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

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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.

Wow, THIS one is also high up for me (#11) and I had no idea other people liked it, assumed it wouldn't place. "I'm not the only dust my mother raised," so fantastic.

The first song in my top 10 to place!

xpost another great early freewheling play with an already somewhat uncommon figure of speech! it's weird but since you brought up r.e.m., there are certain odd similarities between stipes' lyrics and the johns'. syllable density of course but also stipe's play with idiom (in this case southernism) as an intrigued outsider - something like "up to par and katie bars the kitchen signs but not me in" isn't *utterly* removed from "the yellow roosevelt avenue leaf overturned" and "not the only dust my mother raised." obviously they're worlds apart in other ways. but i can kinda "hear" linnell as a weird alternate-universe r.e.m. vocalist doing stipe's lyrics, at least on the uptempo wordy songs.

32: Minimum WAGE
639 points, 11 votes

on Flood LP, 1990

too high!!! fun one-liner tho. i've had friends who really felt it as a fuck-yeah when they were broke. i can dig the idea of dialing an answering machine, hearing this, and hanging up. refreshing.

one of the first TMBG songs I ever heard - a friend that was into the band played it for me shortly after the Tiny Toons videos became popular. it honestly blew my mind when I was 10, that a song could be so short and only contain one lyric. and we laughed a lot listening to it

Fuck! I forgot to put Sensurround in my vote eventhough it'd been in my initial list (when I emailed you sic, I had to redo the whole thing, drunk, in 15 mins flat and I missed a couple tracks).

So far barely any of mine have even placed hah.

I dare say for most of us that doing it drunk in 15 minutes would produce no less valid results than deliberating over it for weeks, even if they turned out completely different

Ha, yes, very likely. Too damn much to choose from.

Number Three was my #9
It's Not My Birthday was my #8