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

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

(there are plenty that your and my ballots shared which haven't made the top 77, Trayce!)

31: Someone Keeps Moving My Chair
645 points, 10 votes

on Flood LP, 1990

I must not have listened to the supposedly 'very familiar' Flood for this exercise, except for the tracks I knew I wanted to include. Like "Letterbox", this one's giving me serious early nineties flashbacks as I've somehow gone without hearing either for an exceedingly long time. This feels inexplicably fresh and unfamiliar, yet utterly familiar at the same time. My tiny brain loves being confused like this.

On the other hand: "Minimum Wage"? TOO LOW!

30: The World's Address
654 points, 10 votes

1987 version (sung by Linnell) played on WFMU
on Lincoln LP, 1988
Joshua Fried remix, 1989

The World’s a dress

Those two throwaway-ish Flood tracks might be a bit high but I like both and voted for them. I love the central conceit of "Minimum Wage" and the instrumental is super catchy too!

someone in a club tonight has stolen my ideas

BTW Throwaway is not an insult in the TMBG context - they write some pretty amazing throwaway and filler songs.

"someone keeps moving my chair" rules. another one my mom got a kick out of, the emphatic address to "mister horrible." the thing that tickles me is "there's some horrible business left for him to attend to." and the opening couple of seconds are just amazing, this monstrous music machine cranking itself into life. doesn't sound like anything else.

i love the world's address so much, i love how they lean into the lounge theme, and how they quickly admit that the conceit of the song is a stretch.

tell them albert einstein and copernicus were wrong

I think I got into this band when I was like 11, around 1997 or so. I would play Magic at the local card shop and the dude who ran it had a 3-disc CD player that was always on shuffle. The 3 CDs were Flood, one of Weird Al's, and a CD of songs from The Simpsons. I didn't know who TMBG was and often mistook them for the other two - "Whistling in the Dark" sounded like it was sung by Principal Skinner, "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" I could swear was Weird Al, cuz he does a lot of songs that sound like that.

lol, that's great. my magic days were just a little earlier, more like late 94 through late 95 i'd guess. got expansion fatigue rapidly. i went to a couple of low-key game days at the comic shop basement but if they played any music it sadly made no impression. mainly i recall the excitement of seeing behind the scenes at the comic shop. aha, so that's what became of the big sculpted venom head!

29: Destination Moon
676 points, 8 votes

on John Henry album, 1994

live on The Jon Stewart Show, 1994, briefly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5xKzO3qEwc

yes! love that this is so high. a great and incredibly catchy narrator-in-denial song, prefiguring "till my head falls off."

that's the last John Henry pick, then? glad it's the highest, but a shame not to see "out of jail" and "aka driver" show up somewhere.

This is really bringing home to me how much more I listen to Factory Showroom than John Henry, because I really was like "wait which one is Destination Moon?" and then when I played it I was like "oh yeah the one with the backwards series of steps to get to the rocket." Good song! But didn't realize it was loved so widely.

I do wonder how John Henry would've fared had it been organized more like a 'normal' TMBG album - 17 songs, 45 minutes. I think it would probably be seen as one of their best.

"Sleeping in the Flowers" a great example of everything the album gets right & wrong - I agree with Paul that it's too weirdly heavy, it's too long, there's a guitar solo which is fine but doesn't really fit. I think all told it's TMBG's longest tune, but if you'd shortened it to like 2:30 it would be an absolute killer. The Johns were clearly a bit eager about having a full band at their disposal.

"Destination Moon" was #9 on my ballot. I've always loved the delusional, hopeful lyrics to this and it's super catchy too! The highest ranking non-placing John Henry song on my ballot is now confirmed to be "Window". N.B. I have an unhealthy affection for this album because it was the first new TMBG album to be released after I started being a fan.

I like to think of My Man as a kind of companion to Destination Moon, where the narrator is only capable of moving in his head rather (My Man seems to be about depression rather than actual physical incapability, but there's still that disconnection between the mind's instructions and the body)

I love the step by step connections thing that show up in a lot of TMBG lyrics, like the steps to get to the moon here or "and at the top of a tree there's a house, and in the house there's a room, and in the room there's a chair and in the chair is you" from The House At The Top Of The Tree, it seems to tie into that thing I mentioned before about being a kid and extending your address to include 'the earth, the solar system' etc. I think that "you're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older, and now your even older" etc comes from the same sort of place as well

I really like the shift from the heavy verses to the jaunty chorus on Sleeping in the Flowers, it reminds me of The Affiliated by XTC/Dukes Of The Stratosphere

not that verses there particularly heavy, but just the shift in style for the chorus

"My Man" is definitely about paralysis

My man won't walk again/In conflict with express instructions given by the brain

Why can't the message be sent?/I guess my man's fallen out with my head

The song seems to me like a sort of muffled protest against the (many) artificial and ridiculous facets of the feminist ideas that have attempted to deny and destroy modern gender roles. So I think the above idea of the "breakfast in bed" line fitting into this is spot on; this action was once a rare reversal of gender roles as the husband made a meal for the wife. Therefore TMBG could be mentioning it simply to evoke this image of altered gender roles.
I would go even further and say that they're mentioning breakfast in bed as a way of saying: "Hey, a man making a meal for a woman isn't so special anymore because we've stupidly destroyed the gender distinctions that made us men and women. You can't treat a woman like a Queen, even for a day, when that woman thinks that men and women should all be treated the same." It's a similar protest to saying "feminists told us to stop opening doors for women; so now even the last shred of Chivalry has been destroyed."

As for the title, I would assume that "Sally Boy" is supposed to compare and contrast with "Candy Bar" somehow, but I can't think how. I would also suggest that, although it's a stretch, "Candy Bar" could be a phallic symbol; but, again, that wouldn't seem to compare/contrast with "Sally Boy" in any meaningful way (unless there's some parallel anatomical reference there that I'm not getting).

-- My sincere appologies if this is an inapropriate forum for expressing my views on this (if anyone feels it is, please feel free to delete this) but I really don't see that we have to subjugate people so that it means something when we're nice to them. How about we just be good to people (i.e. opening doors for them, making breakfast for them, etc.) regardless of their gender. Just my own feelings on this.

I’m sorry to tell you guys I’ve listened to “Sally Boy Candy Bar” and They Might Be Giant Transphobes are C A N C E L L E D

ew where is that from and why am i reading it

The Johns were clearly a bit eager about having a full band at their disposal.

I really wonder what the vibe/dynamic was! I'm sure they were jazzed about the new sonic possibilities, and for the process of recording to be something much less meticulous and/or tedious. I also imagine that, not having really been in "bands" much, that the process of just getting used to that must have been strange. Maybe they let songs go on longer than their previous norm because (a) it was fun to just be playing live and coming around to the chorus again with other musicians and (b) they didn't want to feel like they were 'directing' the band or micromanaging the performance if someone came up with a cool horn solo or whatever. I do think the album's best songs are the ones right around three minutes or less.

but yeah, between this and Boss Of Me, label support for a horn section could have broken them into the ska-punk audience the way Phish fans adopted Ween

still pondering this alternate reality. in fact them getting dropped by elektra and eventually finding their footing with the TV work and childrens' albums may have been a more sustainable life and career path. but very easy to imagine them developing this whole following with the nerdier wing of ska-punk kids. though i guess if Doctor Worm couldn't do it in the era of Reel Big Fish then maybe it just wasn't gonna happen.

not willing enough to wear shorts onstage

In this alternate reality, who would have been TMBG's Ben Carr?

28: Mammal
682 points, 11 votes

on Apollo 18 album, 1992

And no one cares enough about "Mammal" to comment on it. I've never liked it much myself and honestly have always been a big cool on Apollo 18 in general.

another track on the imaginary 1999 wallet-chain-aimed best-of that was released to accompany their Warped Tour afternoon slot:

27: The Statue Got Me High
694 points, 11 votes

single from Apollo 18, 1992:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO5iUDBK7TA

live on Jonathan Ross, backed by Steve Nieve & The Love Band, 1992
live on the Tonight Show without Johnny Carson, 1992

Though I am, as stated above, cool on Apollo 18 generally that doesn't apply to this song. TMBG's best self-consciously 'rocking' song and I do like the lyrics nonsense though they might be. I remember reading a semi-convincing analysis on a TMBG message board c. 2001 that the song is about Mozart's opera Don Giovanni.

"Mammal" is great fun to sing and a brilliantly-curated set of syllables ("main-taining the ver-y high me-tab-o-lis-m rate they have") but hard for me to say much about.

"Statue Got Me High" is another hook-monster with some really striking and memorable turns of phrase "the truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie," "a monument of granite sent a beam into my eye," "my coat contained a furnace where there used to be a guy" - really giving the sense of total transformation, as in some kind of sublime mind-blowing experience or perhaps brainwashing by a cult. That a "statue" could be either a work of art or a religious icon further enriches this ambiguity I think - it's both exciting and terrifying to have your mind totally taken over by some new obsession, artistic or personal or even romantic (there aren't many cues here to read this as a Pygmalionesque tale, but you could). And it's contagious! Your turn to hear the stone, and then your turn to burn.

god what the hell was i doing with my ballot that "statue" was down at 53? that's indefensible.

26: Spiraling Shape
695 points, 10 votes

1992 demo of Rocket Ship, released on TMBG Unlimited
rewritten as Spiraling Shape on the soundtrack of the Kids In The Hall movie Brain Candy, 1996, later on Factory Showroom
live in studio on Studio 360 (audio only)

Surprised to see this so high, never knew it had so many fans. I had it at #61 on my ballot. I like the song my only problem is simply that it is too long.

when I was 13 I thought this was one of the best songs ever written. that chorus was in my head for like, an entire year

great juxtaposition of this and "statue."

don't spennnnnd the rest of your life wondering!