Despite bizarre Twitter rampage, Flaming Lips still together. Who's behind mysterious tweet-streak?

The Flaming Lips Twitter account seems to been the target of a well-operated publicity scheme on Thursday night, as someone reportedly hacked the band's account and declared the band to be disbanded. The tweets related to the curious incident have since been deleted, but Music Times will try to sum up the gist of the situation.

The first tweet that caught attention gave the surprising news in a rather undecorated form: "We have sad news. We've broken up..." with no details explaining why or how. The message sat for 18 minutes as the band's Twitter followers went into a frenzy, and then a follow-up appeared: "lol just joking guys."

The Flaming Lips' spokesperson reported that that band was not breaking up, and the band's frontman Wayne Coyne tweeted from his personal account that "The Flaming Lips twitter has been hijacked!!!!" Some doubters pointed out that if hacking were truly the cause, why would the original message have disappeared literally after the "just kidding" tweet had been posted?

However, the tweets that followed the "just kidding" seemed to suggest that there was something outside of official business being done.

First, the "Lips" requested that its followers buy the new single from English boy band Union J. The account then clarified "that last announcement was a bit premature," featuring an image of a skeleton and the timeline of the band's existence (1983-2013). The account then sent a message to Justin Bieber, requesting a follow. Finally, there were a few retweets of a British marble designer.

It seemed the mystery had been solved when the account told its readers to follow CallumB95, an apparent twenty-something male. The owner of the account swore up and down via his own tweets that he had nothing to do with the incident at hand.

"Hahahahaha I'm on the Spin magazine website and The Rolling Stones (sic) website," he wrote. "What the f---."

As of press time, The Flaming Lips were still officially together.

Tags

Flaming Lips