Wayne Coyne = Magician

As I’ve long suspected Wayne Coyne turns out to be a magician. Not a wizard, that’s an important distinction. I’d not have people believe that I’m calling Wayne Coyne a wizard or a sorcerer or any other medium able to siphon from the universe’s boundless reserves of hot pink power. Not a musician either, though I suspect that the two words similar syllabic layout has caused some of the confusion surrounding this fuckin’ guy. No, a magician. One who sets up his table in the hallway outside your nephew’s bar mitzvah and amazes guests with coin tricks on their way to the bathroom.

Wayne Coyne is cheesy and obnoxious, that’s a given, but plenty of musicians are cheesy and obnoxious. What makes Wayne Coyne a magician is that he believes that these characteristics are qualifications instead of liabilities. They’re part of his act, and they draw your attention from the eyesore of his music. He walks on the crowd in a giant hamster ball, which titillates, becomes a spectacle, and draws progressively larger dosed crowds for him to walk on. Meanwhile, you just got fooled into attending a Flaming Lips concert. Tah Dah! He emerges onto the stage from the recesses of a giant vagina. You can’t miss that. You have to go see that. So much so that you may forget that the purpose for which he emerges is to yelp his cultish horseshit in your ear for a few hours. Abracadabra!!!

And now (sigh) he’s going to re-perform the signature trick of some other famous magicians. That’s right, Wayne Coyne is covering Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973). The whole thing. When this happens I will once again be besieged by devotees who insist that it is a mark of quality that one must be high to enjoy this music, and I will die a little inside because the strictures of polite society don’t permit me to punch these people in the throat. That album will be a trick deck, a false-bottomed box, and Coyne will present it with a accentuated flourish and stand grinning and panting and waiting for his ovation. I see you, Wayne Coyne. I see that spare dove tucked inside your shitty tuxedo jacket. And, no, that’s not my fucking card.