Flaming Lips

“The goal of the people at ACL, is that you leave here and live the rest of your year like there’s no f-king tomorrow,” shouted Wayne Coyne’s digitally super-imposed face, making the actual man in the foreground look meager. Balloons of all colors bounced across the audience; smoke and streamers flew through the air, and naked women danced wildly on the giant semi-circle screen at the back of the stage.

Amidst all the chaos, Coyne, lead singer of The Flaming Lips, had summed up the 2010 Austin City Limits Music Festival in that one sentence. Everything that happened at Zilker Park this past weekend came together; every music fan had now learned how to love music harder, and how to live a little more passionately, and to take all the joy, pain, misery, confusion, and love of all the bands they heard with them wherever they go. By JELANI SIMS, BLOGCRITICS.ORG