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About

Genius Annotation

One of the Flaming Lips' best-loved songs, “Do You Realize” reached #32 on the UK Singles Chart, was chosen to be the Official Rock Song of the state of Oklahoma, and is an enduring staple of the band’s live performances.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

What did The Flaming Lips say about "Do You Realize??"?
Genius Answer

From Coyne’s liner notes on “Do You Realize”:

Whenever I analyze the scientific realities of what it means to be here on Earth – in this galaxy – spinning around the sun – flying though space – a terror shock seizes me!!! I’m reminded once again of how precarious our whole existence is…


When we were in the initial phases of working on “Do You Realize??”, it was a song that was going well. I remember playing that for Steven, and the way I was doing it I could actually just play it with my limited amount of chords that I know how to play. It was probably just in three or four chords. Steven would always point to the line of “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”. That comes out of all these whimsical, romantic, little visions and then at the end of that is this sort of punch to the face, this horrible reality that still feels acceptable or whatever in the flow of the music. We really just moved on to record it, we didn’t feel like it was overly special or different compared to other tracks. It was just another one that we were determined to make sound as cool as we could, but there would have been no way that we could have known that it was going to have this other power where people use it at their deaths of their grandmother’s and the births of their sons and daughters.
When we play it every night, I know in the audience there are people that this is their song this is, this is their mother in this song, this is their sons and daughters. We always play it absolutely like the greatest thing that we get to do is to play this song for people. We would never approach it like where we would be burned out or sick of it. It’s like a piece of magic, it is this other thing that nobody can really do on their own, it’s a form of kind of magic and I think we’re really lucky that magic we get to take credit for. And it was used in the Transformers movie trailer and I thought it was great. Now it has this other dramatic scope to it that I would would have never thought work, but it works it works really great.

– Wayne Coyne, Yahoo

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