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

voted for both of these.

youth culture is even more fun if you think of it as the inspiration for John Wick

to me, the 36-year-old Flansburgh who's spent much of the last decade on the road is expanding the young-love naivety* of the song into a wide-open sincerity about earned, platonic love for people and places

the only time I saw them live was in late 2001, shortly after September 11, and iirc they played New York City as their final song and I remember it being very poignant in that context.

holy shit, i never noticed the fluttering drums or whatever that is on "james ensor"!

they opened the second encore in Vancouver last week with New York City, which felt like a tribute to Cub, but I checked the wiki and they play it several times a week

Well, we're all wrong about what's the most popular song on John Henry (presumably). Maybe it will be the track from the album that appears highest on my ballot!

xp Will this be the highest place for John Henry? I guess "Spy" could show? My own highest-rated hasn't been seen but I doubt it'll be any higher than 40.

First two songs to get 10 votes are both from John Henry (Ensor and Subliminal) so maybe that means the album isn't as well-liked as the others but there's more consensus about which songs are the keepers?

I remember looking up James Ensor's work in the library after hearing this, I wonder how many other kids did the same

this all seems appropriate for TMBG:

In James Ensor‘s work, the concept of vanitas, the transitory nature of the earthly existence, often appeared. He even reworked various paintings in order to give them the concept of vanitas. Still more, he fluidly combined the macabre (the skeleton) and the grotesque (the masks).

In the etching, My Portrait in 1960 (1888), Ensor portrays himself in the grave, one hundred years after his birth in 1860, in the company of a spider and a serpent. The first version of the etching My Portrait as a Skeleton (1889) is an exact copy of a photograph taken at his friend Rousseau‘s house in Brussels. In the second version he makes his face a skull, by which he gives the etching a genuine memento mori meaning.

I feel like there could totally have been a TMBG song about being dead called My Portrait in 2060 or similar

Listening (and re-listening) to isolated John Henry highlights while reading the thread is helping to finally crack that nut, as hoped. Nice.

I have 3 songs from John Henry in my top 40 and only one has placed ("I Should Be Allowed to Think") so I'm hopeful.

spoilers: ʎɹuəɥ uɥoɾ ɯoɹɟ əɯoɔ oʇ buos əɹoɯ əuo sı əɹəɥʇ

38= Man It's So Loud In Here
565 points, 9 votes

on Mink Car album, 2001
Hot 2002 remix by The Elegant Too

live on Conan with DJ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ of The Elegant Too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEXqs_RGgqs

Did we skip 39??

38's a tie

oh yeah i forgot how backwards counting works

38= Boat Of Car
565 points, 8 votes, 1 #1

on 1985 self-titled cassette
re-recorded for The Pink Album, 1986
instore performance c. 1998
recorded with TMBG's Other Thing horns, 2003

Now this is an interesting juxtaposition

My number one. I kept trying to talk myself into lowering it but I just love it

36= The Bells Are Ringing
571 points, 8 votes

Dial-A-Song c. 1995
on Factory Showroom album, 1996

Gee, "Man, It's So Loud In Here" basically IS the Pet Shop Boys of the same era if heard from down a hallway.

The Pet Shop Boys of the era is Release, though!

36= James K. Polk
571 points, 9 votes

b-side to Istanbul (Not Constantinople), 1990
re-recorded for Factory Showroom, 1996
recorded on wax cylinder at the Edison Museum, 1996

yes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B21eVIo8E80

Jesus, DC, you are only 36? How do you like REM and TMBG as much as I do???

haha, well, this thread sort of answers that, i was a precocious nerdy teen and into stuff like this! i got into R.E.M. through probably uh "bittersweet me" and "the wake-up bomb" being on the radio, and quickly backtracked through the catalog with the aid of used CD stores and some yard-sale cassettes that locked me into fables and document and green as i listened to them and mowed the lawn.

tmbg-wise... i knew them originally from the tiny toons episode which went over like gangbusters with everyone i was talking to at age 8, so that maybe primed me to dig a little deeper in the mid-90s. i remember asking an older nerd, on the MOO i hung out on (this would have to be in 96), about this song i'd just heard on the radio, something about walking in the glow of a majestic presence, and them setting me straight. but for whatever reason i think the first album i ended up with was either john henry or for some unknown reason miscellaneous t. i devoured their discography in '97 - got flood for my 16th birthday and then for christmas. such abundance. somewhere in there i got apollo 13 and i remember picking up factory showroom at a Border's books along with, i believe, the last of the nausicaa of the valley of the wind "perfect collection" volumes. it was a heady time. i anxiously anticipated, and was pretty disappointed by, severe tire damage and then the internet albums, which i only heard in pieces, also didn't win me over. so probably my peak "fandom" was when i was 15 through 18 but it's not like i've ever really stopped listening to them.

"no one knows my plan" is such classic linnell. i should have voted it higher. "IN the al-leGORy of the peo-ple-in-the-cave-bythegreekguy" is so fun to sing. this is one of the JH tracks that really makes a case for the horn section. "meet james ensor" also benefits from not being too cluttered and loud and for having a very good hook opening the curtain of each verse. "raise a glass and sit and stare - understand the man" sticks in my mind but the best line is certainly "before there were junk stores - before there was junk." could mean there was no heroin available to ensor but i like reading it as a comment on the historical emergence of the curio as a prerequisite for the curio shop.

you know, if john henry was just the like, ten best tracks on john henry it'd be pretty cool, this one-off side project "for this album they have guitars and horns and they made some songs with those." at least as valid as many guitar bands' later "they're trying on electronica." it's almost an hour long though - nearly their longest - and the lame songs just start to pile up.

"man it's so loud in here" is brilliant pastiche, with gloriously loud and punchy fills from guys who actually knew enough about programming drums to have been consciously not using those sounds the first time around. looked it up on tmbg's wiki and the producer is the bassist and co-songwriter of fountains of wayne. the line from here to "stacy's mom" is not too hard to draw. the lyric is another joke on the failure to communicate in a massively mediated world - not as on-the-nose as "i can hear you" and closer to linnell's sensibility anyway, with people overwhelmed and dumbfounded by external stimuli. no longer able to feel any sublime thrill at the statue getting them high, and without even the creepy divine orders of "the bells are ringing," they're just "excited and confused." as they dance, dependent on the technology even to feel love, they note in passing that they probably had something they would have expressed, but can no longer remember what it was. i've got something to say: "man, it's so loud in here!" the rest of the crowd is also "shouting something at us" but we don't find out what it is. probably "man, it's so loud in here!"

35: Cowtown
592 points, 9 votes

on the 1985 s/t cassette
live version (plus Prince's 1999) c. 1985, released on TMBG Unlimited
re-recorded for Lincoln LP, 1988
covered by Open Mike Eagle in a hotel room, 2016

John Henry Demos album is very good and an interesting listen, mainly for the presence of the arranged brass and woodwind parts even at an early stage. These recordings sound so far on they could even be simply where the well-rehearsed band was immediately pre-production, as opposed to formative sketches. A few moments give a mild glimpse into how they possibly could have fit in with a more Apollo 18-esque world... The album version of Sleeping In The Flowers is the real turning point for me, I do like the song a long but there's something alarmingly heavy about it which at the time seemed very un-TMBG.

XP, re "Polk": So there were four wax cylinder tracks recorded, I read. That's a theme I could get behind for a full album I think.

the outro of Sleeping In The Flowers (the 'tell my boss I'm fired' part and the horn solo) is one of their absolute peaks imo

yep, the other three wax cylinder recordings were all released on Unlimited in 2001. not damaged much by the 128kbps format!

cowtown is good, but it just missed my ballot. it can't help feeling like a let down after ana ng

I was bummed when this came in so close to 33...

34: Number Three
616 points, 8 votes

on the 1985 s/t cassette, reworked for The Pink Album
re-recorded in Greek for Then, 1997
live at the Polish National Home, 2001

Glad to see "Boat of Car" place, one of their best tossed-off songs. Just the name of the song still makes me laugh

"Number Three" at #34 obv too low by 31 places

I really dig the Greek version too - I love the commitment to making it work even though there's too many syllables

"number three" and "cowtown" are both genius, and both very very fun to sing.

"we yearn earnestly for home, but our only home is bone." i mean fuck, that's like some shakespeare level shit about life and it's just tossed off in the middle of a song about a quixotic quest to seek, one supposes, some kind of guru or just an escape from that unfulfilled sequence of life followed by death. a very specifically chosen fantasy mind you, and one which prefigures sensurround and metal-detector in spurning conventional Romantic restoration through nature: the ardor of arboreality is an adventure we have spurned. i'm gonna see the cow beneath the sea.

these guys were NOT appreciated enough in their heyday.

oh i guess it's "we yearn to swim for home." ha, been singing that wrong for twenty years. it's great either way though.

online interpretations suggest i'm totally wrong, instead the arboreal adventure refers to humankind's evolution from tree-dwelling apes, and the upcoming journey to cowtown is either a regression to our still-earlier aquatic state, or a step forward to a utopian future like yellow submarine. i think it might be more like 2001. our only home is bone. our only home is bone.

Number Three is brilliant and 30-odd years later, the idea that these prolific whizkids only had three songs in them is even funnier

early great songwriterly move from flans, concluding with the change from "...and the third one i just made" to "...and this is, number threeeeee." the main sampled hook is also such a cool wonky sound barging in.

Needed to be away from my computer for a spell and I missed three of my all-time favorites, each one top-15 on my ballot. "Cowtown" and "Number Three" possibly the best TMBG songs in the entire ouevre to holler along in the car to.

"Spent my whole life just diggin' up my music's shallow grave for the two songs in me and the third one I just made" -- have birth and death ever been wrapped around each other so tightly in so few words?

if so, it's in another tmbg lyric

The experience and emotions tied to listening to “Number Three” are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax

i didnt vote but i love "Weep Day"

33: It's Not My Birthday
630 points, 8 votes

1987 demo played on WFMU
re-recorded as b-side for They'll Need A Crane, 1989

Lower than I expected!

but there'd be no percentage
and there'd be no proof
and the sound upon the roof is only water
AND the rain falls down without my help,
I'm afraid

seriously gets in my head dozens of times a year, when it's raining, when it's my birthday, when it's not my birthday, when things lunge out at other things.

"so i'm rattling the bars around this drink tank, discreetly / I should pour through the keyhole or evaporate completely." it is so crazy the stuff they marked down as b-sides at this point.