Hope That I Get Polled Before I Die: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS 1982-2002 POLL - Voting, Campaigning, Discussing

I'll start compiling ballots before midnight but if any drift in over the weekend, that's fine. Especially from the Antipodean contingent!

I think only two ppl have ranked albums so far, so I might do a full 20 myself just to make it interesting.

(got yours eephus!)

Ballot sent!

My #s 1 through 10 are pretty solid, after that is chaos.

Turns out I really don't like "Factory Showroom"--not one song made my 75-song ballot.

I came to like quite a bit of Factory Showroom myself, and voted for a couple of tracks. I'd given it only scant attention previously. Meanwhile John Henry remained quite impenetrable on this zillionth attempt to come to terms with it.

I take it frogbs is the voter who probably wouldn't use that email address for a job application?

I have straight up not had time to order/send mine and wont for a day or 2. Am I too late?

lmao how'd you know

I’m holding on in the hope that you and AA can get ‘em in soon!

xpost 2 Trayce

xpost 2 Trayce

BUMP for Australians and any other stragglers

how many ballots do we have?

15.

can't check r/n but was this hyped up in existing tmbg threads? feel like there have to be at least a few other fans on ILM who might have missed the call.

I did my part, and I pretty much never even post!

I was delighted to see your ballot!

I only plugged on the most-recently-active TMBG thread, I'll throw a link on the catch-all-iest one.

If anyone has AA on sosh mēds, can they nudge him? I ILXmailed on the weekend but that may have been dead for years iirc

/pfunkboy

Just threw together and sent in a ballot, if you can use it!

got it

ballot sent

send another seven songs, Shakey!

I trust you received one from me about a week ago?

Yep 👍🏼

fuck sorry

c'mon Melbourne

the list is there (30+) but i legit have not had time to put it in order

done genuflect.jpg

dead set i thought you had given up on me in the intervening centuries

Trayce, you still have a day to get it in because I'm going to Canada tomorrow to see An Evening With They Might Be Giants.

i have asked sic if i can start start a new artist poll. see, i have a very short window where i can run a poll right now but i have to open for voting now too. i don't want to just open a new poll with this poll still open and have asked sic if it's all right to open a new poll? i will ask him again here, this poll has been open for over a month already.

posting from the intermission at the TMBG show:

Bee - go for it

Trayce - number yr top ten, send me the lot & I’ll randomise the rest

shit sorry mate i’ve been sick for days. will try and cobble something this eve !

posting from the intermission at the TMBG show:

next level commitment imo

ok done.

just woke up with "extra savoir faire," a song I pointedly do not like, stuck in my head. a sad legacy of being a teenager and listening to albums over and over and over when i first got them: apparently i know all the words. what's a man like me supposed to do?

if there's one band good at getting songs you don't like in your head....

popping in to say this is my favorite poll thread title ever

xp haha yep. Since I was reminded of "Turn Around" a couple weeks, that irritating last chorus has been in my head on and off

"Wicked Little Critta" is perhaps the best example of this but eventually I grew to actually like it

the verses of "turn around" have some great lyrics ("he had the same obsequious manner that was the reason i had him killed"; "and his face which was a paper-white mask of evil") but yeah that chorus really drags

it also figured prominently in my attempt to construct a "paul is dead"-esque conspiracy in which flansburgh and the record company murdered linnell and replaced him with a robot double circa 1993, which i'm sure i've posted about here before

I don't even mind the chorus much until that last one when they add those ear-piercing backing vocals, god. I don't think I've ever seen this conspiracy of yours, DC

"Wicked Little Critta" is perhaps the best example of this but eventually I grew to actually like it

I had exactly this reaction and struggled really hard with whether to vote for it. In the end, no, I just can't get past the dialect comedy.

looking at my musty old documents the conspiracy is pretty long and convoluted with all the clues, but the basic idea is that flans murdered linnell and replaced him with a robot double in late 1992 or early 1993, frustrated with his partner's unwillingness to compromise artistic integrity for the sake of commercial success. unusually for this kind of rock conspiracy, both linnell and flans had a foreboding sense that it would come to this, long before it in fact did, so even their earlier discography is rife with themes of fame/success, mechanization, and impending doom. a discussion of career versus art animates "put your hand inside the puppet head" but even this opens with a dead body on a city street. linnell's starving-artist integrity, and recognition that this will lead him to his doom, is clearly stated: "everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful"; "abandon hope for future plans"; "nothing's gonna change my clothes [in the grave - read also as, nothing's gonna change my style]"; "when you're following an angel [...] you have to throw your body off a building." i'm missing notes for lincoln but the they'll need a crane material is quite revealing: the title track is about the impossibility of restoring a partnership, while flans is willing to "sacrifice friends" and "sink manhattan" (that is, east village cred) for the sake of fame. linnell is beginning to have more specific visions of death: people lunge out at him, and maybe this isn't so bad: "it's not necessary to breathe." and of course: "we're the replacements" - frauds and duplicates, "playing in a rock and roll band."

by flood the tensions in the band have grown open and bitter. linnell now feels no difference between being "dead" and being alive without artistic freedom ("there's nothing i want to do [within this partnership]"). flans for his part is insistent on the need to build on their commercial success: "to make the merry-go-round go faster [...] everyone needs to hang on tight just to keep from being thrown to the wolves." their love-hate relationship is perfectly encapsulated in the very title of "sapphire bullets of pure love," but in the text, flans mockingly roleplays his future victim: "john, i'm in bed, and they're coming after me." apollo 18 was recorded on the eve of the murder and culminates of course in the fingertips medley, which is saturated with imagery of surprise attacks, accidents and death, in particular the car accident that would indeed prove to be the modus operandi. see also the cowritten "dig my grave," and the automaton replacing a human in "the statue got me high." "turn around" is linnell outright attempting to provoke flans with a tale of an arbitrary murderer haunted by death from that point on. obviously "my evil twin" and the debating voices in "spider" factor in here too but the subtlest clue is linnell recognizing that in terms of the band's success, it was his own stubborn believe in an art deeply restorative and pure (a "glass of milk") which stood "in between extinction and the cold, and explosive radiating growth."

the robot linnell was evidently test-driven on their 1993 EPs but gets its proper debut on back to skull (where flans turns his "back" on the crime and the robot thanks him for giving him his artificial "snail shell" body). the "missing head" of mrs train, the rise of the obscure hotel detective to "run the world" and the savagely-treated corpse of "ondine" all factor in. by john henry, the robot has begun to model the original, asserting his own voice ("i should be allowed to think," "no one knows my plan") and both daring flans to "kill kill kill kill kill me now" and taunting him with images of the car crash on "subliminal" and "the end of the tour." on factory showroom, however, the robot linnell is tormented by his origins and complicity in the crime ("exquisite dead guy," "til my head falls off," "your own worst enemy") and flans feels compelled to allegorize the entire struggle to unburden himself ("xtc versus adam ant"). around the same time, the ostensibly older, unreleased tracks on then similarly trope on guilt and duplication: "the mirror on the wall won't talk to me at all now that i have everything." it's a good time for one partner ("samba time for tambo") but bad for another ("weep day for urine man"). one genuine 80s relic: an extended display of anxiety about the "big big whoredom" of success. and an emboldened flans, apparently having beaten down the double's spirit ("counterfeit fake"), is ready to mock his dead bandmate: "here's hoping you don't become a robot!" all guilt is thus banished by the time of malcolm in the middle, with flans standing front and center in the rock-star video, triumphantly declaring once and for all that "you're not the boss of me now!"

the failure to deal with lincoln reflects mainly my running out of energy for this thing and losing interest rather than being unable to incorporate it - seems like there's plenty of meat there though. this and flood are the high synthesis albums where the brimming hostility criss-crosses with their collaborative synergy. in terms of flans's crass commercialism shading into violence ("shoehorn with teeth"), and eager search for mass audiences ("i'm going down to cowtown"). "cage and aquarium" finds him formulating his plan: to "steal back your best ideas" (echoed later in the album: "i can see your secrets") and crush the iconoclast: "used to be different, now you're the same." linnell's repeated pleas for autonomy ("gimme some skin to call my own"; "i've got a match: your embrace, and my collapse"). a preoccupation with doppelgangers is already there too ("a filthy scarecrow waves its arms and does a parody of each unconscious thing you do"). in a rare lapse into pique, he even expresses frustration that his genius is carrying along this lesser talent, portraying him as "buil(ding) a little empire" through exploitation and deception. "stand on your own head!" he cries. and of course, as linnell sees ahead to the inevitable, it's not "me" but "mr. me" - a simulacrum - who will "end up sad."

FUCK, i only just realised i forgot to include 'join us' because it's not on apple music

there's seriously like eight incredible songs on that one

I like Wicked little critta! I put it in my ballot! Mr Xcitement, too.

...'join us' is from 2011

this is why i should not post the second i wake up

worth nothing that Join Us was the start of a career renaissance for them and it kicked off with a song called "Can't Keep Johnny Down"....perhaps the real Linnell was not dead after all? perhaps he was spared by some Lady & the Tiger type scheme?