Bonus Notes: Tupac & Kendrick Lamar + The Flaming Lips

On this special free edition of Bonus Notes, I take another look at Tupac's 'Me Against the World' in connection to Kendrick Lamar's 'DAMN.,' as well as review The Flaming Lips' new record.

Bonus Notes

Every week (or so), as a thank you to the lovely people who support Quarter Notes, I write a second newsletter filled with extra thoughts, reading/listening material, playlists, and more called Bonus Notes. Here, I feature both extra content from 25 years ago AND thoughts on more recent releases. As a preview of some of the additional content you could receive by signing up for a full membership with Quarter Notes, I’m making this week’s Bonus Notes available to everyone! If you like what you see below, please do consider subscribing or passing it on to someone you think would love it. And as always, thank you for reading!

It Was Always Me Vs. The World

Last week, I wrote about Tupac Shakur’s 1995 album Me Against the World, taking special note of how the West Coast rapper explores his fears, anxieties, and the coping mechanisms he employs toward both. I explored what I believe to be his two most important shields against a world he finds set against him—prayer and bravado. In both cases, Tupac finds no help from the world around him, and thus seeks relief by divine intervention or strength through self-assured internal power. Both cases are compelling and have influenced subsequent generations of hip-hop artists to engage the same tactics to escape fear, violence, and vice. This is particularly clear when listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 album DAMN.

Pac has always been a prime influence and spiritual successor to Kendrick, a relationship that culminated in the beyond-the-grave interview the latter conducts with the former on 2015’s “Mortal Man,” the closing track of his masterpiece, To Pimp a Butterfly. In this faux interview, Pac tells Kendrick, “I like to think that at every opportunity I’ve ever been...it’s been met with resistance.” “It’s in my veins to fight back,” he continues, echoing his “Me Against the World” mentality. However, Kendrick, a self-proclaimed “offspring of the legacy [Tupac] left behind,” is yearning for something greater than cyclical violence and the “me vs. them” dualities that often plague American thought. 

This led to 2017’s DAMN., an album filled with opposing dualities—love and lust, humility and pride, wickedness and weakness, heaven and hell, fear and God. Throughout the album, you can feel Kendrick’s tension between fighting for self-preservation against a world of problems and fighting with himself. This presents itself clearly on the album’s final track, “DUCKWORTH.,” when singer Bekon opens, “It was always me vs. the world / Until I found it's me vs. me.” 

Kendrick, having learned so much from his spiritual predecessor, found himself repeating the same emotions, fears, and anxieties in response to the world’s injustices. Of course, these responses aren’t unfounded. We’ve seen the great need for racial reconciliation and equality in recent years. But Kendrick refuses to only critique the World and preserve himself against it. Instead, he recognizes his own faults as the number one place of change he can affect. And so he wrestles openly with himself. Instead of wholly hiding behind bravado, he allows the world to see his faults. He allows the world to hear his concerns that “ain’t nobody prayin’ for [him].” He voices his fears with clarity—”fear of losin’ loyalty from pride,” ”fear that love ain’t livin’ here no more”—and shares his “Searchin' for resolutions until somebody get back.” And he shares the freedom he feels when that somebody (“GOD.”) carries him toward peace. 

I can’t tell you how important this example has been to me. It’s a beautiful display of honesty in art. I hope to someday exhibit half the honesty (both with myself and others) Kendrick does with DAMN. in my own writing and art. It’s clear that he is working on himself, warring with himself constantly in his music, and inviting us to do the same within ourselves—to choose humility and loyalty over pride, and faith in God over fear. 

It’s also entirely apparent that, in the same way I want to learn and grow in my personal meditation and growth because of Kendrick, Kendrick learned and grew because of Tupac. DAMN. is a perfect example of embracing the influence of your predecessors, innovating it, and learning from it. The Kendrick Lamar we hear on DAMN. wouldn’t be the same person without Tupac or the music he created with Me Against the World. And that’s one of the most important hopes we can have for our art, isn’t it? The hope that it will inspire someone (maybe even our future selves) to grow and make better art down the road, creating a snowball effect of beauty from pain and growth from mistakes that leads us ever closer to faith, hope, and love.

1-Listen Reviews: The Flaming Lips - American Head

I’ve always given high importance to the idea of place as it pertains to an artist’s personal voice. There’s a reason the Eagles bring to mind the dusty southwest while Sigur Rós conjures the openness of Iceland. Your experiences, and especially your landscape, informs your art. However, every so often there are groups that buck this generalization. For example, the Flaming Lips—a cosmic alternative rock group known to battle pink robots and sing about unicorns with purple eyes (not the green eyes) who find their origins in...Oklahoma. Despite the extra-terrestrial psychedelia they’ve indulged in for most of their career, the Flaming Lips decided to embrace a uniquely American identity for their 16th studio album, American Head, as they continue to evolve as an artistic unit—a unit that has never once shown signs of slowing its creative explorations. 

As I take a first listen to American Head, I’m interested to hear how grounded the sound is. Will the lyrics remain intangible? Psychedelic? Aloof? Or are the Lips trying to tap into something uniquely appropriate to the America we find ourselves in in 2020? Let’s find out.

“Will You Return / When You Come Down”

We’re already up in the stratosphere with these high chimes and spacey reverbs. “Will you return? / Will you come down?” the song begins. It’s a call, perhaps, to come back to Earth. Man, this is immediately heavy. Frontman Wayne Coyne seems to be singing to someone who has been detached from reality (whether due to drugs or something else) while the world falls apart. Gosh, imagine having to have someone explain to you that your friends/family have died (or, really, any of the events of 2020) and you entirely missed it. I love this production, the simple acoustic guitars and piano mixed with spaceship-like effects...it has a “Rocket Man” feel. A great way to open the record.

“Watching the Lightbugs Glow”

This is really dreamy; I like it. Who’s the female voice? It sounds like it may be Kacey Musgraves (who shows up later on the record). Just checked the credits, it is. I love her so much. No words, just weightless vocalizing over triumphant chords as we lie in a field and watch the fireflies sparkle. Interesting to have an interlude as the second song, but I’m here for it. 

“Flowers Of Neptune 6”

So to answer one of my questions...the psychedelia is here in full effect. We’re tripping on acid already. But I love the metaphorical connection between lightbugs and spaceships. It gives us a little insight into how Coyne imagined his Oklahoma as a cosmic wonderland. Not as much for me to grab onto on this one. Coyne is reminiscing about old friends and how they’ve changed or not. The switch from collaborating with Miley Cyrus to Kacey Musgraves is important, though.

“Dinosaurs On The Mountain”

A soft, acoustic ballad. This is literally a song about wishing dinosaurs were still alive to play on the mountains. They obviously haven’t seen a particular highly-successful movie franchise. Anyways, there is a distinct calm and peace the Lips always bring to their music, like the Beatles. “Yellow Submarine” or “Octopus’s Garden” don’t have to be about anything at all. They’re just peaceful, happy songs, and that’s alright. “Dinosaurs on the Mountain” isn’t on that level, but it’s still a good time.  

“At The Movies On Quaaludes”

So much drugs. “As we destroy our brains / Till we believe we’re dead / It’s the American dream / In the American head.” Phew. This somehow toes the line between anti- and pro-drug; I’m not sure which way I’m leaning. Another spacey, peaceful song. Not particularly memorable, however.

“Mother I've Taken LSD”

A confessional. Coyne telling his mom that now he understands the world’s sadness, after taking LSD. I don’t know who originally said it, but I’ve always thought the saying “our music sounds like our drugs” was interesting. In recent years, this has meant a lot of depressant-induced music. I think it’s interesting that the Flaming Lips are tapping into the sadness heard in the music of artists like Juice WRLD. RIP. 

“Brother Eye”

Ooh, I like the energy of this one. This is a beautiful and tragic love song for a brother, supposedly on his deathbed. The pinging synths sound like hospital monitors, as Coyne remembers the brilliant beauty of the brother’s birth and life. Heartbreaking song. 

“You n Me Sellin' Weed”

I love the subtle electric guitar here. Feels like Tom Petty taken to the moon. Coyne makes living in “magic trees” sound absolutely lovely. Woah, that switch up was pretty great. Springsteen used classic cars and heavenly language as his means of escape from small town America. The Flaming Lips commandeer spaceships and weed to the same purpose. I love the synth strings and the triumph here. 

“Mother Please Don't Be Sad”

Holy cow, what a gorgeous intro. “I didn’t mean to die tonight.” Wow. The narrator is singing from beyond the grave, having been killed in an armed robbery. This was unexpected, but incredibly engaging! I’m all in on this little short story. There is so much drama here, and questionable theology haha (“When we die when we’re high / The gatekeeper hides, hides his eyes / Let’s us by”). The orchestration and production of this record are just really knocking it out of the park for me.

“When We Die When We're High”

Woah, fantastic transition. The driving drum beat! Another instrumental break here. I think it’s a little less interesting than the first one. But offers a chance to stop and take in what all just happened. Not a keeper as a standalone song, but not a throwaway either.

“Assassins of Youth”

Auto-tune time. I like how this record has picked up speed and immediacy as its gone on. “I was young yesterday / But now everything is changed after today.” If that doesn’t sum up this year. There are so many little musical touches. They referenced Grateful Dead and Parliament-Funkadelic as influences for the record, and I can certainly hear those flourishes. “Even your death will die,” I think the deep theology of this statement is lost on Coyne, but wow. The line is still powerful as a statement on the loss of innocence and how that coming-of-age moment is forgotten over time. 

“God and the Policeman (Feat. Kacey Musgraves)”

I can’t wait to hear what this provocatively-titled song is about. And also Kacey Musgraves. She sounds so great over these orchestrations. It’s easy to try to run a thread between each of the songs considering the similar content and smooth transitions. But I think most of them are independent vignettes. Here, we hear Coyne and Musgraves trade lines about being on-the-run fugitives, afraid of the justice of God and man. Not the George Floyd era song I was expecting, but interesting nonetheless. The storytelling is entirely minimalist. We have no context. The song’s conclusion, that “God will forgive me,” is made even more poignant by the exclusion of the policeman.

“My Religion Is You”

A straightforward “If you’re religious, that’s fine; just let me do my own thing” song seems pretty out of context with the rest of the record. An odd way to end the record. It’s not even as sonically interesting as many of the previous songs (though they still know their way around synthesizers better than most). An anticlimactic ending to an otherwise entirely engaging record.

Closing Thoughts

So I guess I was expecting something a little bit more grounded, but then again, it is the Flaming Lips. And I enjoyed it thoroughly. The beautiful orchestrations and vast range of synthesizer tones and pitches were mesmerizing. I’m super interested in diving in again and considering more what Coyne has to say about small-town America, drug-induced escapism, as well as what he thinks the consequences of such escapism are on American Head. As someone who really enjoyed The Flaming Lips’ 2017 record Oczy Mlody, this one is better. Here, the Flaming Lips maintain their love affair with the psychedelic cosmos, but portray it through the eyes of real characters. People you can envision looking up at the fireflies in an Oklahoman field and dreaming to reach the stars, or running toward forgiveness on the edge of a sad and broken world. That all sounds pretty American to me. 

A Great Song

Coming Up Next

Next up, I’ll be tackling the debut record from a band I’ve never really listened to, despite multiple people telling me, “YOU’VE GOTTA LISTEN TO THEM.” I’ve eluded them for, well, all my life, but that ends now. I’m not gonna tell you who it is, but the lead singer’s name rhymes with Def Greedy.