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

Jonathan Wolff failed to respond to the

21: Rhythm Section Want Ad
784 points, 10 votes

on The Pink Album, 1986

First from my top 10! I can’t explain why exactly I like the so much. It just somehow captures the freedom and joy and confusion of that first record so perfectly. Laugh hard, it’s a long way to the bank.

one fun (and probably unintentional) thing about this tune is how it ends the album on "...and here's the reason why", which on CD would often loop back to the first track

definitely one of my favorites from the first LP, there's something really incredible about these breakneck pop songs that almost have this Zolo feel to them. plus Modest Mouse stole a line from this - Issac Brock being a fan of this album is pretty amusing to me

(googles)

bluetooth earphones feel?

First from my top 10!

Three of my top five have already shown up.

“Confusion” up there was meant to be “concision”

last call to place your bets on what has a chance of placing top 20

Call me crazy but I think “Ana No” might show up somewhere

Ana Ng screw you autocorrect for messing up my joke

Sorry I don’t know why I said that, looked at my ballot and Cowtown and Youth Culture Killed My Dog also top 10 for me. So this is.... number three

None of my top 5 has shown up but I’m 99% sure they are all in the top 20

what are the odds on this one making it

20: Snowball In Hell
797 points, 11 votes

on Lincoln LP, 1988

I love the spoken word interlude in this song so much

You have no idea how often I said “Not back on it, Joe — still on it” in college.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxEGmjnt4Wo

Ps back to the Laurie Anderson comparison I see “avalanche or roadblock” here as analogous to LA’s “pineapple o knife”

birdhouse will be #1 surely, with ana ng and she's an angel also in the top ten. beyond that god only knows.

i didn't rate "your racist friend" as high as i ought to, b/c of the obviousness, but "i know politics bore you, but i feel like a hypocrite talking to you" is pretty relevant/otm.

"rhythm section want ad" is so giddy and funny. i love the NO NO NO NO backing vocals chomping away behind "do you sing like olive oyl on purpose? you guys must be into the eurythmics!" great lyrics throughout as usual. hats off to the use of HATS....as megaphones.

the fast part still totally throws me for singing along, after all these years

If it wasn’t for disappointment, I wouldn’t have any appointments

My number 3

The accordion riff is killer, incredible melody, and lots of fun turns of phrase

“Money-I-owe, money I-ay” still makes me chuckle

Ooooh, two of my selections in a row. Maybe the top twenty will reveal me to be Mr Consensus after a fairly quiet start.

19: I Palindrome I
806 points, 12 votes

on Apollo 18, 1992

live on Letterman 1992, backed by Paul Shaffer and the World's Most Dangerous Band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DAnHlOLAn0

This has been an interesting poll so far, the order of songs is more or less unpredictable to me. I voted nearly 100 songs, so I voted for most everything that has showed up, but seeing "Narrow Your Eyes" this high threw me. Always thought that was one of the weaker Apollo 18 songs, I should go back and relisten. "Istanbul" probably should have been on my ballot due to how much I used to like it, but it's the rare TMBG song I've gotten sick of. It might be the only song they've played at every show I've been to (7 or 8 times by now)

"I Palindrome I" was my number 2, its basically the quintessential TMBG song. Littered with hooks and varied drum patterns, lyrics that could easily have been lazy novelty but end up being more open in meaning. It's still a little weird to hear them say "son of a bitch" on a song

The song at the very bottom of my ballot. I admire it, rarely return to it

another amazing little high-concept story married to a formalist game. the reflections and repetitions of palindromes stand in for the repeated sins of the generations. "dad palindrome dad, i palindrome i, and i am a SNAKE HEAD eating the head on the opposite side." a song where once it starts up in my head every single line is going to come rolling forward.

Apropos of nothing, I realize I've probably voted for every song with a horn section.

What musician has been the closest in marrying Marvin Gaye and Phil Ochs?

Solange?

Narrow Your Eyes is my all-time favourite Flans song. When I first saw them in 2001, the balcony burst into a singalong of it before they came on.

18: Fingertips
865 points, 11 votes

intended as 21 miniatures to appear in CD shuffle play on 1992's Apollo 18, mispressed as a single track outside north America, learnt & performed live as a medley in C21st
live at the Polish National Home, 2001
what if John and John were one nerd and all the Fingertips were melodies from Beatles songs?

WHAT'S THAT BLUE THING

DO ING HERE

figured this'd be higher! definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

have only done the actual shuffle listen a few times (tho ballot playlist has changed that in the last week) so it's mostly burned into my brain as the original pressed sequence. "everything is catching" is like the best curtain-raiser and i love the "yes!" backing vocals. other faves include "somethin' grabbed ahold of my hand" and "come on and wreck my car." good outlet for flans's interest in micro-tributes to micro-genres. on that last it struck me today that their "concrete and clay" cover, rudimentary as it is, maybe says the most about the kind of band flans would have loved to be in, if he'd been born at the right time.

Much much much too low!!

i wonder how many of these were written for the occasion, or whether any/most of them were fragments they'd had for ages which didn't even have quite enough to them to make for dial-a-song test runs. it's a nice exercise in how-much-do-you-really-need since you can sort of imagine the whole rest of the song for most of them. paul mccartney would scatter a couple of these per album and call them "link" tracks to suggest it was all intentional, or weld them together to form medleys with sometimes brilliant and sometimes disappointing results. this approach is fun tho, and of course one has to love the idea of them discovering the Shuffle button and wondering why nobody was doing anything interesting with it. an impulse from the same minds that suggested a HyperCard stack as the appropriate venue for bonus material surrounding the next album.

paul mccartney would scatter a couple of these per album

DC did you check that last link

i think we're all missing the most important question, about what that blue thing is doing here

I can't explain the intensity of joy that I felt when I discovered Fingertips

Fingertips was my #5. I thought it was a lock for top 10.

17: Till My Head Falls Off
898 points, 11 votes, 2 #1s

on Factory Showroom, 1996

live on Recovery in 1996, possibly ripped from me replaying it on TV in 2007 or 08 (Graham Maby on bass):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKx_vybLjNo

live Severe Tire Damage version, 1998

always loved how Fingertrips resembled those commercials where the tracklist would scroll from bottom to top and you'd hear 10-second samples of the songs in yellow. I don't know if those were around in '92 but by the time I got into TMBG they were pretty much ubiquitous.

yes otm, that's exactly what i think of

I love the melody and lyrics to this song, and I voted it at around this point (#19). I do think it could stand to be about a minute shorter though.

those commercials HAD to have been on their mind as a sort of parallel reading to the "shuffle" listening experience.

and wow that little youtube beatles fingertips performance.... very cute.

so cool to see "till my head falls off" this high. stuck in my head every time i'm writing/revising a lecture for class. this is stunningly good:

clearing my throat and gripping the lectern, i
smile and face my audience, clearing his
throat and smiling with his hands on the bathroom
sink

like basically returning to the "son, i am able, she said" bit of "i palindrome i" but not a literal palindrome, and now accomplishing a musical camera move, swinging around to reveal the reality in the reflection of this poor guy completely falling to pieces. see also "the broken figure silhouetted on the wall" - he never outright recognizes these people as himself. it's obviously about dementia as much as any stock kind of paranoid mania and i think there's a sympathy for the protagonist as much as in "destination moon," the guy really wants to maintain his dignity and the intellectual powers that he knows are slipping away tho he can't state it, it comes out between the lines. ("destination moon"'s sympathies in turn are for the desire for a grand and fantastic end versus the shabby hospital reality of death - basically albert finney's finale in Big Fish.)

16: Whistling In The Dark
902 points, 13 votes

on Flood LP, 1990

live on Post-Modern MTV, 1989:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWCA7xErX08