Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the tenth album by The Flaming Lips, released on July 16, 2002, in the United Kingdom and the following day in the United States. It is characterized by electronic-influenced, psychedelic-tinged alternative rock compositions. It has been certified Gold by the RIAA. The lyrics of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots concern a diverse array of subject matter, mostly deeply melancholy ponderings about love, mortality, artificial emotion, pacifism, and deception, while telling the story of Yoshimi's battle. The title character is believed to be an allusion to Boredoms/OOIOO member Yoshimi P-We, who also performs on the album. Some listeners consider Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots to be a concept album; however, the story is debated, as it is only directly apparent in the first four tracks. Despite the story-type title and science fiction themes of the album, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has made it clear that the album is not intended to be a concept album. The vocal melody of track one, "Fight Test", echoes Cat Stevens's "Father and Son". Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, is receiving royalties following a relatively uncontentious settlement. The band's frontman, Wayne Coyne, claims that he was unaware of the songs' similarities until producer Dave Fridmann pointed them out. This claim however is contradicted by his statement to Rolling Stone magazine: 'I know "Father and Son" and I knew there would be a little bit of comparison. "Fight Test" is not a reference necessarily to the ideas of "Father and Son", but definitely a reference to the cadence, the melody, and chord progression. I think it's such a great arrangement of chords and melody'. The song was also the theme song for the short-lived MTV cartoon, 3 South. The song is also briefly played in the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday. It plays in the background of the cafeteria scene, at the very beginning of the scene. The album's lead single, "Do You Realize??", has been used in numerous commercials, including some for VH1 during 2004 and 2005. The final track, "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)", won a 2002 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. The Lips also won the same award for "The Wizard Turns On...", taken from At War with the Mystics, in 2006. In addition to the single compact disc format, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was also released as a special two-disc release in 2003. This version contains the regular album and a DVD containing various alternate takes, b-sides, music videos, video footage from the album recordings, and the trailer for The Flaming Lips' film, Christmas on Mars. In addition to bonus content on the DVD, there is a 5.1 DVD-Audio version of the entire album included. There was also a limited edition translucent red LP version. A secret message from the band is included on the original album on the inside of the right spine. It reads "You Have Found The Secret Message, Do You Have too Much Time on Your Hands? ...Let it Go". It also features Japanese script. This script reads "Happiness can make you cry" (a line taken from the song "Do You Realize??"). In recent years, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots has proved itself to have a bigger commercial impact than the band's 1999 breakthrough album, The Soft Bulletin, and became their first gold-certified release in April 2006. In 2003, British bastard pop DJ Eric Kleptone released a mashup album called Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots which paired instrumentals from the album with rap samples and lyrics.
There aren’t a lot of distractions in Oklahoma City—which helps explain how the area’s most prominent weirdos, The Flaming Lips, managed to release ten album between 1986’s <i>Hear It Is</i> and 2002’s <i>Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots</i>. But that statistic fails to fully measure the band’s proficiency. According to lead singer Wayne Coyne, the group was working on no fewer than three distinct projects while creating <i>Yoshimi</i>, including the country-leaning soundtrack to <i>Okie Noodling</i>—a documentary about men who catch giant catfish with their bare hands—and the synthesiser score to Coyne’s own self-directed full-length homage to 1950s sci-fi B movies, <i>Christmas on Mars</i>. Those disparate efforts all played a role in the creation of <i>Yoshimi</i>, which Coyne once described as a “candy-coated potato chip” of an album. On <i>Yoshimi</i>, the western twang and martian bleeps meld with the maximalist space-rock the band had perfected on its previous album, <i>The Soft Bulletin</i>. That record secured the group’s place in the pantheon of consequential album artists, freeing the Lips from the one-hit-wonder tag that had clung to the group since 1993’s “She Don’t Use Jelly”. <i>Yoshimi</i> found Coyne comfortably settling into middle age, complete with grey streaks in his signature long wavy hair. The outsider-artist posture he’d displayed in the 1980s was gone; he was now a seasoned seer, albeit one who still possessed the gift of childlike wonder. How did <i>Yoshimi</i>’s “Do You Realize??”—which reminds listeners that “happiness makes you cry” and “everyone you know someday will die”—end up in three national ad campaigns? Answer: Because while the lyrics are heavy, the brand managers felt safe, knowing Coyne was holding our hand as we embrace the existential crisis. If that’s not enough, the album’s first four songs tell the story of a young Japanese girl, Yoshimi, who’s staring down an army of robots—one of which is having an existential crisis of its own. When the fog of war clears, and <i>Yoshimi</i> comes to an end, the questions linger: Who was right, and who was wrong? Does free will exist? And, to quote Coyne, “Do you realise we're floating in space?”
