Flipper played a shambolic, hypnotic rendition of their anthem “Sex Bomb” earlier this year on their 40th anniversary tour, and they’ve now made it into a music video.
The clip opens with testimonials from the Melvins’ Dale Crover, Minutemen’s Mike Watt and artist Shepard Fairey, and it features clips from throughout the band’s career. Jesus Lizard singer David Yow, who has been touring as the group’s frontman, bellows the song’s chorus over and over again … “Sex bomb, baby!”
The group’s 40th anniversary tour is ongoing, with East Coast dates through the end of the month and gigs in the south in November. It will all culminate with an L.A. gig at the Roxy that will feature Watt as guest bassist. In the “Sex Bomb” clip, Watt talks about how much it hurt for him to be pelted with batteries, but that watching Flipper “hurt in another way.”
Flipper’s Generic ranked at Number 26 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 40 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time in 2016. “Their fuck-you freedom inspired Kurt Cobain, who often sported a homemade Flipper T-shirt,” the magazine noted at the time.
Earlier this year, Generic was featured on L7 singer-guitarist Donita Sparks’ and Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne’s lists of their favorite grunge albums.
“I’m very fond of the song ‘Sex Bomb,’” Sparks said. “L7 used to cover it. We did it as a mashup of it in the infancy of L7 with ‘Sweet Leaf’ from Black Sabbath, and we used to call it ‘Sweet Sex.’ It was very interesting that years later, we bonded with Nirvana over our love of Flipper. So there’s something there.”
“This would be in my top five albums of all time,” Osborne said. “They’re another band that simultaneously destroyed and invented rock & roll music. They wrote the Bible on what was possible with punk rock music. It was so far beyond anything I had heard before. Its genius is in its simplicity, its end-of-the-world quality. It made me want to make music that sounded like the end of the world, as well.”
Flipper tour dates:
October 23 – Boston, MA @ The Middle East
October 24 -Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bazaar
October 25 – Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church
October 26 – Baltimore,MD @ Ottobar
November 7 – Dallas, TX @ Three Links
November 8 – San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger
November 9 – Austin, TX @ Levitation Festival @ Hotel Vegas
November 10 – New Orleans, LA @ Santos
November 27 -Los Angeles, CA @ The Roxy