Wayne Coyne wrote in the At War With The Mystics 5.1 CD booklet:

THE SOUND OF FAILURE
We have some friends whose father was dying of cancer—I say “was” because it (the cancer and his death) dragged on agonizingly for over a year—and they (our friends) were becoming, understandably, weary of being forced to be upbeat…
And I remember hearing a comment once about how annoying it was, to them, to have to hear this gratingly jubilant fake enthusiasm (usually hokey hyped-up pop groups like Black Eyed Peas, Destiny’s Child, Ashlee Simpson, Hillary Duff, etc.) blasting out of the “Muzak” systems virtually everywhere they went. To them this cheerleader-type assault was really only effective if you didn’t actually have any real psychic stress… And they felt that it was, surprisingly, helpful to them to try to understand their fears and their sadness— as opposed to pretending that it’s “all good.”
And, you see, this is true insight… finally we know it’s okay to have a troubled mind, it’s okay to fail…
And so this song (which was written in the car on the way up to New York from Oklahoma while I drove and Steven played battery-powered keyboard and computer) is about a young girl whose best friend has died and, everywhere she goes (like the friends I mentioned earlier), she must endure the empty optimism of the inexperienced. She wants to know, since it has arrived, what is despair, what is hope, what is failure… And what is in the darkness??
The line in the song “so go tell Britney and go tell Gwen” is obviously a reference back to my friends and their Muzak incident… meaning, “Yeah, go tell Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani that their energy and their Prom Queen smiles only go to prove that they don’t empathize with my sadness.” I believe, in the song, that Britney and Gwen could be thought of as this grieving girl’s less mature friends… and that she’s not trying to go against them, she just doesn’t want to pretend that she understands what she doesn’t really understand—what death is… what hopelessness is… what existential fear is… She doesn’t know, but she’s starting to find out…

IT’S DARK… IS IT ALWAYS THIS DARK??
A strange sort of afterword to the previous song. The voice and the strange blippy trail is actually my voice run through a computer plug-in effect called “Squirrel Parade” … Pretty cool… Anyway, it sounds like I’m saying “It’s Dark,” but I didn’t say “It’s Dark.” I don’t remember what it was exactly—just me talking before a song, but it gives the illusion of a young girl finding her way through a mystery… yes?