‘Do You Realize??’: The Flaming Lips song Wayne Coyne said felt like falling in love
If you listen to the two best-known Flaming Lips songs back-to-back—the absurdist psych-pop hit ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ and the swooping, cosmic anthem ‘Do You Realize??’—it has the same effect as listening to an awkward, mischievous teenager transforming into a hopelessly romantic university student; deep into existentialism and even more deeply in love with a new flame who finally understands them.
Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne would probably take offence at the idea that he ever lost his precocious inner child, but he’s on record confirming that ‘Do You Realize??’—for all its heavier lyrical themes—felt like a love song at heart.
“Writing that is like meeting [my wife] Michelle, or one of those things that just happens to you where you say: ‘How lucky am I?’” Coyne told Uncut in 2008. “I can say that I created that song, but I wouldn’t have thought it had this otherworldliness. I run into people every time we play who’ve used it at funerals, weddings, or when their kids are born.”
‘Do You Realize??’ was an immediate standout track on 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, an accessible pop song on one of the more accessible albums in the Lips’ extensive catalogue. Its emergence as one of the signature songs of the decade took a while, though, as the song didn’t reach a wider audience beyond the indie rock universe until it appeared in a couple of TV commercial campaigns for Hewlett-Packard and Mitsubishi through 2003 and 2004.
By 2009, it had been voted the ‘Official Rock Song’ of the Flaming Lips’ home state of Oklahoma (although a Republican governor covertly removed that honour four years later). For Coyne, the song’s resonance resulted from essentially Trojan-horsing a bit of dangerous honesty into an otherwise bright and familiar pop song structure.
“If you like The Beatles, you like these chord changes,” he told NME. “It plays on you in a way that is optimistic, and it appears to be telling a story that you already know, which is a good story. Then I start singing these words, and then right at the time when you’re at your most comforted in the song, I tell you this horrible line, that ‘Everyone you know, someday, will die,’ and it’s almost as if you go: ‘It’s okay,’ and you take it in because that’s what the music and everything has done.”
It’s not an aspect of love that tends to get the most ink spilt over it, but “acceptance”—of one’s mortality, flaws, and relative insignificance in the vast universe—does have a romantic and joyous element to it. It’s the same reason people have found a deeper connection to other silly pop art that doesn’t shy away from dark ideas, from Monty Python to the Muppets. A bit like Python’s ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, Coyne’s jarring death reminder in ‘Do You Realize??’ is also quickly followed by a message about appreciating the here and now (and one of the best astronomy-based couplets in rock history).
At its core, ‘Do You Realize??’ is such a beautiful song and sentiment that even lifelong Flaming Lips fans don’t seem to mind that it’s become the band’s calling card—despite not hinting much at the more adventurous and experimental instincts that define most of the Lips’ catalogue. It might be a Beatles-esque tune, but when Wayne Coyne sings it—usually flanked by smiling people dressed in animal costumes—it’s the Flaming Lips all the way.
