Words & Music
August 2012
Do You Realize?? by The Flaming Lips stands as a reminder for us all to embrace life while we can. As likely to be heard at a wedding as a funeral, the song has the power to lift the spirits with its glorious sense of awe. It’s big and colourful, a little weird and hugely optimistic – much like the band itself. Declared the ‘Official Rock Song’ of their home state Oklahoma, it remains one of the glittering highlights of their thirty-year career.
The song was the first single from the band’s 2002 album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and was written by singer Wayne Coyne with multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd. It opens with the clang of church bells, a flurry of acoustic guitars, and a series of small epiphanies designed to jolt the listener into a shift of consciousness.
Do you realise you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realise we’re floating in space?
Do you realise happiness makes you cry?
Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die?
These little revelations are delivered in a high childlike voice full of sadness and wonder, while the words are carried by a melody that reaches skyward with each line before falling inevitably back to earth.
Coyne has said that the lyrics were inspired by the feelings of grief he had experienced around his fortieth birthday in 2001. The recent death of his father and that of a devoted fan, as well as the hard living lifestyles of some band mates and family members had led him to take stock of his own existence. Coyne had retained a sense of his own mortality since his early twenties when he had survived a brush with death during an armed robbery. Now, maturity allowed him to see a much bigger picture.
And instead of saying all of your goodbyes
Let them know you realise that life goes fast
It’s hard to mark the good things last
You realise the sun doesn’t go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ‘round
Coyne has said that this approach is central to the group’s aesthetic. “We can sing about death but we really have to sing about it as if we’re singing about life… that was our essential idea going into it, that it would seem like a very joyous thing with an underlying current of some kind of despair, some kind of realisation of what this is all about”.
When Coyne first played Do You Realize?? to Drozd many of the song’s essentials were already in place: the rhetorical questions, anthemic melody and metaphysical mindset were all there, at least in rudimentary form. Pronouncing it a ‘Wayne classic’ reminiscent of John Lennon (Mind Games comes to mind), musical prodigy Drozd helped Coyne finish the song, in all likelihood contributing to its more sophisticated elements like the perfectly judged mid-song key change that elevates the song to the stars.
The Lennon comparison may also have inspired the over the top production, which with its multi-tracked guitars, bells, choir and (synthetic) strings recalls Phil Spector’s work on Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War Is Over), albeit with an overlay of Flaming Lips weirdness via the gurgling sci-fi sound effects and heavily treated backing vocals. The spacey sounds seem to accentuate the human qualities of Coyne’s voice while placing it deep inside the vastness of the cosmos. The result is curiously uplifting.
For Coyne, the live presentation of the album now presented a challenge. “I didn’t want to sit there on a Saturday night singing about how grim your life is going to be… if we’re going to do that then we need to make this into an outrageous party like it was someone’s birthday… and we’ll do that in the context of this extravagant, exploding circus you know…”
During the last decade or so, that ’exploding circus’ has evolved into a psychedelic spectacular complete with animal costumes, giant balloons, streamers, strobe lights, loud music and fake blood. It’s warm, welcoming and a lot of fun. A surreal birthday party that culminates each night in a communal sing-along of Do You Realize??, it is, according to Wayne Coyne, a transcendental moment.
“It really does sometimes feel like this triumph of humanity, this triumph of optimism… truly, the only cure for sadness is to share it with someone else.”
Phil Kakulas is a songwriter and musician who plays double bass in The Blackeyed Susans.
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