Flaming Lips to perform tribute to Steve Jobs on O Music Awards, release 24-hour song in human skulls on Halloween
Wayne Coyne performs with the Flaming Lips at the Tabernacle in Atlanta in May. (Photo by Michelle Martin-Coyne)
Oklahoma City-based psychedelic rockers The Flaming Lips will perform a cover of the Beatles’ “Revolution” in memory of Steve Jobs at MTV’s O Music Awards on Monday.
The performance will be recorded with an iPad and broadcast on www.OMusicAwards.com, reports the Associated Press. The Apple co-founder, whose technological innovations like the iPod and iPad drastically changed the way we consume music and other media, died Oct. 5 at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
The awards show, which will take place in Los Angeles, “celebrates the artists, innovators and fans impacting digital music culture.” Other performers and presenters include Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Demi Lovato, Travie McCoy and Tyler, the Creator, according to the AP.
Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne will compete for The Digital Genius Award, along with Bjork, Girl Talk, Devo and music video director Chris Milk, at the second O Music Awards.
Since Monday happens to be Halloween, you can bet attending the awards show and playing “Revolution” aren’t the Lips’ only plans. And you’d be right.
According to the O Music Awards blog, the band plans to release a 24-hour-long song at midnight on Halloween – and it will be encased in an actual human skull.
“I would say nothing that we’re doing is bizarre or illegal,” Coyne says on the blog. “In parts of the world and even on eBay you can actually buy real human skulls. There’s a place in town (Oklahoma City) that’s called Skulls Unlimited that’s been here for almost as long as The Flaming Lips have been here, and it sells human skulls.”
“People heads come into this place and they have these flesh-eating beetles — I would have tweeted a picture of it, but they don’t allow it — literally eat every molecule of flesh off of these things and you’ll end up with a human skull,” he adds on the blog.
The skulls will come covered in chrome and packaged in elegant boxes, and inserted in each one will be hard drive containing the 24-hour-long song. According to the blog, he’s apparently sold all five of skulls already for $5,000 each, even though the song still isn’t done.
“It’s a song about death and it’s a song about f—ing and it’s a song about life… It’s another element of this Flaming Lips connection with death and beauty and all that,” Coyne says on the blog.
Coyne has certainly earned his Digital Genius Award nomination this year. Throughout 2011, the Lips have devoted themselves to artistic exploration and kept a vow to release new music every month. Some of the new songs have come on flash drives contained in gummy skulls or gummy fetuses, while others have been accompanied by trippy music videos.
The 24-hour song follows the band’s six-hour track “Found a Star on the Ground,” contained on a USB drive within a newly developed toy called “The Strobo Trip,” which provides a psychedelic visual display to enhance the music. The band made the creation of the six-hour opus a charitable event, offering fans the chance to make a $100 donation in exchange for having Sean Lennon speak their names somewhere in the song.
The project raised about $20,000 for the Central Oklahoma Humane Society and the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma, according to The Oklahoman Entertainment Editor Gene Triplett.
-BAM
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