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Interpretations:Exquisite Dead Guy

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I get the sense that this song was in fact written as an exquisite corpse, under the surrealist game where one person makes a line, then the next person makes one. ~Christina Miller, January 2007


I've always thought (with not one jot of evidence) that this song was about Paul McCartney musing upon his relationship with John Lennon after the latters murder. Though its really another of Linnell songs about the dangers of fans obsessing about celebrity. The giants did this first with humour in the Famous Polka and again with the darkly melodic I'm your boyfriend now. The brilliant arrangement harks back to the barber shop stuff they messed around with on Birds Fly. Exquisite Dead Guy was the best track on Factory Showroom and should have been the single. (mr tuck)


It's true that "exquisite corpse" used to be all the rage among surrealists, and Flansburgh said in one interview that TMBG have actually written or attempted to write songs by playing this game. However, I don't think the game has much to do with the actual meaning behind this song -- it seems more like a phrase the Johns decided they liked and stuck it on here. I suspect the song is about the narrator's father, or some other deceased male figure that figured heavily in the narrator's life. The father and the son were never close in life, and Junior kept a lot of things bottled up inside, but now the narrator is seeing all these things that remind him of Dear Old Dad -- maybe it was triggered by a museum exhibit in a display case? Suddenly Dad is everywhere the narrator looks, and he even seems to be talking, mouthing the same old words of disapproval, but the narrator knows his father is dead and out of reach. How is he supposed to let Dad know the way he feels about him? The question is so important he must ask it again, shouting this time.

I was reading about the Mafia yesterday, and found out that an official that is assassinated for trying to reign in the mob is called an Excellent Cadaver. A link? (lehmanap)

I realized the other day while listening to this song that, as a really simple and silly interpretation, it could just be about some guy who has this random dead guy hanging around him (a zombie of sorts, perhaps) and in particular, the line "how'm I s'posed to let you know the way I feel about you" - he wants the guy to go away, but how is he supposed to tell the guy that when he's dead and can't hear him?

For some reason I always felt like when they get to the "how'm I s'posed to..." section that it's actually the dead guy talking...or, rather, thinking. It's like when a shy person hangs around you but isn't very interactive. He may be really nice, a real catch, exquisite...but if he's too bottled up then he might as well be a dead guy. maybe john wrote it remembering feeling like a dead guy who hangs around somebody but can never muster up the courage to tell them how he feels, or just never could express it for one reason or another. maybe he knows what it's like to be the dead guy, but also knows what it's like to be the living guy, and that's how he can sing from both perspectives.

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