Flaming Lips' Fight Test and Cat Stevens' Father to Son

Aye, and it winds me up no end. I want to love Fight Test cos it's great, but all I can think of is Boyzone's hideous cover of Father To Son and it's most offputting.

Really? I still love Fight Test. It's one of my favorites from the album. I've never heard Boyzone's cover of Father to Son though.

I almost started a thread on this, something like, "Are we running out of melodies?" All I can think of is "Father and Son" when I hear the Lips track. I like the Cat Stevens song better, actually.

has anyone heard the yoshimi battles the pink robots listening party CD?

before each song starts, wayne coyne and steven drozd (michael ivins keeps quiet, i think) say a little bit about the song that you're about to hear. from the introduction to "fight test": "and then we ran into the trouble almost immediately -- dave fridmann recognized it at first as being reminiscent of the cat stevens song 'father and son.' which with a little manipulating we changed it that, i think, legally that it doesn't resemble him enough that he can come and torture us later."

I think there's a double reference going on -- Wayne Coyne is a noted Echo and the Bunnymen, and isn't the story that they asked Shankar to recreate the melody of that Cat Stevens song for the start of "The Cutter"? It definitely says something like that in the box set (that Mr. Coyne provided an introduction for), so one wonders...

is a noted Echo and the Bunnymen

Er, 'fan' -- ;-)

Close Ned - the Bunnymen asked Shankar to play the main melody to "Matthew and Son" on "The cutter"...

It was the 'son' thing that threw me off! Damn!

i could never get into the soft bulletin coz of that bit in race for the prize which IS that bit from "sweet talkin' guy"

What strikes me is that no one here said anything about the meaning of the song. The song basically says that sometimes you can't stand there waiting for the punches and have to "stand up and be a man", i.e fight. When I read the lyrics I wondered if it wasn't a condoning of the american strikes in Afghanistan after september 11th. The Cat Stevens rip-off has a meaning, Stevens being now known as Yousuf Islam, an integrist muslim who asked for the death of Salman Rushdie... I still wonder if the Flaming Lips really think that "war is good", though.

My appologies for side stepping the whole war thing..BUT I remember clearly hearing a couple of early "YES" moments on the 'soft bulletin'

Fight Test is almost an electronic version (melody speaking) of Father to Son, but hey Rap has been doing this for years.

to = and
prongskillteemu = can't type and think at the same time

i agree that the "rip-off" is an intentional (& meaningful) reference, but it's a little far-fetched to explain it with cat stevens's conversion to islam. i'm not ready to make that leap of logic. why not just say it's the anti-father&son? let's take a look at cat stevens' lyrics: "it's hard, but it's harder to ignore it." "take your time, think a lot" this father seems to be teaching his son NOT to fight, to walk away... "and i know that i have to go away" to resist jihad, if you wanna bring the moslim faith into it. i read fight test as an answer to father and son, as in, "ok, dad, i tried it your way, and you know what? pacifism is too simple to work in this p0m0 world."

Here's a quote from an interview with Wayne Coyne that was posted on nudeasthenews.com today:

We thought we'd try putting [the sound of a random audience] on some other things to see if it evoked a mood. It certainly does that on "Fight Test," where you have the weird announcer and then the narrator talking about a fight. Without that, it comes across as some kind of Cat Stevens...

NATN: I’m so glad to hear you say that! The vocal melody is so familiar.

WC: Yeah! It's "Father And Son." It's a great song. When I did it, I didn't know that song that well. My brothers all had his records so I knew it somewhere in there, but when I played it for Dave Fridmann, he was like, “wait a minute -- that's another song!” So we molded it to be more of an, oh, you know, an homage or companion to that story Cat Stevens tells. It's like, picture Wayne telling a story about being the father and son at the same time! He accepted it in that way, like, OK, if you're going to rip him off, let's change it up so it's you ripping him off and not the production team. You can see where those little elements trigger something in your mind. It's not a note. It's an atmosphere just injected into what was already an atmosphere.