[Note: lots of Wikipedia links in the first paragraph, then a bunch of YouTube links.]
sg, your father's first concert ever (that didn't involve folding chairs and the VFW or being with my mom or dad) was They Might Be Giants at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta. IM and I saw them touring in support of John Henry (which, damn it, is a fine album) and had a lot of fun.
AT and I went to see They Might Be Giants last night at the Variety Playhouse and had a lot of fun. There was a whole drawn-out "phone calls from beyond the grave" bit that seemed to be in place only to give people a chance to get another beer, and there were a lot of songs from the new album that didn't make me want to buy the new album (although "Withered Hope" was pretty cool).
Anyways, it struck me last night how very few of the hundreds of songs TMBG play don't fall into one of two buckets:
- Novelty songs, such as the Alphabet of Nations, Why Does the Sun Shine and Meet James Ensor, and
- Songs about death, isolation and/or psychosis, like, well, almost everything they've written and Meet James Ensor.
You could listen to TMBG for a long time without realizing that you were spending so much time in bucket number two. (And this will be doubly true for you, sg, as your iPod overflows with TMBG.) Because what comes through so much more clearly than the morbidity behind the lyrics is the sense of fun, the refusal to take any of it too seriously. This, I think, is why there are so many of us so dedicated to this band. Maybe we came to them through Istanbul or Particle Man, but if we stayed for Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head or Where Your Eyes Don't Go it was because we found that TMBG helped us make friends with our teen angst. And in a way that emphasized the value of some of the things that were making us angsty! (Like how, in my case, I was uncool because I was so smart and handsome and rich and suave that the other kids, in collaboration with Nazi in exile in Argentina, were developing silent self-esteem disruptor beams and flouridating the water supply.)
Anyway, here's to TMBG. Making death, isolation and psychosis fun since 1982.
You know, TMBG was my first
You know, TMBG was my first concert, too, in high school. I've always loved it, and you are so right about bucket #2! Unfortunately, since Claire has discovered Playhouse Disney, most of my TMBG exposure comes from the theme songs of various children's programs. However, I'm totally jealous you got to go see them! Rock on!
Sweet!
You be careful with that girl of yours -- music snobbery doesn't just happen overnight. It must be inculcated over years of indie rock and snide comments about mainstream "music". I'm teaching sg to say "Modest Mouse is ok, I guess, but only their early stuff."