Wayne Coyne and the Limits of Pop Music: Ed McKay’s Artist and Author Series

September, 11, 2011 , by Stacey

On Saturday at Hopscotch, Wayne Coyne summed up the limits of pop music with analogies about bananas and elephants. As part of the assembled panel hosted by Ed McKay in their Artist and Author series at Raleigh City Museum, Coyne had one basic message regarding music: if you like it, it’s good. The end.

Coyne is clearly not a big fan of limits.

Not one to see the omnipresence and over-availability of media as a threat, the Flaming Lips front man likened music to food. More specifically, bananas. Having just eaten one prior to the panel discussion, he noted that there was a time he could not have enjoyed such a small pleasure. Much in the way he had to scour music shops for new sounds in his youth, or happen to be at a friend’s house when they played something interesting, Coyne noted that there was a time when you couldn’t eat a banana unless it grew in your backyard. Music nowadays is as accessible as fruit; there for the picking, without all the foraging required in the past.

Coyne also discussed perspective. Upon receiving a painting from a fan that he and his sister thought was god awful, he opened and read the letter that accompanied it only to find that the painting had been created not by a person, but rather by an elephant. Suddenly something that seemed at first to be an atrocity became a treasure. In the same vein, Coyne feels that music is often best appreciated by those who aren’t involved in its creation. Music fans, he claims, “are not concerned with chord changes or producers. They just listen to it and go to heaven and then when it’s over say ‘fuck, I have to go back to work.’”

Of course, despite all his astute musical observations, some of the best tidbits of the conversation included Coyne just straight up calling people out. Ted Nugent as a “retarded, racist asshole.” Garth Brooks as an artist who propagates the industry with “the most generic bullshit for the masses.” Music as something you should enjoy “when you’re done reading bullshit like the Bible.”

The spirited conversation between Coyne and fellow panel members Sam Herring, Juianna Barwick, Mark Richardson (editor of Pitchfork), Chris Stamey (of the dB’s), and author David Tompkins was an excellent way to set the stage for day three of Hopscotch. The theme: it’s just music, after all. Have fun with it. And I had the whole day to enjoy it in my backyard without having to battle the jungle for the metaphorical music banana.