We Want A Rock

From This Might Be A Wiki

song name	We Want a Rock
artist	They Might Be Giants
album	Flood
year	1990
first played	Feb. 1, 1992 (22 known performances)
run time	2:47
sung by	John Linnell

[edit] Trivia/Info

John Linnell on the song in a 2008 Houston Chronicle interview:

Interviewer: I've spent too much time thinking about We Want a Rock. Is it about political oppression? Or is it just about rocks, string and foreheads?

Linnell: Uh, there's a little bit of stream of consciousness to writing that one. This sounds really abstract, but in order to begin wrapping a piece of string around itself, you need something to start with. Like a rock. I guess you can make a ball of string starting from nothing if you just make a tiny loop at the end of the string. But it seems theoretically impossible. It's a metaphor for getting started.

Interviewer: Oh. See, I'd allowed myself to see the string people as blue-collar workers and the forehead people as intellectuals, and you guys as going after political forces that oppress the former and ridicule the latter.

Linnell: (Pause. Laughs.) Well, that's fine, too. I can't disagree with such a wonderful interpretation. But I'm afraid that's not what was in my head. It was just a general set of loose metaphors. You know, where do you begin? It's a funny conceit, saying everyone has this problem when it's really about the problem of the person singing about wanting a prosthetic forehead. It's hard to make the argument that everybody wants one. You're enlisting everyone else.