Science & Tech Quote by Wayne Coyne

Coyne is doing that classic indie-rock two-step: claim tenderness, admit lust, then package the whole thing as artistic integrity. The setup is a mild jab at Kylie Minogue's pop persona: her version is framed as a "sex machine song", efficient, gleaming, built to move bodies. Coyne positions The Flaming Lips as the corrective, promising to reroute the track into "loving and longing" - code for emotional depth, vulnerability, and the kind of soft-focus melancholy alternative bands trade in like currency.

The subtext is less about the song than about cultural ownership. Pop gets cast as surface; indie gets to be soul. It's a familiar hierarchy, but Coyne sells it with disarming candor, not theory. He doesn't say Kylie's take is bad; he implies it's a machine by design, and machines can be repurposed. That word choice matters: "turned it into" suggests transformation, almost contamination, as if the song had an original innocence before pop production made it sweaty.

Then he undercuts any looming snobbery with that last line. Meeting Kylie and reporting she was "pleased" functions like a permission slip - an ethical seal of approval that defuses the anxiety of covering a famous pop track. It's also a small flex: proximity to celebrity, proof he's not throwing stones from outside the gates.

What makes the quote work is its honesty about the politics of taste. Coyne isn't just describing arrangement choices; he's narrating the uneasy romance between indie credibility and pop hedonism, and showing how easily reverence and condescension can share a backstage pass.