Mr. Xcitement

From This Might Be A Wiki

song name Mr. Xcitement
artist They Might Be Giants
releases Mink Car (except European releases), Podcast 49
year 2001
run time 3:36
sung by Mike Doughty; John Flansburgh emcees


Trivia/Info

  • From TMBG Unlimited, "'Mr. Xcitement' with Mike Doughty and the Elegant Too. A good time was had by all on this high energy track. Working with former Mono Puff DJ Phil Hernandez and Skeleton Key guitarist Chris Maxwell, now known collectively as the Elegant Too, TMBG and Doughty cooked up this manic track. I get name checked in the rap - a real first for me."
  • Flansburgh: "Originally [this was going to be an instrumental]. This track was put together from manipulations of various horn samples from Velcro Horns Dan Levine and Jim O'Connor. The beats were then super-sized with wild sonic manipulations and real live scratching by beatmeisters The Elegant Too, but when Mike Doughty heard it, he insisted on taking the track home where he cooked up the crazy rhymes, which we are still trying to decode."[1]
  • Excerpt from Mix Magazine, January 2002:

The Giants built the song in an unusual way, starting out with samples of their trombonist Dan Levine, which they recorded and manipulated with Vision software. "Chris Maxwell and Phil and I immediately set about working on this track, writing it to these abstract horn blasts," Flansburgh says. "It has essentially a kind of Peter Gunn quality. That's probably the thing that our minds went to when we heard that sound. It's a strange place to start for a song.
"A lot of it is made by machines played by Phil and Chris," Flansburgh notes of the sounds on the song. "They're into electronic music, but they're also really great musicians, so it's often easier for them to create electronic sounds by actually playing them. So the bass sound on it is actually from Chris' MIDI guitar that he uses as a trigger. They're experts at sampling themselves to make it sound like a very slick programming, which is an unusual kind of expertise."

  • The Spanish line "Café con pan," means "Coffee with bread."
  • Appears in the Malcolm In The Middle episode "Dinner Out."
  • The line "Like Flansy in a soda can..." is referenced in the music video for "E Eats Everything."
  • R&B/soul legend Jackie Wilson was known by his nickname "Mr. Excitement", thanks to his riveting live performances.

Song Themes

Accents, Coffee, Drinks, Food, Language, Non-John Vocals, Nonsense Words, People (Imaginary), Self-Reference, Songs With Handclaps, Spanish, Spoken Word, Titles And Honorifics, Weapons, Writing, Yes

Videos

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Mr. Xcitement is currently ranked #879 out of 1005. (183 wikians have given it an average rating of 7.17)