‘7 Skies H3’: The Flaming Lips album embedded into a human skull
When you think about your preferred format of listening to your favourite album, you might consider a number of factors that greatly affect the overall experience of consuming it. You might be after a greater sound quality, in which case, the physical format is going to take preference over digital listening methods. On the other hand, you might be after the convenience of having any album you wish to listen to stored in one place accessible by the internet, in which case streaming is the better option. If you’re a fan of Oklahoma psychedelic rockers The Flaming Lips, you might have to consider that sometimes neither of these is possible.
Since the mid-1980s, the band have been celebrated for their constantly expansive and inventive approach to making music, and while they didn’t achieve a huge amount of success until much later with records such as 1999’s The Soft Bulletin and its follow-up, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in 2002, they’ve been able to maintain a fervent cult fanbase. Frontman Wayne Coyne, while considered a cult icon in his field, is something of a loon, and this is ultimately where listeners are split on the group.
While their weirdness and experimental nature are what win over legions of fans, it’s also the very same attitude that has gotten in the way of them being a more successful act. For example, their 1997 album, Zaireeka, was released as a four-CD box set, which demanded listeners to play all four discs simultaneously in order to achieve quadrophonic sound. Is this necessary? No, of course, it isn’t – forking out the money for a four-CD album is inconvenient enough, but sourcing four devices and stereo systems, putting them all in the same room and having them perfectly aligned in order to achieve the ideal listening experience is a pain in the ass.
Understandably, a single-disc version of the record was subsequently issued, with the revolutionary idea of making all four channels of sound able to be played from one device finally becoming apparent to the band. That doesn’t mean they stopped themselves from releasing future records in unconventional formats though, and they’d eventually move into the realm of releasing material in exceedingly bizarre packaging methods.
The sister EPs, Gummy Song Skull and Gummy Song Fetus both arrived in 2011 in digital format – of sorts. While those who ordered the releases would receive a USB flash drive with the songs on them, they both came encased in edible gummy versions of their respective titles, and they’d repeat this for a live studio re-recording of The Soft Bulletin which was available at just two live shows. For those interested, the skull was strawberry-flavoured, and the brain tasted of marijuana.
Their obsession with skulls didn’t end there, as for Halloween the same year, the band chose to release a 24-hour song titled ‘7 Skies H3’, which was available for the hefty fee of $5,000 and came embedded in a real human skull. Not only is there something incredibly morbid about purchasing a genuine cranial artefact, but the extortionate cost of the album, which is virtually impossible to listen to in one sitting, makes it perhaps one of the most egregious release decisions made by any band, let alone The Flaming Lips. Also, this one couldn’t be eaten if you got peckish.
Speaking of the process and the backlash they received for this macabre packaging, Coyne stated how the band had worked with a medical research facility in their home state in order to source the skulls. “Nothing that we’re doing is bizarre or illegal,” he explained. “Heads come into this place, and they have these flesh-eating beetles […] they literally eat every molecule of flesh off of these things, and you’ll end up with a human skull.” It might not be illegal, but questioning people’s decision to call it bizarre is perhaps a little blind to the reality of what they’d done.
However, in addition to the 13 available physical copies of the record, they set up a page on their official website where you could listen to the entire day-long track, rendering the purchase virtually obsolete unless you really fancied paying five grand for an empty head with a memory stick in it. A condensed version of the record was also later made available on CD, shortening the album down to just 50 minutes.
If The Flaming Lips truly wanted to make some sort of statement about art, they’d have only ever distributed it in skulls and not digitally, and they’d have sacrificed profitability in the name of artistic integrity. If, on the other hand, they wanted to reach a wider audience with their art and distribute their music in a more traditionally accepted format, then perhaps they could’ve knocked this on the head and been content with a digital-only release.
