Flaming Lips' Zaireeka by Richardson Mark

Author:Richardson, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Wayne Coyne’s map to a Parking Lot Experiment in Oklahoma City, late 1996.

“The Landscape’s Grande Design”—An Analysis of Zaireeka

Setting Up

Zaireeka provides an opportunity to think about what it means to listen, the specifics of music consumption and dissemination, and how a band gets to a point where they’re willing to take extraordinary risks. But then there’s the music. You can forget about it sometimes, getting caught up in all the neat things surrounding the album. But once you get the stereos together and gather some friends and actually hear the thing, Zaireeka holds up terrifically as a musical experience—it’s first-tier psych rock and among the best albums in the band’s catalog. During the 1990s, the Flaming Lips were on a roll—the stretch from 1993’s Transmission from the Satellite Heart and 1999’s The Soft Bulletin is one of the great four-album runs in rock history. And in many ways, Zaireeka sits in the center of it, serving as a divider between the alternative rock band and the sound explorers/ pop art progenitors off in their own world.

This section discusses what the record actually does, how the songs are constructed, what the songs mean, and the sorts of experiences and feelings they evoke. As I said in the introduction, I’ve probably given Zaireeka fewer proper listens than anyone else who has written a book about an album. I don’t feel like two-track mixdowns are “the real thing” when it comes to this album, though I have consulted them here as a reference to help me remember particular passages and sonic effects. But note that when I write about the music below, I’m referring to the tracks as they work in their totality, when listening to the album with multiple discs and a group of people.

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