If you would, allow me a moment to climb onto my soapbox: Was anyone else irked by the Flaming Lips’ anti-green antics at the Earth Day concert on the Mall yesterday? I mean, a free Flaming Lips performance is pretty sweet and all, but it smacked me as a little off-message when frontman Wayne Coyne started blasting confetti into the air within minutes of their set.
Granted, I was what Noah you might call “cranky” due to the cold and drizzly weather, so I’m sure that didn’t help. But not only was the confetti pretty pointless and premature, at the very least (it wasn’t even the grand finale or anything!), but the Earth Day festival organizers had apparently kindly requested the Lips to bag the confetti portion of their legendarily showy performances. Coyne justified his actions by saying something about how if the crowd was truly eco-conscious, they’d pick up after him. Around that time a little yellow piece of what appeared to be plastic drifted by. At which point I got really annoyed.
But whatever. Celebrities can do whatever they want! As long as they have a few tree-huggers around who will clean up after them. Apparently they also shot off smoke bombs later in their set (by which point we had ditched). I mean, sure, you’ve gotta love the Flaming Lips’ ridiculousness, but would it have killed them to make such small concessions at an event intended to raise awareness about global warming?
(P.S. I understand that a little confetti isn’t going to doom the planet, but I just can’t shake the hypocricy of the symbolism. And I’m not the only one who thinks it was inappropriate.)
Photo via Flickr
