1997-02-02 Newsday
They Might Be Surreal
By Carol Hernandez, New York Newsday, February 2, 1997
Archived from: Full scan, transcription
DEFINING A BAND LIKE THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS - Is it pop? Is it poetry? - MIGHT BE POINTLESS. Best to take these two guys on their own terms.
THEY MIGHT BE Giants might be misunderstood.
In a pop music culture where outlandishness reigns, it's hard to figure out why these two guys from Brooklyn are writing zippy odes to metal detectors.
Many have tried. Since the Giants started performing their poppy music collages and strangely intelligent lyrics in the early '80s, music critics have searched for a way to best describe them. Cofounders John Linnell and John Flansburgh have been called nerdy, gimmicky, wacky and goofy, plus some other more endearing terms.
That might be why, despite the fact that their music has found a strong following among a wide-ranging audience, which includes teenagers, toddlers and 30-something suburban dads, they are still not perceived by the public as they see themselves.
The two Johns say the critics have missed the point. Fifteen years and eight albums later, they still read their reviews and shake their heads at this unfamiliar public persona.
"We have sort of a nonimage," says Flansburgh, who wears square silver-framed glasses and plays electric guitar and sings. "But we're in a business where a lot of what is being presented is only image."
Inside Kasia's Polish Restaurant, their favorite restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a radio is blaring Top-40 dance tunes and Flansburgh uses it to make his point. "We really look spectacularly earthbound compared to the disco that's on right now. You can only imagine how shiny the outfits that they're wearing are," he says.
For those who'd rather hear for themselves what TMBG is about, the band is playing three Friday night shows (this Friday, plus Feb. 7 and 14) at Irving Plaza in Manhattan. Each night has its own theme. The first night focuses most on their recent album, "Factory Showroom," which includes the song about metal detectors and according to the two Johns, the idea that "beach recreation is frivolous compared to the serious business of treasure hunting."
The second show will feature songs they are working on now. The third night is a stroll down memory lane, or as Flansburgh puts it: "crazy songs from the mid-Eighties that were too crazy then, and are probably too crazy now." There's "Greek No. 3," for example, which is sung in Greek by Linnell, who is part Hellenic.
And for the loyal fans who believe you can never have enough TMBG, the band has a 72-song retrospective CD coming out March 25, which includes 19 never-released tracks.
One of their early favorites is "Fake Out In Buenos Aires," which goes like this: "Fake out. Fake in. Fake TV. What is fake?"
"We're kind of fascinated by the world of fakeness," Flansburgh says. "We could try as hard as we could to be as slick as we could, and we wouldn't get any closer to it. All these ideas of authenticity or fakeness, they're interesting issues because if you look deep into your soul or you look deep into your TV, it ends up being the same thing for us."
Perhaps that is why the band is misinterpreted. In a society where people have been conditioned to expect a gimmick, they look at TMBG and wonder what the scheme is.
"I'm probably just as guilty of this as anybody," says Linnell, who also sings and plays the accordion, keyboard and a saxophone that is almost as tall as he is. "When you see a band, you don't immediately think of them as real people especially if they're doing something interesting or weird. The first thing you think is that they're like caricatures."
Not an unreasonable thought at a TMBG show. During performances they have been known to wear fez hats and big gold medallions, frolic onstage with hand puppets, incite the audience into a conga line or play requests as unusual as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
The duo doesn't much sing about emotional experiences in the traditional sense. Most of their hits, like "Birdhouse in Your Soul," "The Statue Got Me High" and "The Guitar" are about objects - in these instances, about a night-light, a statue and a guitar, respectively.
"We have a noun obsession," Flansburgh says. "It's sort of fetishy in a way. Since we decided not to write about sex, we're writing about the rest of the physical world."
While they do take on serious topics, as in "Your Racist Friend," they do it in a lighthearted way. "Minimum Wage" is instrumental until they sing the title and a whip is violently cracked. Their current album, "Your Own Worst Enemy," deals with depression, alcoholism and self-destruction, which the musicians say, "are the original products of our own imaginations."
Also on the album is "The Bells Are Ringing," which comes across as a festive holiday tune . . . except for the lyrics. The two Johns call it "a song about the seductive appeal of social order [as opposed to individual freedom] and an expression of the terrifying and exciting power of propaganda."
In early performances, Linnell and Flansburgh played dingy city clubs and carted around a tape recorder, which supplied some of the background music that was too difficult to perform onstage. They now have support of a full band, but back then their vision was too weird for others to interpret. "We felt like what we were doing was so fragile that it would crumble if somebody legitimate poked their finger into it," says Linnell.
"The idea really goes all the way back to the way we started working," Flansburgh says. "A lot of people, their background is being in a garage band and we're basically a living-room band."
To bring their music to fans, they have a Web site at tmbg.com and Dial-A-Song, an answering machine in Brooklyn that plays one of their songs hourly. It's this direct contact with the audience that brought them success, they say.
"We didn't assume that our audience was as jaded as all the other acts around us did," Flansburgh says. "If we did anything weird in a theatrical way, there was also this strange kind of crushing obviousness to it. If we put on a three-foot-tall hat, part of the theater was that it wasn't representing anything."
Despite the comical wordplay of their lyrics and their onstage antics, Linnell and Flansburgh insist they are serious about their art.
"We really don't feel that we're making fun of anything and I don't think we ever felt like that in the first place," says Linnell. "We're doing something that is kind of its own end and it's not about something else."
Although they deny poking fun, it is difficult to ignore lyrics like those in "We're The Replacements" obviously about the oft-drunk '80s band, in which the two sing, "Hi we're the replacements and we're playing in a rock 'n' roll band. Then we'll have a party. Rock 'n' rollin' 'til the break of dawn."
Or those from "It's Not My Birthday" in which they borrow a line from Jimmy Webb's famous disco-era ballad, "MacArthur Park," and twist the lyrics into: "When the gray world crumbles like a cake, I'll be hanging from the hope that I'll never find that recipe again." And they echo Gloria Gaynor in their "The Biggest One," singing, "Should have changed that stupid lock. Should have thrown away the key. No, no, not I. I will survive. Right down here on my knees. I've got no one to blame but my fat self."
What is most glaringly missing from their repertoire is the angst and posturing of most popular rock. Linnell ascribes this to the fact that although the two were childhood friends in Lincoln, Mass., they didn't start recording in earnest until they were in their 20s, living in Brooklyn and past the anxiety-ridden era of teenhood.
"Our lyrics are pretty complicated, but they're certainly not anthems for adolescence," Flansburgh says. "That's the official rock thing, to speak for a generation, and since we've completely failed to do that, we're willing to speak for ourselves."
Adds Linnell, "The song becomes this distinct thing that we're working on and trying to make interesting to us in a way we could never be interesting to ourselves. We think of the songs as objects, it's not meant to be us talking about ourselves."