The Flaming Lips and the Lure of Nostalgia

Old and new memories will collide when the band performs Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

As older millennials like me grapple with the onset of middle age and yearn for simpler times, social media posts commenting on musical anniversaries have become increasingly common.

For example, this week you might see something like “Happy 20th to The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats”. Engaging in these posts is like microdosing on nostalgia; there’s rarely any deeper discussion and respondents either say “great record” or joke about how decrepit they’ve become and move on.

I’m certainly not immune to nostalgia, but I try not to get sucked into this particular habit of marking time, largely because it’s incongruent with how I listen to and write about music. If I’m digging into an older record and feel an urge to celebrate it, I’ll go ahead and do that. Inspiration occurs when it occurs, with no regard to historical release schedules. I appreciate that a more calculated approach might boost engagement and enhance growth, but if I cared deeply about those sorts of things I would have stopped covering obscure music a long time ago.

While I’m on the subject of milestones, here’s one that absolutely no one will be posting about. This Saturday, No Ripcord, the music magazine I founded in my teens, will celebrate its 26th birthday. Not a classic milestone, admittedly, but in the world of websites, 26 years is a really long time — it makes No Ripcord older than the likes of Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube.

The very first No Ripcord logo. The writing wasn’t much better.

In a musical sense, 1999 feels like a lifetime ago. When Prince talked of partying “like it’s 1999,” he presumably didn’t envisage a soundtrack of Reef, Stereophonics, and Catatonia, all three of whom were ensconced in the top ten of the UK Albums Chart the week NR was launched. And the singles chart, topped by Westlife, was bleaker still.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think No Ripcord could be the world’s longest-running not-for-profit — or as I prefer, loss-making — fully independent online music magazine. If you know anyone who has bashed their head against this particular brick wall for even longer than I have, post their name in the comments. They have my sympathies.

To mark the occasion, I’ll be immersing myself in a different brand of nostalgia: the anniversary concert. If a throwaway social media post is microdosing, the band-plays-its-classic-album-in-full event allows fans to mainline nostalgia in its most potent form.

“Her name is Yoshimi, she’s a black belt in karate”

The Flaming Lips will be performing their 2002 classic Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots at Brixton Academy and I will be there basking in the technicolour glory of one of the greatest albums of the early 2000s. Indeed, Yoshimi was the number one pick in No Ripcord’s inaugural Top 50 Albums feature, where our critic, Mark Mason, wrote:

Fundamentally, the album is based around the concept that life is scattered with random shots of excruciating pain, but there is such beauty and wonder to be found that you need to hang onto it as it passes and cherish its fleeting brilliance.

I think he nailed the essence of Yoshimi, but his words could equally apply to the Flaming Lips as a live band. They know how to create an occasion that encapsulates this specific beauty and wonder.

The show will be nostalgic — I saw them three times on the Yoshimi tour, twice with the same friend I’ll be attending Saturday’s performance with — but the Flaming Lips experience is about so much more. Old memories will collide with ecstatically vivid new ones, as I fully expect my nostalgia to be served with a generous side of unbridled, life-affirming, very much in-the-moment joy. Or to paraphrase Mark Mason, the band’s sets (they’re playing two — Yoshimi in full, followed by deep cuts and fan favourites) will form a fleeting brilliance, which the audience can hang on to and cherish.

You simply won’t find that in a scheduled social media post.

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