The Flaming Lips, New Years Eve, Oklahoma -Streaming by Alyson Camus

But it was just the beginning of crazy debaucheries of confetti and hurricanes of balloons, just like the Lips have us get used to: Wayne walked over the crowd inside his utero-bubble, people were drown in an ocean of multicolor balloons and machine-induced smog, Wayne used a guitar with the front also protected by a green air bulb, and the background of the amphitheater where they were playing was producing these lightning rainbow arches looking like the ultimate protective bubble. Why everything has to be about bubbles with the Lips?

Their show is populated by strange creatures and iconoclastic scenes, the flower and caterpillar people dancing their ass off on the side of the stage, Mr. Bear carrying Wayne on his shoulders for the time of a song singing ‘She forgets about the fear/When she’s high’, two giant hands reflecting laser lights into a disco ball, and even a couple getting married on stage with Coyne’s benediction.

The Lips are the masters of their colorful psychedelic park-amusement-universe, they want the public to have fun, they want to have fun, and I love their long dramatic synth-driven interludes, their end-of-the-world (or end-of-the-year) drums and cymbals explosive sounds which suddenly weigh a ton, their dream-awake world that makes people escape reality even though this reality is constantly bursting in their faces, thanks to lines like ‘Do you realize/That happiness makes you cry?/Do you realize/That everyone you know someday will die?’

If we cannot escape death, the Flaming Lips reminds us that life can be that colorful and exhilarating for an hour or two, even though all this bubble-gum childish universe tells you there is always a fight for your life in the corner: ‘They’re determined if it kills them/They’re just human with wives and children’.
And talking about ‘Race for the prize’, it was unfortunately the last song of the broadcast of the show, although I believe they played the entire Soft Bulletin album after midnight.