Cage & Aquarium
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | Cage & Aquarium |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Lincoln, Then: The Earlier Years |
| year | 1988 |
| first played | October 4, 1987 (34 known performances) |
| run time | 1:10 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh, John Linnell harmonizes |
Trivia/Info
- "This is the spawning of the cage and aquarium" is a play on "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" from the musical Hair and the hit single Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In by The 5th Dimension. The 1968 Broadway cast recording of Hair was one of the first albums that John Flansburgh ever bought.[1]
- John Flansburgh described this song in a 1988 interview: "'Cage & Aquarium' is about making your life your personal prison, like people who get married too early."
- According to the liner notes of Then: The Earlier Years, the guitar heard in this song was the band's first "homemade" sample.[2] John Flansburgh would further explain the sample in 2023 for Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record, a track-by-track breakdown of the Lincoln album featured in Bandbox Issue #103:
"Cage & Aquarium" actually has my guitar sampled on it. There are a bunch of self-sampling things, which was very hard to do because samplers had such limited memory then. They could only sample like five seconds of sound, so you'd just get this little sliver of a sample and you could inject it into your song. All the "rr-rr-rr" sounds on that song are things that the engineer, Al Houghton, and I cooked up.
- This song is typically performed as a medley with "I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die". A 1992 live recording of the medley was released as part of TMBG Unlimited - July in 2001.
- A hippie leader can be heard announcing to everyone "This is the spawning of the cage and aquarium!" during a short cutscene in the video game Destroy All Humans! 2.
Song Themes
Altered Voice, Fire, Gleeful Irreverence, Mind Control, Hypnotism, Misanthropy, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Paranoia, Puns, Songs With Samples, Swear Words, Swing Feel, Telecommunication, Transportation, Windows
Videos
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