The Flaming Lips / I Was Zapped By the Lucky Super Rainbow - Single / 2007
I Was Zapped By the Lucky Super Rainbow
euphoric, chant-like, half-reverent half-goofy
A short, incantatory track that treats luck as a physical force, something that arrives like weather and settles on a person like electricity in the hand. It reads as a blessing or toast disguised as a psychedelic pop chant, celebrating someone's sudden good fortune or arrival into adulthood.
luck and chance transformation into manhood weather/nature as metaphor for fate celebration and blessing the sacred within the absurd
Who's speaking
A narrator addresses a 'you' directly, marveling at this person's sudden luck; the tone shifts between tender awe and rowdy, almost drunken celebration, culminating in a shouted aside that breaks the spell with crude affection.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as circle a single moment of recognition: someone appears, charged with luck, and the speaker responds with rising astonishment. The verses set up the imagery of storms and rainbows as unpredictable, near-mystical forces; the choruses escalate into direct address, naming the person a 'man' and a 'lucky man,' as if luck itself confers adulthood. By the second chorus the exclamation breaks decorum entirely, and the final verse returns to the storm imagery, looser and more fragmented, trailing into repetition rather than resolution.
How it's built
Built on a simple verse-chorus-chorus-verse shape with heavy repetition standing in for development. The verses are short, imagistic couplets; the choruses function almost as a ritual chant, repeating the 'lucky man' phrase until it becomes incantatory. The interjected all-caps exclamation acts as a comic release valve breaking the otherwise dreamy tone. The song ends not with a resolution but a trailing fade, as if the chant simply runs out of energy.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song opens with weather imagery that frames the addressee as a force of nature themselves, someone whose mere presence disperses storms. This sets luck up not as something possessed but as something embodied.
Second verse
“Luck is sick that day”
Here luck is personified as fickle and almost ailing, introducing the idea that fortune has its own moods and isn't simply earned or deserved.
First chorus
The declaration of manhood arrives fused with imagery of lightning and rainbow shooting from the hands, as though luck were a superpower newly discovered, and adulthood is framed less as maturity than as sudden electric capability.
Chorus tag line
The line about fouled-up days feeling like part of a plan is the emotional crux — it reframes bad luck retroactively as design, offering comfort disguised as celebration.
Exclamatory break
The shouted interjection punctures the mystical tone with blunt, celebratory profanity, turning the ritual chant into something closer to a toast among friends.
Final verse and fade
The return to the storm-chasing imagery, now interspersed with murmured fragments, loosens the song's structure, letting it dissolve into repetition rather than closing on a clean resolution.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Luck is consistently figured as weather and electricity — lightning, storms, rainbows — collapsing an abstract concept into something with physical, almost bodily presence.
- anaphora
- The repeated phrase declaring someone lucky and now a man drives the chorus, turning a simple statement into a ritual affirmation through sheer repetition.
- tonal juxtaposition
- A shouted vulgar aside interrupts the otherwise reverent, dreamy language, deflating the mysticism with blunt affection and humor.
- personification
- Luck is treated as an entity that can be 'sick' on a given day, giving fate a body and moods rather than leaving it abstract.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a blessing song — an ecstatic toast to someone's arrival into luck, adulthood, or grace, with the crude interjection working as genuine affection rather than mockery. An alternative reading hears it more ironically, as satire of the American mythology of luck and self-made manhood, where the absurd electric imagery and drunken outburst puncture the sincerity of the declaration. The lyric itself doesn't clearly resolve which reading is correct, and the band's history of blending sincerity with playful excess supports both.
Context
This track was released as a single in 2007, around the era of the Flaming Lips' more theatrical, festival-oriented live shows, and its incantatory, communal-chant quality suits their tendency to turn songs into shared rituals in concert. I don't have detailed information on its recording context or specific inspiration, so this is inferred largely from the text and general knowledge of the band's style.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal tone between the dreamy verses and the shouted interjection
- how the 'lightning' and 'rainbow' imagery recurs to blur weather and superpower
- the way repetition of the 'lucky man' phrase builds ritual intensity
- the fragmented, murmured asides in the final verse that destabilize the song's ending
- whether the music underscores sincerity or irony in the celebratory tone
About The Flaming Lips
The Flaming Lips are an American psychedelic rock band formed in 1983 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The band currently consists of Wayne Coyne, Derek Brown, Matt Duckworth Kirksey, AJ Slaughter and Tommy McKenzie (bass).
1983 - present / United States
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