Songfacts®:

• Lead singer Wayne Coyne got the idea for this song when he had a dream about a singer/songwriter named Devendra Banhart where he is trying to convince a suicide bomber not to explode. In the dream, Banhart succeeds, and begins to sympathize with the bomber and understand why he would want to blow himself (and others) up. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Jake - Stillwater, OK
• Back when this was released, Donald Trump was a decade away from becoming the president of the United States and was known to TV viewers as the billionaire host of The Apprentice. Wayne Coyne, who levels the insult "You're turning into a poor man's Donald Trump" in the song, isn't proud of the reference. He told Newsweek in 2017: "At the time, he was this kind of celebrated loudmouth that everybody would wish they could ignore but he's just so stupid that you can't help but pay attention. I think that's the exact thing that happened to us with this election."
• Wayne continued with his thoughts on Trump and the power (or lack thereof) of protest music in a 2017 interview with Consequence Of Sound: "We sort of liked the idea that we would be these freaks making absolutely radical protest music, which I never thought would be actual protest music; I don't think that really works. I don't think music is an actual protest. If you mentioned Donald Trump in a song, people would like Donald Trump more because of your song. It never works singing against something; you almost always have to be singing for something. It was more absurd that these noisy freaks The Flaming Lips are having some say about the way the country is run."