Interpretations:Mammal
- Song
- Lyrics
- Interpretations
- Credits
- Guitar Tab
- Bass Tab
- Chronology
Contents
Simply a song of life! Linnell at his most innovative and fascinating.
The beginning of TMBG's edumacational songs, teaching us through catchy lyrics. Next stop, off to the Bloodmobile -King of Hearts
"Explosive radiating growth" is a reference to the concept of adaptive radiation, from evolutionary biology.
One noteworthy mammalian species is not mentioned. And the last note of the song fades to extinction. -- Nehushtan 10:07, 8 Mar 2006 (CST)
- ... and that is why the song is more profound than The Bloodmobile or Meet The Elements. Those songs are also immensely entertaining & informative, but they were written "for kids" to the Franklin Institute and Disney. In Mammal, Linnell has composed an adult contemplation of our insignificance in the stretch of deep time. The song's punch is so subtle that it can go unnoticed. --Nehushtan (talk) 02:22, 26 December 2019 (EST)
This belongs to the TMBG series of tributes to living organisms (See also C Is For Conifers).
I think this song breaks down mammals, a living creature, into a series of functions. Since humans are mammals, the point of this song is basically that humans are animals and can be broken down into a series of functions, fundamentally. --Penumbra
One thing I find interesting is that the lyrics, both on this site and in the liner booklet, do not include a comma between "koala" and "bear". In fact a koala is not a bear, but a marsupial that happens to look like a teddy bear. This would seem to be a glaring oversight in what is otherwise an accurate educational song. However, it's worth noting that TMBG liner booklet lyrics are often missing verses or changing words. This has been happening since their first album, I believe. So it may have been an intentional "mistake" to draw the reader's attention to the fact that although there's no such thing as a "koala bear", in fact a "koala" and a "bear" are both mammals. --The Almighty Doer of Stuff 16:49, 11 May 2012 (EDT)
The line I find so fascinating is the opener... A thin line between extinction and explosive growth, and the thin line is represented as a glass of milk, or what mammals breastfeed their young. We're a few meals between extinction and overpopulation. -maytag
1992 Movie Commonality[edit]
The song, dated 1992, has something in common with a movie of the same year: "Batman Returns" came out with a tagline associated with the film and its publicity posters: "The Bat ... the Cat ... the Penguin." Of course a penguin is not a mammal (unless he happens to be Oswald Cobblepot), but the first two mammal names called in the chorus of the song always struck me as subtly significant.
It seems likely to me that "Monkey with no tail" is referring not to Barbary Macaques—who, while tailless, are not notably hairless—but instead directly to Humans. While yes, Humans are generally not considered Monkeys, from a cladistic standpoint we, and all apes, are indeed monkeys, and while I don't know if TMBG were highly educated on Cladistics when they wrote this song, it's also fairly common for "Monkey" to be used informally to refer to other apes such as Chimps or Gorillas, so it doesn't seem like a stretch that they'd extend this to Humans as well.
