YOUTH CULTURE POLLED MY DOG: They Might Be Giants (first 21 years) POLL RESULTS

I had Hide Away Folk Family in my top 5 I think, surprised it's so low

(All the cool kids favour the demo, maybe? Or I'm amongst those those failing to grasp eligibility criteria? :) )

you and I were the only two to vote for The Pink Album - as I hinted, I assume the five votes for They Might Be Giants meant to vote Pink, but it was funnier to run with the votes as submitted since nobody really cared about the EPs / albums element

66: South Carolina
431 points, 6 votes

on John Linnell's State Songs EP, 1994 & album, 1999

I love this song. Happy it made the list, it was in my top 25

this stuff about the s/t / pink album is going right over my head - it's called they might be giants right?

South Carolina SO GOOD, I was worried I was the only State Songs Stan here. "Lift that fork, eat that snail, garçon summon up a new cocktail" one of their very finest convoluted strings of syllables.

Somehow missed "Hide Away Folk Family," yes, that's surprisingly low! To me it's one of the defining songs on the debut.

AQUARIUS: ABANDON HOPE FOR FUTURE PLANNNNS

I think I like every song where the bridge consists of one John doing a megaphone declarative over some kind of chaotic musical interlude.

^ ha ha, otm

it's called they might be giants right?

yes, but so was the sold-for-money 1985 cassette (reissued in 1993), so I called the 1986 LP "The Pink Album" in all the eligibility lists

65: Sleeping in the Flowers
443 points, 8 votes

on John Henry album, 1994

there's this whole aspect to the debut, in things like that "daily home astrology report," which puts them much much closer to idk laurie anderson and talking heads and was not was.... stuff that today has much more "cool" nyc 80s art-world type cred, versus the "beloved by high school dorks like doctor casino" image. not saying they should be ranked as more cool than they are just that they've maybe been misread a bit. or maybe a lot of those 80s art postures became standard high school dork moves via channels including TMBG, i dunno. i think i've made this exact post before, and recently maybe.

xxp oh ha, i didn't read the eligibility lists, just the line that said you could vote for x number of albums or EPs. that's on me then!

I think I've made that exact post before DC! In that early TMBG is 100% definitely a downtown performance experiment about the concept of the "rock band" which sort of accidentally turns into an actual rock band.

there is a strong, sad possibility i read it from you, repeated it out loud at some point, and convinced myself it was my brilliant original thought

Well, whoever's thought it was, it's definitely the case.

downtown performance experiment about the concept of the "rock band"

Oh god! I realised while compiling a ballot that I'm hopelessly biased toward the early output and could only come up with "there's a tiny of bit more of The Residents to them" or something. Y'all capture it better.

"South Carolina" was my #4. Would be the standout track on any of the TMBG albums of that time period.

"32 Footsteps" was my #5. I'm old enough to have Lou Reed's pre-death vocal range, but I can still sing this one.

Started a Spotify playlist, if only as a means of belatedly 'getting' John Henry. :) Just made it 'collaborative' if anyone's into that.

https://open.spotify.com/user/empeecee/playlist/33vPnKhNeF8NA5ZDNC8k6D?si=-_WjGXjrRSuaj2YUpijmNw

the back wheel's 'O' is now a letter 'D'/ I was an 'I' and now I am a 'V'

- I love this, feel like it's another one of those lyrics Dr Casino mentioned earlier that's right on the verge of being too cute for its own good but just gets away with it

I was think I posted something in the voting thread about how it seemed a big part of the TMBG aesthetic is the kind of stuff that kids think about to blow their minds, like when you'd write your address but keep going after the street, town etc so it said "the earth, the solar system, the milky way, the universe" etc

like, I remember being a child and reading about astronomy, and sort of enjoying that vertiginous feeling of catching a glimpse of how tiny and irrelevant you are compared to the vastness of the universe, kind of like the Total Perspective Vortex from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I think this broken perspective is something evoked in a lot of TMBG songs, a connection between something very small/specific/close and the hugeness of the world or the universe? like the stopped clock in Four Of Two that's still there in the far future world is kind of like the endlessly continuing address thing, this fixed point from which you navigate the enormity of everything, and I think there's that kind of perspective in A Self Called Nowhere as well

they have lots of songs about being in two places at once, or being in one place and thinking of another place - and there's a kind of paradox where this ruminating of the vastness of the world/universe is 'looking outwards', but also - because you can't see this stuff directly. you can only conceive of it - it's also 'looking inwards'? in practise it means creating a private inner world apart from the actual world and landscape and society around you, TMBG capture something about that woozy perspective and sensation of moving outwards and inwards at the same time

My familiarity with TMBG is pretty much Flood-and-a-bit-of-Lincoln, but yeah, that sounds otm to me. It's less than 50 seconds from "Particle Man" to "Size of the Entire Universe Man".

I re-read the bit of Hitchhikers where the Total Perspective Vortex appears and it sounds very TMBG-esque imo -

The total perspective vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic amalyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a single piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realised that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

- especially those songs that describe a thing that can obliterate someone just by them looking at it or thinking about it - "the statue made me fry/my coat contained a furnace where there used to be a guy', "the spiraling shape will make you go insane" etc

the Total Perspective Vortex reminds me of descriptions I've read of the experience of taking LSD, (I guess that is at least part of the inspiration for the concept?), stripping away the sense of self, allowing you to 'perceive' the universe as a whole? a lot of TMBG deals with similar subjects to pop music that is drug inspired (weird sensory stuff, disorientation) but the TMBG version always sounds very un-druggy to me, and reminds me more of childhood stuff where you would be aware of the sheer weirdness of having a body (I guess this is less pronounced as you get older as you get used to it, or just because you have less time to sit around on your own thinking about this stuff?) - e.g. I remember spending time looking in a mirror closing and opening my eyes hoping that if I did it quickly enough I'd catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror with my eyes closed, that kind of thing.

there's not a clear distinction between the TMBG songs about being involved in a vivid inner life, like Nobody Knows My Plans, and the ones about the outer world, the vastness of the universe and the relative smallness of you and your inner world, if you go far enough in one direction you meet yourself coming back (and all those songs where recursion shows up) - it all gives this feeling of someone exploring the universe from inside their own head

"I will never say the word 'procrastinate' again; I'll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed.". Great posts soref.

Yeah soref highly otm. I would add that the preoccupation with death is definitely part of this -- the awareness that your lifespan is a tiny bounded zone of existence inside the vast realms of time in which either no longer exist or have never existed.

also i would note that their explorations of these concepts never feel in any way druggy or drug-inspired. maybe in part because the meticulous construction of their MIDI/sampler recordings produces a tightly-wired, clockwork-machine effect when listening, no trippy instrumental journeys or even a hair's breath for the track. you wind up "purple toupee" and it's just clattering down the track. but conceptually they're also more like twilight zone episodes or brain-teaser puzzles than "woahhh did you ever really think about how we'll all turn to dust, maaaan" musings. they're interested in the boundary between life and death and the expanding universe in the same way they're interested in, like, the formalist challenge of writing a palindromic lyric, or a "house that jack built" style song, also things popular with nerdy and verbally-oriented kids. whether this is the chicken or the egg of them seeming kind of square and tame when i try to sell friends on them, i dunno.

tiny toons obviously an important factor here if you're of a certain age

disconnect from the brain and body seems to be a common theme with them. "My Man" being a pretty good example

my son just discover TMBG. He would vote "Hot Dog" for #1.

yeah my son asks for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse all the time but doesn't want to watch anything between the opening theme and "Hot Dog". he's definitely got the bug

tiny toons obviously an important factor here if you're of a certain age

FP'd you for racism

64: Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas)
446 points, 7 votes

original from Space Songs, 1959
on Why Does The Sun Shine? EP, 1993
live version on Severe Tire Damage, specified by one voter

re-recorded for Here Comes Science, 2009
corrected as Why Does the Sun Really Shine? (The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma) for Here Comes Science, 2009

Too low!! Total banger live.

I think I can sing that one.

btw every few years I see Linnell on the streets of Brooklyn, and we exchange sheepish grins.

we need its light, we need its heat, we need its energy

the outright covers of old kids' songs might be one area where TMBG doesn't really speak to me, especially on the faithfully nursery-ready 1993 rendition. i'm pretty sure i thought this was kinda neat as a youth, and i bought the CD single ("jessica" was worth it).... but i'm pretty far now from the kinda "we love square po-faced 50s cartoon graphic design" kinda thing. maybe james lileks just spoiled me on it or something. it was obviously a vital source for tons of postmodern camp and some original hybrid aesthetics from circa the B-52s onwards into the 90s, but .... idk, just not a recording i feel an urge to put on and listen to.

i didn't vote for this, but i did vote for a different novelty-esque cover that you probably can guess.

"why did Jamal Khashoggi get the works?"

i'm sorry for that

i hate that it scans

62= My Evil Twin
447 points, 8 votes

on Apollo 18 album, 1992

62= Shoehorn With Teeth
447 points, 9 votes

on Lincoln album, 1988
recalled by Terry Pratchett

voted for both of these.

shoehorn with teeth might be the most insidiously catchy of all insidiously catchy tmbg tracks

yeah see here I absolutely dig them being sing-songy and almost kids-record catchy. it occurred to me that in another era they would have been tin pan alley composers, knocking out tunes for the shows, cause they can do a tune for sure and they have a theater-writer's love of unusual word choices and turns of phrase

people should get beat up for statin' their beliefs

61: The Famous Polka
453 points, 8 votes

b-side to Don't Let's Start, 1987

made me happy to hear some audience members singing along with terry pratchett in that video

xp

love "Shoehorn"