Ana Ng
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | Ana Ng |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Lincoln, Ana Ng (Single), Then: The Earlier Years, Selections From Then, Direct From Brooklyn, Best Of The Early Years, Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, A User's Guide To They Might Be Giants: Melody, Fidelity, Quantity, 50,000,000 They Might Be Giants Songs Can't Be Wrong, Modern |
| year | 1988 |
| first played | April 2, 1988 (812 known performances) |
| run time | 3:23 |
| sung by | John Linnell; Lisa Klapp recites the final line of the bridge |
Trivia/Info
- This song was written alongside "We're The Replacements" while John Linnell was crashing at Jonathan Gregg's apartment[1], with its first known appearance being on a 1987 song list. The title of the track came from an experience Linnell had during that time, when he found a substantial number of people with the surname Ng listed in a phone book. Linnell in Pitchfork Magazine, 1996:
I think I was collecting possible song ideas and, for some reason, I ended up looking in the phone book, and there were about four pages of this name that contains no vowels, Ng. I was fascinated because it's a name I didn't know about before, and it was filling up a large chunk of the Manhattan white pages. I called up some of the numbers kind of experimentally to find out how it was pronounced, and I got the phone machine of a Dr. Ng and I was kind of relieved. The message said, "Dr. Ng is not in," and I had my material.
- Part of the song's concept was inspired by a Pogo strip by Walt Kelly that appeared on August 9, 1953. Linnell in Pitchfork Magazine, 1996:
The other inspiration for ["Ana Ng"] was a Pogo comic strip. [...] Some of the characters are digging a hole. They decide they're going to dig to China, but one of the smarter characters [Churchy La Femme] pulls this huge revolver out of a drawer and shoots a hole "in the desktop globe." Then they look at the other side and the hole is in the Indian Ocean.
- In a 1988 interview on MTV, Linnell said:
The name Ng seems to be a Vietnamese name... So if you look at the globe and you find Vietnam, you'll see that the opposite side of the world from Vietnam is Peru. So the song, presumably, is about someone in Peru, writing about somebody in Vietnam. But I didn't know that when I wrote it.
- The guitar sounds heard in this song were created using a noise-gate effect controlled by producer Bill Krauss' Apple Macintosh 512k computer[2], which was used to track and mix the Lincoln album[3]. The idea for the effect came from Linnell, who would explain the story behind it in 2023 for Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record, a track-by-track breakdown of the Lincoln album featured in Bandbox Issue #103:
My notion was that we would use a noise gate that was controlled by the computer to turn John [Flansburgh]'s guitar on and off in the rhythm track that starts the song. It was kind of an abstract idea, but I thought, "This is this jerky rhythm, but it'd be cool if it was really robotic." The noise gate is an audio device that can turn on and off an audio signal. It's either controlled by the volume of the signal that's coming in, or it can be controlled by something else. In this case, we just plugged the computer into it and had the computer do the on-and-off part.
Now, I was not very good at explaining this to John, unfortunately. We were sitting in a car in New Jersey, outside of a club where we were supposed to play, and I was telling him what I wanted to do and he thought that I was trying to say that he wasn't able to play the rhythm accurately or something like that. We got into a terrible argument about it, and it didn't get resolved until we finally went into the studio and actually tried it. Everybody loved the arrangement I was talking about right away. John was playing the guitar and then the computer was opening and closing the circuit. Because we were using a computer that was synchronized to the tape, we could record multiple guitars doing that and it seemed like this purely experimental, fun thing.
- The noise gate effect has also been used on "Mr. Me"[4], "Welcome To The Jungle"[5] and "Canajoharie"[6], and when asked in a 1997 interview for the Tartan what "the coolest sound [he'd] ever created" was, Flansburgh answered with this song. He would also describe the setup for the effect on Tumblr in 2011[7]: "The noise gate is basically a full 'volume off' switch on the guitar's sound, and it is synced to trigger at double the tempo of the track to cut the sound for the second half of the note."
- In an old tmbg.com Q&A, Linnell stated that the line "I don't want the world, I just want your half" "came out of a conversation we once had about money."
- In the February 1988 issue of Automobile Magazine, while recounting the band's Bring Me The Head Of Kenny Rogers World Tour '87, Jamie Kitman mentioned Flansburgh telling him: "It's not like we're megalomaniacs. We don't want the whole world. We just want our half."
- In the Dial-A-Song demo, this line was said by Linnell, but in the final album recording, this line is said by Lisa Klapp, a friend of the Johns. The line was delivered from her phone at work and recorded through engineer Al Houghton's answering machine at Dubway Studio[8]. When asked why Klapp said this line on Tumblr in 2023, Flansburgh said: "[It was] a way to kind of animate the words written on the bridge."[9]
- In live performances, the band has been known to alter the bridge in several ways:
- On Live!! New York City, Linnell sings no words and imitates the sound of radio static. The same recording was used for Severe Tire Damage, but for that album, the radio static was replaced with the sound of Flansburgh screaming the original line into his guitar pickups with a Mid-Atlantic accent.
- Linnell sometimes sings "It's a small girl after all" during the bridge.
- In 1996, Linnell would occasionally open the song with the chant of "OVERSIZED LOAD," and this line would, in the bridge, replace "I don't want the world; I just want your half."
- Flansburgh has often been known to sing the aforementioned line in a falsetto with a melody similar to "Love people are there / The smell of love is everywhere" from "I've Got A Match."
- The video was directed by Adam Bernstein and the exterior shots were filmed at the FDNY Training Academy, Randall's Island, New York City. Throughout the music video, portraits of John Flansburgh's grandfather and Linnell's great grandfather can be spotted. The video also includes a shot of cards from "Touring", a card game dating back to 1906 that was popular in the United States during the early 1960s. (For more information on the making of the video, see Myke Weiskopf Interviews Adam Bernstein).
- Flansburgh on the moves seen in the music video[10]:
We would figure out some simple moves the day before, and sometime in the down moments before the shots. It was a way to do something that looked organized and graphic. It was also specifically not lip syncing which was the crushing cliche of that moment.
- One of the shots included in the music video was of two girls holding up the pictures of Brigadier General Ralph Hospital and Lewis T. Linnell from the shrine featured in Lincoln's cover artwork. John and John would explain who these girls were in a 1988 interview for Rockpool magazine:
[They are] six years old [and] identical twins, it happens that they're big Giants' fans, they know all the words to all the songs. We met them a year ago when they were five, they would come to our soundcheck and sing along, and we would forget the words and they would remind us how they went.
- The line "eighty dolls yelling 'Small Girl After All'" is a reference to the ride "It's A Small World", created for the 1964 World's Fair and now residing at several Disney theme parks.
- The line "water spirals the wrong way out the sink" alludes to the mistaken belief that water going down a sink rotates counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere due to the Coriolis effect.
- Linnell sometimes sings "human hair" instead of "humid air" when the song is played live.
- In the early 90s show Clarissa Explains It All, Clarissa says that she likes John Linnell and a bit of "Ana Ng" plays. A picture of TMBG from the "(She Was A) Hotel Detective" video follows.
- The song appeared briefly in the film Yes Man in the background at the Harry Potter party while the characters discuss the exclusivity of owning a "Costco" card.
- The line "I don't want the world, I just want your half." is referenced in the 1998 film Music from Another Room. In the film, the main character passes by a wall of graffiti that features the line from the song.
- The chorus of the song is creatively interpolated into the Car Seat Headrest song "Cute Thing" on their 2011 album Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror) and the album's 2018 re-recording Twin Fantasy (Face to Face). The interpolated lyrics were written by lead vocalist Will Toledo, and read: "I accidentally spoke his first name aloud / Trying to make it fit in with the lyrics of 'Ana Ng' / Worked like a charm / We're getting old / When will we walk in each other's majestic presence? / Listen, hear my words / They're the ones you would think I would say if I was John Linnell / Or trying to be John Linnell."
- This song has been covered by Al Stewart, Star Fucking Hipsters and sElf, the latter of whom contributed their cover to Hello Radio: The Songs Of They Might Be Giants.
Song Themes
1964 World's Fair, Age, Backwards, Cities, Everything, Fade Out, Geography, In Back, Loneliness, Love, Numbers, Onomatopoeia, Oxymorons, Paradoxes, And Contradictory Statements, People (Imaginary), Places (Real), Non-John Vocals, Questions, Real Estate, Recursion, References To Other Songs Or Musicians, Size, Spoken Word, Telecommunication, Temperature, This Town, Trade Names, Transportation, Upside Down, Water, Weapons, Weather, Writing
Videos
- Watch it on
- Watch it on - 2019 "best quality" video
- Watch it on
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