"Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" by the Flaming Lips is the greatest song of all time. Got it?
I have a lot to say about this band. First of all, they are a great band. I don't know of a band that had a better track record in the 90's (I count five classic albums-- In A Priest Driven Ambulance, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, Clouds Taste Metallic, Zaireeka, and the Soft Bulletin-- and one very-near classic-- Hit to Death in the Future Head) and their discography before and after that decade is less consistent but full of gems (most notably 2009's Embryonic, a radical shift to the Dark Side (probably explains why they covered Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety shortly afterward)). More than our generation's Pink Floyd, they are our generation's Beatles: always interesting, always experimental, and, perhaps most importantly, always entertaining.
It's weird, though... Without lead singer and guru Wayne Coyne, I'm convinced this band-- from Zaireeka on, anyway-- would be all but insufferable. Michael Ivins (bass guy) and Stephen Drozd (everything guy) are obviously talented, creative dudes, but the realms in which they dwell are by and large synth-driven, electronic, and pretentious as all get out. The early-and-middle Lips, who were ambitious and not above weird instruments (and are unbelievably underappreciated by the critical establishment), are ridiculously easy for me to love. Their songs were based around guitars, for the most part-- loud, distorted (aka "the best") guitars. But the Lips of Zaireeka, the Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi, etc use the guitar sparingly, if at all. Keyboards-- the kinds that stand on their own, and the kinds hooked to computers-- are the stars here... which, normally, I don't dig. And the Lips are not using computers in a cool, hip-hop way, no... They're using them the way Stevie Wonder used them, with emphasis on massive sweeping sonics, fake stringy sounds, elaborate, proggy synth patterns, and tugging your heartstrings all over the damn world.
But just as Stevie Wonder brings his sound to earth with a tender, heartbreaking voice, Wayne Coyne grounds the Lips with his... err... less accomplished set of pipes. The guy can't really sing... but he can. He's technically limited, but capable of hitting you in places that 99% of rock singers cannot. He can do optimism-- which, as I mentioned in my Paul McCartney piece, is rarely acceptable in rock-- and he can do defeat. "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," with its timeless Lips themes of love and death, allows Wayne to do both in the same song. This duality is not unique to The Soft Bulletin, contrary to the public's general idea of the Lips-- it's in every single song on Clouds Taste Metallic-- but it's blown up to astronomical proportions here, and turns "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" into something kinda quintessential.
Wayne frequently crosses another kind of binary: that distinguishing "love" in the universal sense (see "All is Full of Love" by Bjork) and "love" in the intimate, personal sense (see "She Loves You" by I forget). "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate's" sound would be pure Disney, purely "love" in the perverse forms of either sense, if not for Wayne bleating away. Well, maybe not pure Disney-- as I said before, these guys are accomplished musicians; Drozd's jangly guitar line is a thing of beauty-- but still, I cannot imagine this song working without Wayne. His voice is just so warm and inviting... when he speaks of love, it's not a cold, political ideal, but a living, bleeding thing. His voice makes the whole idea of "feeling yourself disintegrate" kind of gorgeous... And that takes a lot.
Hence, "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" is the greatest song of all time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8IP3S8dxU8
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