Popscreen: The Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips

“The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”

Dir. Traktor



Is J-horror scraping the bottom of the barrel or is it just a new Flaming Lips video? “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” opens with three attractive Japanese girls posing in a dimly-lit subterranean room and brandishing knives and saws in front of a businessman before proceeding to tape hamburgers all over his body, then releasing him into a dusty street filled with hungry sumo-wrestler types.

It’s bizarre and a little disturbing, but what do you expect from a band whose live shows feature bunny suits and fake blood? Besides, seeing a bunch of fat men chasing a guy covered in burgers is fantastic in a slightly inappropriate way, as is another key scene in which cops race after a doughnut-covered, pink-clad Paris Hilton lookalike.

This is the type of thing that you’d like to do if you could get away with it, which is exactly what the song is about. “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” is a paean to the misuse of power, featuring lines such as “If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich, would you do it? Yeah yeah yeah yeah.” After all, if you could make a bunch of cops ravenously chase a pastry-bedecked socialite, would you do it? (Yeah yeah yeah).

Presiding over the madness is singer Wayne Coyne, sporting an appropriately megalomaniacal fur coat and hat and tauntingly waving hamburgers under the noses of his soon-to-be captors. He is dragged into the girls’ underground room and departs stapled with raw meat, a werewolf on his scent. The creature takes the meat but leaves the singer intact to keep making outlandishly entertaining videos.

—­­Elisabeth J. Bloomberg