2006 In Music: At War With The Mystics

The Flaming Lips – At War With the Mystics

At War With the Mystics was probably the most controversial album of the first half of the year. Clearly, people wanted another Yoshimi and they didn’t get it.

Is this album as good as The Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi? No. Those albums were masterpieces, and this one falls ever so short. But, is it one of the best albums of 2006? Yes, I think it is.

In fact, this is a brilliant record that hopefully, will someday be recalled for its own brilliance rather than what people wanted it to be.

There is a theme running through this album, and it can be found in the title. We are at war with the mystics. We know who the mystics are. They believe they know better then us. They are the first to defend the status quo and the last to evolve socially. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were two blows to the mystics. The American Revolution was a more modern blow to the mystics. The Emancipation Proclamation was a blow to mystics. The New Deal was another. Brown v. Board of Education was another. We know who the mystics are.

We are at war with the mystics because we have to be. The future of civilization depends on it. It always has, always will. Socrates was at war with the mystics. Jesus was at war with the mystics. Galileo was at war with the mystics. Voltaire was at war with the mystics. Thomas Jefferson was at war with the mystics. Charles Darwin was at war with the mystics. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was at war with the mystics.

This is a political album. But, it’s not political in the sense of when you sit around a table with your friends at 3:00AM discussing how the world should be run, not in “The McLaughlin Group” sense of what some Senator said this week. Ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now The W.A.N.D. will still be a song that means something to someone because it’s a song about the people rising up and taking control. It’s a protest song in the classic sense. It’s like something Pete Seeger would create if he were to be born on a starship in 3000AD. There has always been a need for songs like that, and there probably always will be, because we are always at war with the mystics.

Why are we at war with the mystics? Because greed and hubris and hate and ignorance are all part of the human condition. Each of us has their own battle to fight with the mystics:

It's a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want

Because you cannot know yourself, or what you'd really do

People have criticized The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song for being annoying and overly silly, but you really have to listen closely. It’s really a short essay on ethics:

If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch

Would you do it?

If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich

Would you do it?

If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back

Would you do it?

If you could take all the love without giving any back

Would you do it?

Our quest for a more peaceful, more civilized form of existence as a species much happen within each of us before it can happen to the world as a whole. None of this is new of course, philosophers like Kant and others have been saying these things for centuries. But they didn’t say it in four minutes, fifty one seconds at the beginning of a psychedelic indie-rock/post-punk album.

So, we are not just at war with the mystics, we are at war with ourselves. Witness Vein of Stars:

Maybe there isn't a vein of stars callin' out my name

They'll glow from above our heads

Nothin' there to see you down on your knees

25, 26, 27

Back from the future maybe there ain't no heaven

There's just you and me

Maybe that's all whose left

And if there ain't no heaven

Maybe there ain't no hell

This is not a song about rejecting organized religion. It’s a song about accepting the possibility that your favorite version of the truth is not in fact the truth. In order to respect other human beings and coexist peacefully with them, we must always accept the possibility that we are wrong. Those who cannot accept this become fanatics:

You think you're radical

But you're not so radical

In fact, you're fanatical

Fanatical

My favorite track on At War With the Mystics is the driving guitar cataclysm Pompeii am Götterdämmerung. This is what it sounds like when the mystics win. We listen as a loving man and woman are obliterated by forces they cannot understand.

I say to the naysayers, how can you say that this album not live up to expectations when it has a track like Pompeii am Götterdämmerung? It may be the best track they’ve ever recorded.

This album is not Yoshimi and it’s not the Soft Bulletin, it’s something that was clearly intended to be different…And it’s something that needed to be done.