Psychedelic-alternative band The Flaming Lips have been around since the 1980s, making their name early in their career with songs like “The Ceiling Is Bendin’” and gaining renown for more “alt” hits as well as their their lead singer/writer, Wayne Coyne’s, practice of slipping into a giant, clear, ball to roll over the crowd. But now, in what might be the ultimate in “audience-participation-non-participation” events, the Oklahoma City band has taken Coyne’s idea and maximized it – all with a nod to the craziness of COVID19 “protection.”
As Hannah Fishberg reports for the New York Post, The Flaming Lips just put on a show for their hometown fans...in which the members of the band and the one-hundred concert-goers were encased in Coyne’s famous transparent bubbles.
And, not to get drawn-in by a possible gimmick, photos and video of this are worth seeing. One can’t help but think of the old TV commercials for that featured cartoons of the Dow “Scrubbing Bubbles” who cleaned your shower and tub.
Writes Fishberg:
For a live show Monday in Oklahoma City, where the group formed in 1983, Coyne performed in a bubble for an audience of people also in their own orbs. Video posted by Coyne of the innovative, COVID-safe show at the Criterion initially looks like a transparent ball pit, with viewers comparing the bubbles to hamster balls, tadpole embryos and ‘frogspawn’ in the comments. (The question of how bubbled audiences go about using the restroom was also raised.)
Indeed, and that’s not the only question. But we’ll get to those. Coyne recently told CNN that in 2019 he had drawn a picture of the band performing, and he was the only one in the bubble. But in early 2020:
Then (I did another drawing with) The Flaming Lips playing a show in 2020. The exact same scenario, but I'm in a bubble, and so is everybody else.
And now, after some careful planning, the purchase of 100 of the bubbles, and the announcement to fans that the band would perform and, simultaneously, shoot video in Oklahoma City, the band has made the “dream” (or nightmare) a reality. Explained Coyne to CNN:
I don't think anybody would have thought... in the middle of March that this is still going to be going, you know, eight months later. I think we all thought this is a month, this is maybe two months, but we're going to get a handle on this.
Which brings us to a few questions.
At what point are American citizens able to say not only that they have “gotten a handle” on COVID19, but that the virus threat was disastrously overblown, that politicians immorally and unconstitutionally imposed economy-killing lockdowns, and that the early claims of needing to “flatten the curve” so that hospitals could have room was also overblown and has now morphed into “don’t stop lockdowns and mask decrees until not even one so-called ‘case’ of COVID19 appears?”
For goodness, sake. A crowd filled with oxygen-starving, heat-trapped, plastic-encased fans who, nearly nine months after Americans became alarmed about the virus -- and months after we learned that it’s not as deadly as first claimed -- is only valuable now if it’s ironic commentary, if it’s used to burst the bubble of political nonsense and tyranny that has surrounded all of us since the lockdowns and fearmongering and bogus claims of world destruction began.
A concert like this -- where plastic bubbles get steamy and make it hard to see, where the bubble-residents can only breathe if there’s a proper air exchange (which would create another risk of infection) and which could create a huge evacuation hazard should a fire erupt – is only valuable to show how absurd the thinking behind “COVID19 measures” really is.
And one gets the sense that, despite early hopes of the band putting on this show to mock the insanity of the lockdowns and poke fun at useless “measures” imposed on innocent Americans, they’re serious.
But what is serious are the unreliable and inflated CDC numbers that have not only been bumped up thanks to federal subsidies, but which also haven’t even been based on Koch’s Postulates for the isolation of a virus and which have been misused and propagandized by bureaucrats and politicians who improperly claim they have some God-given “power” to tell others how they can voluntarily congregate.
If the Flaming Lips want to put on a concert in bubbles and ask ticket-buyers to get into their own, that’s up to them. It’s an expression of free will, and no one in government should stop them or tell them how to do it.
But to do a show and assume that American society hasn’t gotten “a handle” on how to manage their own lives, even as politicians use bogus numbers and bogus rationales and bogus claims of power to tell others how to live? That just exposes what could be a naïve blindness of the Flaming Lips to reality.
Perhaps they need to get out of their celebrity bubbles and see what’s really going on.