Songfacts®:

• Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne wrote this after a Warner Bros executive told him about horrific films of babies being killed in the Middle East. "She said she had seen some of these films," he explained in the band bio Staring At Sound: The True Story Of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips. "It's so brutal, putting an idea like that out there in the world, and lines like 'You have to be kiddin' me/They wouldn't do those unspeakable things' are my reaction."
• The band's first album through a major label, Hit To Death In The Future Head was supposed to make its debut in 1991, but it was delayed for over a year because this song used a sample of Michael Kamen's score from the 1985 film Brazil and securing the rights took much longer than expected.
• By the time the album finally came out, the band had a new lineup with Ronald Jones replacing Jonathan Donahue on guitar and Steve Drozd replacing Nathan Roberts on drums. Donahue, who clashed with Coyne over creative differences, wanted to focus more on his other band, Mercury Rev. As for Roberts, he just wasn't cut out for life on the road. Coyne told Consequence Of Sound: "In his way, he wanted to have a 9-5 job, so he could be off work and get drunk and not worry about it. And being in The Flaming Lips at that time was just too much of a full-time commitment."
• The British post-punk band The Futureheads took their name from this album.