1990-03-31 NME
It's All Ogre Now
By Stephen Dalton, NME, March 31, 1990
"Post everything" pop ironists THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS reckon they owe their current success to avant garde composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and the cast of Cheers."
"This is for the NME?!" ask They Might Be Giants incredulously as the tape machine clicks on. "Wow!"
This could be the wide-eyed wonder which has propelled these Brooklyn boys from college-radio cultdom to major-label maturity within the space of three ferociously energetic and tune-stuffed albums. Then again, They Might Be Joking.
"Wow," repeats John Linnell, his bug eyes popping out from an Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers face. "Waaaaauh!!" They are joking.
They have always been joking. With 18 or 19 tracks per album, all underpinned by hilarious hit-and- run wit and a brain-blasting range of musical styles, They Might Be Giants are the funniest comedy duo currently operating within the orbit of pop music. But write them off as pithy purveyors of dry humour and along comes Flood to wash away your preconceptions, submerging you in a widescreen wonderland of surreal soundscapes.
EVEN ASSUMING the term 'sell out' still has any relevance these days, it could never be applied to 'Flood". The songs are as strong and as strange as ever, from ultra-catchy chart single 'Birdhouse In Your Soul to the epic backdrop of 'Road Movie To Berlin'. The only difference is that the duo are now darlings of brain-dead pop pundits in tabloid and daytime radio circles who inevitably claim to have "discovered" them.
John Flansburgh: "One thing people don't understand in the whole indie-to-major question we get asked a lot, is that you can't be a functioning national act in the United States on an indie label in the way you can here. Here it's a professional, political, aesthetic and moral decision whereas in the States it's a completely practical one. You have a country that's three-and-a-half thousand miles wide with no national radio and there's no way you're going to break through to the culture at large on an indie label."
So signing to Warners was always part of the master plan?
"There was no master plan. We're like London, totally unplanned and sprawling. And really hard for us to get from one part of ourselves to another... The main thing is we realised we couldn't crash on people's floors our whole lives."
Two days in the country and Flansburgh has already mastered cockney rhyming slang. So are you punks or what?
"We've always been a pluralist band... some people think we're this super-intelligent, pro-thinking band and others think we're just a big-joke party band, and we don't really see ourselves as either. A band like Sonic Youth are very much for one very cohesive group of people, but we've never had that cohesion because we get 40-year-old hippies and 17-year-old girls who think we're like New Kids On The Block or something.
"In New York when we first started playing it was definitely the same crowd, the same 50 people. But they don't come to our shows now and I bet they don't go to Sonic Youth's."
They are probably in hospital. So do you share anything with New Kids On The Block?
"I hope not," spits Linnell. "I'm a generous guy but I don't want to share anything with them."
THEY MIGHT Be Giants will never be as huge as New Kids On The Block because they are the diametric opposites of the crap-rap heart-throbs. A super-literate tune machine who treat their audience like intelligent human beings and offer a value-for-money almost unique in pop, they still maintain their dial-a-song service in America as a means of painlessly acquainting punters with their work.
"It doesn't cost any more than a normal call and it hardly costs us anything to operate, so it's no big thing," claims Flansburgh. "But since then there's been this phenomenon of 0900 numbers where you can phone Bobby Brown or Paula Abdul or whoever, and you just hear a recording of them saying something like I like chocolate cake, thank you for your two dollars. It's just such a blatant rip-off of people who obviously adore you in a really basic way... and New Kids On The Block are involved in some serious fan exploitation."
Since The Giants and the New Kids both came originally from Massachussetts, we discuss regional differences in American music the po-faced puritanism of the Boston scene and wigged-out performance art pretensions of New York. Aren't both atitudes equally contrived? Don't all youth (sub)cultures have a strict hierarchy and dress code, however alternative or avant-garde they claim to be?
"It reminds me of the way the credibility scene works in England, chips in Flansburgh. "It's a strategy, and if all credibility is to you is a strategy then you're really f--ed up."
"You can focus in on it and say it's just encyclopaedia of styles. But a lot of bands function that way- Simon & Garfunkel, Billy Joel- it doesn't mean anything. It's the personal part on top of the stylistic details that makes it valuable."
One question the two Johns get sick of facing is: why aren't you The Beastie Boys? Both bands are Brooklyn-based and beatbox-friendly, so why don't Flansburgh and Linnell go around vandalising Volkswagens and spraying each other with Budweiser instead of fiddling with accordions and guitars?
"The actual rapping part is very difficult for us because we feel extremely white," admits Flansburgh. "But the non- representational qualities of hip-hop have really influenced us because it's one of the few places in popular music where your hear sound being manipulated in this really aggressive, cool way. Like that De La Soul song that has the line this is a recording going round in it just completely blows my mind!"
"It's like this insane pop thing that basically comes down from Karl-Hein Stockhausen," asserts Linnell unashamedly. "and it's really a weird thing to live long enough to see."
To think it's the most street-level popular music," elaborates Flansburgh, "that the most average person really grooves to something yet all the tenets of it are alienation techniques! It's really great, a wonderful celebration of strangeness."
So Bertolt Brecht, top anti-Nazi playwrite and alienation maestro, would have made a fine rapper?
"Yeah! Bertolt's in the house!"
HAVING EXHAUSTED their huge back catalogue of spunky, punky outbursts and only just starting to appreciate the value of subtlety and nuance, They Might Be Giants are turning into a real grown-up band. Both the Johns sit nervously on the precipice of 30 years on the planet, but how would they feel if the cast of Thirtysomething adopted them as mascots?
"That would be kind of a bummer, especially the guy with the beard," confesses Linnell with a look of genuine horror. "The peculiar thing is that the cast of Cheers came to one of our shows in LA, and they all lined up at the bar so it looked just like the set of the programme!"
Art imitating life?
"Don't drag art into this."
I put it to The Giants that they are post-punk, post-rap, post-graduate and post-modernist: a post-everything band. They laugh. Very loudly.
"After a certain amount of time it will become obvious t us that we belong here," promises Linnell. "It always seems as if every era has finally reached a time when there is no style anymore, when all the style is in the past, and of course it out to be untrue. going to be a look back nostalgically on the '90s represented in a very iconic way, which will be very repugnant to people who were around at the time."
"Yeah," agrees Flansburgh, "and we'll be shaking our fists at the intravenous laser-vision machine because they got it all wrong."
Click. The time capsule seals up. This is a recording.