#51 "Do You Realize?" by The Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips are kind of like the Salvador Dali of modern music. They're just completely out there, totally unique, and just doing their own bizarre form of art regardless of what anyone expects from them. They're occasionally brilliant, often too strange to embrace, but always entertaining.

Dali has the best titles for his paintings. There's 1954's "Dali Nude, In Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies Metamorphized into Corpuscles, in Which Suddenly Appears the Leda of Leonardo Chromosomatized by the Vision of Gala" or how about "Dali at the Age of Six, When He Thought He Was a Girl, Lifting the Skin of the Water to See a Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea." And there's always my favorite "The Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity." The Lips have song titles like "Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus with Needles" and "I'm a Fly on a Sunbeam, Following the Funeral Procession of a Stranger." It's a toss-up as to who's more weird... or maybe who's taking more acid!

What I like about The Flaming Lips is that they're always pretty interesting and rarely predictable. Despite their wacky approach to music, they write some really intelligent lyrics. On an album called "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," you also get the beautiful and brilliant "Do You Realize?"

"Do You Realize?" is a great philosophical song, where singer Wayne Coyne pensively contemplates truths about life. He asks us...

"Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?" Smiles generate tears. Who ever gives this idea any thought?

"Do you realize the sun doesn't go down? It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning 'round." I love this one... kind of saying that the world you think you know is actually not that way at all.

He also repeats the poignant, "Do you realize that everyone you know one day will die?" One thing I've not read very often about Wayne Coyne is the power of his voice. I wouldn't say he has a lot of vocal quality... at least not in the conventional sense, but he's able to communicate fragile ideas in a very effective way. When he asks us if we realize that we're going to lose all of the people we love, his voice is soft... almost cracking... as if HE is actually realizing this for the first time... realizing that life is short and that we have to "work hard to make the good things last," because in reality, they actually don't last at all. It's a really deep and beautiful song, not the typical thing you'd hear on the radio but I don't think The Flaming Lips have ever aimed for typical.

"Do You Realize" is from the album "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots." To hear the song, click on the icon in the widget jukebox along the side of the blog.