Curate Yourself - The Flaming Lips

I think this course ought to include live music. As an avid concert goer and festival goer, i think its important for people to view and feel the feelings that come with live music. These feelings can range from anywhere in the spectrum from happiness to anger and back again. I believe if anything is the universal language, more than mathematics, music is the universal language. Regardless of lyrics and cultural aspects of music,  music is not just heard but more importantly felt. In the live setting, I believe we receive the energies and the feelings a lot more profoundly and somehow in our subconscious music speaks to us, and allows us to express things we don't have words or images for.

It's also interesting to see the kind of culture that live music has developed, specially music festivals as they've become a lot more mainstream and attainable to people, especially in America. Which goes to show universality of it, as many different walks of life, ages, and kinds of people come together to experience a basic human experience, to feel. 

I think an imperative mention in this world is The Flaming Lips and their out of this world concerts. The Lips put on a kind of show that most artists and major celebrities in the public eye don't. This is not your typical perfectly curated picture perfect arena tour, but rather a raw visual collage of emotion. The Lips are probably the epitome of letting your freak flag fly. Their concerts are an out of body experience of absolute madness that perfectly fulfills anything you've been looking for. Instead of spoon feeding you content, The Flaming Lips create that amazing atmosphere where you can let music, energy, and the people around you speak to you. This is done by a mixture of sound and visuals that allow for the creation of such an atmosphere that cannot be found otherwise. Neither the sound or the visuals can stand alone in this situation.A perfect picture of artistic collaboration. The people that The Flaming Lips are often those on a similar wavelength of self expression and desire to find raw emotion. More often than not, a newcomer experiencing their live performances for the first time, will come back for that free spirited atmosphere.

 It's important to me because it feels as if music's universality allows for it to speak to you instead of you speaking to it. Generally, in our world we speak to it, or a particular response is desired from us. More often than not the world is very manicured and  however music allows one to feel freely, without obligation to feel a certain particular way. We can find sadness, happiness, anger, joy, passion, in many different kinds of music, and feel them without judgement. In particular The Flaming Lips live experiences  have been important to me because they've allowed me to find a world of emotion and express many subconscious things without even knowing it. Needless to say, they're also great fun!