20th
The Flaming Lips
“Watching The Planets”
This video by Wayne Coyne and George Salisbury is extraordinarily NSFW, but are you at work today? Probably not!
A lot of people whine and complain about what we have lost as the “monoculture” has dissolved over the course of the past decade, but I tend to focus on what we have gained. For example, we now live in an era where major labels fund ultra-arty quasi-pornographic music videos in which the 40-something lead singer of a psychedelic band exposes his dong while dozens of naked people ride bikes and emerge from a gigantic vagina orb. There is no worry about it being unairable because no one plays music videos on television anyway, but people do watch them online. So why not go totally crazy in the wild west of the internet? I figure we’re going to be in for a lot of cheap and salacious attention-grabbing videos in the coming years, but the beautiful thing about “Watching The Planets” is how well it complements the themes of the song and the Embyronic album in general. Yes, it’s flamboyant and a bit crass, but that’s always been a part of what the Flaming Lips do. I hope Warner Bros keeps giving them the cash to keep doing this sort of thing.
