VIDEO: Flaming Lips featuring Erykah Badu’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”

June 6th, 2012 by thisisjohnbook

NOTE: Some of the imagery in this video, which includes shots of a nude woman, may not be for all audiences, so to be safe, this is NSFW. They’re not allowing websites to embed it, so click the image below which will take you to the video at Vimeo.com.

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Flaming Lips have a new collaboration album coming out called The Flaming Lips & Heady Fwends (Warner Bros.), where they are joined with a number of different artists, including Ke$ha, Lightning Bolt, and Yoko Ono, but what has gained a lot of attention in the last few days is a video for their collaboration with Erykah Badu, a cover of Robert Flack‘s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. The song is Badu entering the Flaming Lips’ adventurous musical world, as if her natural and organic self decided to explore their acid and mushroom tinged soundscapes. But there has been a controversy not for the song, but for the video that was directed by Lips frontman Wayne Coyne.

If you have seen the videos Coyne has done in the last 20 years, you’ll know that he can be trippy. In this case, it seems that Badu agreed to do the video with him with a few ideas and expressed between her and Coyne. However, an alleged “rough” version of the video was placed on Pitchfork and Badu was livid about what she saw. She had claimed that she did not approve of this version of the video, even though it was presented as a “raw cut”. Badu accused Coyne of being “self serving”. You can see the views of both Badu and Coyne in an article written at Okayplayer. For a few hours, the video was removed from YouTube and Vimeo, but before it was, it lead to a lot of people discussing it in forums and in social media. It has also lead to countless videos on YouTube where people recorded their first viewing of the video, treating it as if if it was the music video equivalent of 2 Girls, 1 Cup. I initially missed it because I felt I would eventually see the video by the weekend, and when it was removed, I questioned “was it really that bad?”

I knew that what considered controversial was a nude woman that people assumed was Badu herself. Rather, it was Badu’s sister, Nayrok. As for the imagery… well take a look first if you haven’t seen it and then come back here.

Ready?

  • The song turns a beautiful ballad into a distorted rock dirge, rhythmless yet still retaining its beauty in a murky haze. However, what seems to be irking people is the imagery in the video of Nayrok not so much being in the nude, but being covered in mysterious liquids. At first, Nayrok is simply covered in glitter. Then she’s covered in a red liquid. Then she’s covered in white liquid, and that’s where the arguments and debates started. People wanted to know what it meant. As someone who has watched music videos since I was a kid, music videos do NOT have to be 100% literal, things can be very abstract and mean nothing. Music videos are nothing more than promotional tools for the audio, a means of marketing with the aid of eye candy. Or in this case, mysterious red and white liquid. Some of the red/bloody liquid were displayed on Nayrok’s rear-end, and… I have not read or heard any other comments but did people view this as something to suggest rape? There’s a brief scene where the blood is covering Nayrok’s face, as the line “the first time ever I saw your face” is sung by Badu, and in my mind I’m thinking metaphors of birth.

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