Who is “Yoshimi” from the Flaming Lips’ album ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’?
Like few other artists could, The Flaming Lips have always managed to combine their weirdest and most wonderful sides. Whether it’s their joyous shoegaze ditty about slightly gross habits, ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’, or two scientists racing with each other in ‘Race for the Prize’, they have a knack for making the bizarre speak to us.
How about the title of one of their best-known albums, then? Their 2002 release Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots includes some sparkling tracks, such as the gorgeous first part of the title track and the tearjerking masterpiece ‘Do You Realize??’ But that doesn’t give us any indication of the exact origins of the record’s title.
Well, for one thing, The Flaming Lips’ lead singer and songwriter, Wayne Coyne, has always insisted that it’s not a concept album. So we can’t consider Yoshimi a character in an overarching album-length narrative arc about fighting evil pink robots, apparently. Just the two songs about her “black belt in karate” and diet, including “lots of vitamins”.
For another, Yoshimi is actually a real person. What’s more, she even features on the album herself, credited with performing “vocalisations”. Ironically, she might have lent her voice to the robots she’s meant to be fighting in her own song. She also appears in the music video for the single ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1’.
So, who is the real Yoshimi?
Yoshimi P-We is a Japanese singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who is part of the experimental rock bands OOIOO and Boredoms. Wayne Coyne has cited OOIOO’s Feather Float as one of his favourite albums on multiple occasions.
It was this admiration for her music that encouraged Coyne to get Yoshimi involved in The Flaming Lips’ follow-up album to The Soft Bulletin. After they wrote and produced a song about a fictionalised version of their new collaborator, the band decided to name the whole album after the song, as it seemed to encapsulate its main themes and overall sound.
A record about fighting the rise of the machines and enjoying the moment before an impending apocalypse isn’t a bad thing to have named after you. Especially when it’s become one of the most celebrated albums of the 2000s.
Since her collaboration with The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi P-We has joined all-female supergroup Free Kitten as drummer, alongside Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth fame and Pussy Galore’s Julia Cafritz. And she’s continued to write, record and perform with OOIOO and Boredoms. In between battling the pink robots, that is.
