It is very sad when you have appreciated the music, the original live shows, the humor and the allegedly lack of ego of a certain band and you suddenly discover that they are actually the opposite of the image they have been projecting. The Flaming Lips saga continues and it’s not pretty.
To sum up the events, drummer Kliph Scurlock was fired by Wayne Coyne after criticizing Coyne’s friendship with musician and daughter of Oklahoma governor, Christina Fallin, who posted a picture of herself wearing a Native American-style headdress, and who performed a mocked Native American dance at Oklahoma’s Norman Music Festival. Kliph wrote a long explanation of the event, which was posted on Pitchfork, accusing Wayne of endless verbal (with threats of physical) abuse and seriously questioning the integrity of the frontman. It was already ugly, and, as expected, Wayne Coyne answered to Kliph via Rolling Stones on Friday. Who is the winner in the story? It’s clear that after Pitchfork’s post, Coyne looked like the bad guy and if he had a chance to restore his image of the cool hippie-indie musician with a wild imagination, he failed miserably. Along the interview, he takes the high road, appearing condescending and obviously playing a plain hypocrite. First of all, Coyne calls Scurlock a ‘compulsive pathological liar’, and repeatedly says that the Lips’ drummer ‘was not a very significant musical part of the Flaming Lips anyway’… Is it a way to treat a bandmate? Who are you Wayne Coyne, Greg Ginn? He also clearly says that the Fallin incident wasn’t the only reason Scurlock was fired: ‘And all the things he’s saying about the reason he was fired, it’s all just made-up lies. He knows we struggled with him for years and it didn’t occur to us that it seemed that significant. I don’t even use the word “fired.” He just doesn’t play drums with us anymore – that’s the way I’d put it.’… ‘Kliph was fired because of a thousand hateful things that he’s done.’
Wow, this sounds so cruel and vile, Coyne just totally removed any legitimate role that Kliph may have had in the band (and there are so many documents that prove he had one), he doesn’t even recognize him as The Flaming Lips’ drummer, reducing him to some guy playing drums with them? How idiotic! Then he turns himself to this Buddhist BS, saying ‘I don’t like having any hate go anywhere’, having even twitted at one point a Buddha’s quote about hate and love printed on a bottle, while turning Kliph into this heinous person at the same time. Kliph would have tweeted/facebooked all kinds of bad comments about other musicians working with the Lips, while Wayne is the Dalai Lama? But there is worst, I just wonder why Coyne even bothered working with a guy who ‘is not creative’, who ‘is a hateful person’ and who was just ‘a guy that we thought was good enough technically that could do stuff in performance’. Coyne has managed to crush Scurlock to the minimum, he is not even a real artist. Good work Wayne, you look like the most despicable person I ever heard.
Scurlock had a good counter-argument when he was accused by Coyne to be hateful… hasn’t Coyne made a career of insulting people (Beck, Arcade Fire, Dylan,…)? Of course Coyne says it was all media distortion and that he has laughed with Win Butler at the exaggerated versions of that story since. Beside this, he regrets and apologizes if he has offended Native Americans with his headdress Instagram pictures. ‘That was never our intention, and I realize now that it goes deeply to the heart of some Native Americans,’ he says, ‘And I definitely regret it.’ Even there he doesn’t sound convincing , it self-promotion, look at me, I am cool, I even helped these guys in the 70s. And then Coyne reveals himself as this totally arrogant, grandiloquent egocentric out of hand: ‘I think if he doesn’t use the Flaming Lips name and my name, no one will listen to him. I mean, the Flaming Lips as an entity mostly act through me.’ Just there, I had enough of him!
It is very curious because I have been following Kliph on Twitter and he had been my friend on Facebook for a long time, and I have never seen any of his hatred that Coyne is endlessly talking about. I mean 90 % of the interview is about how awful Kliph is: ‘if you know him, you know what a horrible, hateful person he is’… still have no clue what he is talking about, especially because he wants to sell himself as this immaculate saint, ‘I don’t have any hate for him’, when all he does is spitting his venom on his ex-drummer.The interview is such a mess, a 13-year old rant, totally immature and hypocrite, he comes across as someone trying to save a wreck while shooting himself in the foot.
Among the comments, there is a long series of disappointing fans, and also a lot of people from Oklahoma (where Wayne Coyne lives) having the worst things to say about him, my favorite comment being ‘The Lips are done. Over. Wayne has transitioned from peacenik to indie rock’s Ted Nugent – loudmouthed, racist and (let’s get real here) more personality than musician’. I am afraid this guy is right. At the end, this break up has nothing to do with the Native American controversy, but everything to do with Wayne Coyne being a total dick, and I am retrospectively questioning everything he has said.
