Wayne Coyne Makes Peace With Death

Posted on Oct 25th 2007 4:30PM by Benjy Eisen
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As Spinner previously reported, the Flaming Lips will lead 1,000 volunteers in a "March of the Thousand Flaming Skeletons" as part of the annual Halloween parade in Oklahoma City this Friday. Spinner recently caught up with leading Lip and ringmaster Wayne Coyne as he made preparations. "A lot of Halloween things end up being dumbed-down," Coyne tells Spinner. "We're trying to make it an adult experience and just kind of get to a little more of the 'death' aspect of it."

It's not that Coyne is against "bikers dressed up as Dracula and girls in bikinis" at Halloween parties, per se, but the holiday used to be about a lot more than just tricks and treats. He points to Mexico's 'Day of the Dead' as a ritual that celebrates death the way that Halloween once celebrated fear and the unknown.

"The most powerful songs in the Flaming Lips catalog are about death, in a way," Coyne says. "I mean, in the way that we sing about life. Here in America, if your relatives are dying, it's like, 'Oooh, I don't want to talk about that -- let's talk about Britney Spears getting drunk or something.'"

Coyne's philosophy is that death can be something we all celebrate as an inevitable part of life, and therefore the dying and grieving process itself doesn't have to be such a private and painful ordeal. It's a philosophy he's built not only entire song cycles about, but also the live show. And it's what he hopes to bring to Oklahoma City's otherwise "Disneyland" version of a Halloween parade.

"Everybody that we know is going to die, and I sing about that all the time," he says. "If there's anything I could depart to people in the time that I'm here, it's to say, 'There ain't no afterlife. This is the life! Don't wait for it to happen to you -- go out and get it."

The 1,000 participants in the Lips' death march get to keep their flaming skeleton costumes as a souvenir -- 'til death do they part.