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

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

lol "now here's tin machine with under the god"

god alone knows what the MTV viewership, clicking in halfway through, would have made of that

"nerds"

15: Particle Man
930 points, 12 votes, 1 #1

banjo demo c. 1989
on Flood LP, 1990
Live At Mountain Stage c. 1993
recorded with TMBG's Other Thing, 2003
live with stylophone on The Screen Savers c. 2003

hard to even say much, so long-established in the brain. pretty sure i learned all the words just from tiny toons reruns. "who came up with Person Man?" is still hilarious to me.

(and, not to impugn your overall very excellent versions links, but you missed the schoolchildren performance released on then...)

My #1!

With four of my top five already gone, I suppose I'm not Mr. Consensus.

(Consensus man, consensus man, doing the things that everyone can...)

Much as with Istanbul above, I am one of the few spoilsports who did not vote for this. I song I have no interest in hearing ever again.

my top 5 and two others in my top 20 have still not showed, but i think all or almost all would be consensus favorites.... i am probably a pretty boring tmbg fan!

(and, not to impugn your overall very excellent versions links, but you missed the schoolchildren performance released on then...)

Then is not on the ParticleMen channel, and I liked the schoolchildren doing Your Racist Friend as a substitute

lives his life in a garbage can

7 of my top ten are yet to place, but they will. and the other three already have lol. i think i have doc c beat on the boring tmbg fan front

I definitely have some top 20 songs that won't appear at this point, but I am still quite confident that my whole top 5 will appear (#5 already has: "Fingertips")

I'm probably a pretty boring TMBG fan circa early 1994. Then I liked John Henry more than it seems most people did.

my top 5 and two others in my top 20 have still not showed

yikes, glad you said this: I was going to note that you have more than two in the lower top 20, but discovered that I'd missed one discrepancy when fixing everyone's spelling and punctuation for tallying. Let's wind the clock back to yesterday:

27a: I've Got a Match
688 points, 9 votes

Dial-A-Song c. 1987
on Lincoln LP, 1988

(three people voted for I've Got A Match, six people voted for I’ve Got A Match)

(it would have been higher overall if Shakey hadn't skipped listing #2 to #8 on his ballot, too)

Was away from my desk, missed some highlights!

SUPER PSYCHED to see "Till My Head Falls Off" this high. Looking back, I see I placed it #30 -- why so low? One of my very favorite of the rockers. "And when I lean my head against the frosted shower stall / I see stuff through the glass that I don't recognize at all" one of their most perfectly tuned lines. "I'm not done talking" in some weird way counterpoint to "And now this song is over now." Great.

Yes, Particle Man is one of the most overexposed songs in their catalog. But it's also maybe the most perfect song they ever did? I mean, there's not much to it. But every single thing in it has to be there. And the number of changes they ring on the very small set of basic elements is amazing.

Five of my top 10 have placed, 2 more definitely will, doesn't seem inconceivable that all 10 will.

Agreed, eephus. I think I have a higher tolerance for overexposure than most people, so that didn't bother me when putting together my ballot.