S-E-X-X-Y
| song name | S-E-X-X-Y |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Factory Showroom, Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, John Henry + Factory Showroom, 50,000,000 They Might Be Giants Songs Can't Be Wrong |
| year | 1996 |
| first played | March 14, 1996 (311 known performances) |
| run time | 3:51 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh |
Trivia/Info
The opening track, and first single, is a pretty big departure for us, as it is our first ode to getting it on. Written with Iggy Pop's bassist Hal Cragin, and featuring a horn and string arrangement by TMBG road veteran Kurt Hoffman (also known for his work with The Ordinaires) this track spotlights Eric's phenomenal playing over a very fine groove laid down by Brian, Hal and percussionist Sue Hadjopoulos.
- John Flansburgh on the song's instrumentation in a 1996 interview:
The song has a kind of a funk bassline and "Shaft" hi-hat figure in it, so it's definitely pre-disco in a certain way, but the strings and the horns kind of pull it into 1976/1977... I think it would be on the charts at the exact same time as "Do The Hustle".
- Flansburgh on the song in a 2007 Suicide Girls interview:
I never thought about the fact that the cookie lyric could be taken as an, um, anatomical reference? I actually was thinking in that lyric about, um, you know eating in bed! Decadent, you know, as the purest expression of good time/getting it on that you'd just be eating a cookie. Whether it's like Chips Ahoy or something else, it's about actually eating a cookie. It's single entendre.
In a lot of cases I feel like even when we're trying to write things as directly as possible, they end up sounding like they're filled with coded messages. Even the title of that song, if we had thought about it or worked on it longer or thought about it in a smarter way, the song would actually be called "S-E-X-X-X-Y"! Because the just, "S-E-X-X-Y" makes people wonder if it's like an extra chromosome. Which again is something that really didn't cross my mind until the song, like, is this about some kind of transgender German swimming team thing? Which is fine, it totally fits the spirit of the song in a way but it's so much more specific than the intention. That's the terrain of writing lyrics—they're open-ended whether you like it or not.
- Before the release of Factory Showroom, there was a music video for this song on the table - though no video shoot was ever scheduled. Marcia Edelstein, the then-senior director of marketing and product manager for Elektra, spoke about it in an August 1996 interview:
We're hoping to do a video very shortly. [...] We're looking to get a little bit of feedback from the marketplace, from radio. Videos are an awful lot of money, and any record company at this point is trying to be more prudent about what we push buttons on. And frankly, the band should be as well, because they pay for a portion of it.
- Danny Weinkauf considers this song to be among his favorite TMBG bass lines, along with Rest Awhile.
- The radio edit of this song is the version that appears on EP/single releases.
- TMBG performed this song on The Larry Sanders Show on September 21, 1996. As an aside during the performance, the character played by Scott Thompson (a TMBG fan and member of The Kids In The Hall) says to Larry, "Great band, eh?".
- Earlier live performances of the song contained the lyrics "All by herself, nobody else" and "All night long, nobody else" instead of the line "Around the clock with nobody else".
Song Themes
Artificial Body Parts, Body Parts, Clothes, Food, Gender Issues, Hands, Heads, Intelligence, Espionage, Letters Of The Alphabet, Medical, Music, Plans, Precious Metal, Puns, Questions, References To Other Songs Or Musicians, Self-Reference, The Senses, Sex, Spoken Word
Videos
- Watch it on
– Recorded live on September 27, 2008 by CapitalQ (with horns)
Current Rating You must be logged in to rate this. You can either login (if you have a userid) or create an account with us today. S-E-X-X-Y is currently ranked #749 out of 1022. (162 wikians have given it an average rating of 7.68) |
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