With COVID-19 seemingly having no end in sight for the United States, Americans need to get creative with getting back to work while also staying safe. It’s no different for the Oklahoma City spawned rock band The Flaming Lips.
As reported by CNN, band frontman Wayne Coyne had a crazy idea he sketched in the early days of the pandemic and recently brought to fruition. “I did a little drawing… where I drew a picture of The Flaming Lips doing a show in 2019. And I’m the only person in the space bubble, and everybody else is just normal,” Coyne told CNN. “Then (I did another drawing with) The Flaming Lips playing a show in 2020. The exact same scenario, but I’m in a bubble, and so is everybody else.”
Before the full gravity of the pandemic was apparent, Coyne says the idea was more so a social commentary on the state of the virus rather than a legitimate idea.
“I don’t think anybody would have thought … in the middle of March that this is still going to be going, you know, eight months later. I think we all thought this is a month, this is maybe two months, but we’re going to get a handle on this,” he said.
“We do a couple of songs with about 30 people in the bubbles. And we start to think, ‘Well, you know, just from doing that, we start to get an idea that we could actually do it, you know, and it could actually happen,'” Coyne revealed.
“I like the way this looks, because you can get as excited as you want, you can scream as much as you want, you just can’t infect the person next to you, no matter what you forget about, how excited you get,” he said. “That barrier is still there, they’re protected, and you’re protected… that part of it is what we really felt like was the success,” he said.
COVID – paired with the dumpster fire that is 2020 – has very much made abnormal sightings previously considered strange, completely normal (such as wearing medical masks). At this point, no news, picture, or video does much to phase Americans anymore. It may be a sad fact, but what else can we do but laugh through the pain?
