The first time The Flaming Lips came into my consciousness was around the time that At War with the Mystics was their “new” album that was going to be released soon. Guess that places us in 2006. The video for ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ was a regular in the mornings on MTV2. It was a strange video. It was a strange song. But I dug it. To the 11-year-old child I was, it scratched that weird internal itch that I think all young ones have at that age. Because there was this hype for The Flaming Lips going around, their older videos would be played on the channel too. Through this, it’s how I came to know songs like ‘Race for the Prize’, ‘Fight Test’, ‘Do You Realize??’, and today’s featured track ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’.

I was a younger, foolish kid back when I saw the video for ‘Jelly’ for the first time, and I think I cared more about appearances than the music. The first thought I had was how different Wayne Coyne looked compared to all the other videos I’d seen him in. In fact, the whole band looked completely unrecognizable. It appeared to be a much older music video than than the ones for the songs from Bulletin and Yoshimi, so obviously they were younger. They just also happened to look like completely different people. Plus, there appeared to be this other person in the band that by 2006 was not in there anymore. I had a lot of research to do. The track just seemed weird to me. The combination of the audio with the visuals, my little brain couldn’t handle it. I got over that bridge eventually.

The Flaming Lips could have easily been known as the band that did this one song. and then dipped, never to be heard from again. As we all know, they went on to do great things which I think we’re all very grateful for. But there are a lot of one-hit wonders who have worst tracks than this one. ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ is about three kooky characters, two girls, one guy, all described in three respective verses, who use unusual objects for the completely wrong purposes. There’s choruses per se. Where the choruses would usually be are instead replaced by the crunching guitar riff and loopy slide guitar refrain, which also start the track off. And I like Coyne’s vocal in this too, all bare and untampered with. He’s not the strongest singer, but he gives it feeling, even if the lyrics aren’t meant to be taken all seriously.