Prescription: Love
The Flaming Lips Lyrics

The Flaming Lips’ “Prescription: Love” is a song that reflects on the ways people try to fill the hole left by lack of love, including through drugs, cars, and money. The first two verses follow a pattern where the singer notes that when love is lacking - indicated by the repeated phrase “when it seems like love is all around” - people turn to substitutes. The third verse introduces the idea of “giving love the marketing scam” so that people can “understand” it better. The point is clear: love has become something people cannot understand without some manipulative marketing of it. The final line, “Let’s give love the marketing scam / And get on with it” is almost dismissive, as though acknowledging the futility of trying to create a public understanding of love that doesn’t depend on a consumer culture that commodifies it.

One can imagine that The Flaming Lips were exploring some of the same concerns as Radiohead in their seminal OK Computer album, released a year later. The theme of a consumer culture that drains meaning from life runs through both, with record companies and marketers seen as helping to create a culture that values products over people. And while addiction and mental illness is not mentioned, the idea of using drugs as substitutes for love or anything else is similar to Thom Yorke’s “drowning in a dry world” or “sucking on the brains of the ones we love.”

Ultimately, “Prescription: Love” is a sad commentary on the ways love has become lost in a culture based on consumption. It suggests that love can only be understood in a context of material wealth that values possessions over relationships. And yet, by suggesting that “everybody could get some sleep” if love were as easy to purchase as cars or drugs, it also implies that love has the power to heal, and that a culture where love is understood apart from a capitalist framework might be possible.