| TMBW Userboxes
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AGE:
42
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This user is 42 years old.
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| FAN
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This user became a TMBG fan in 2000.
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This user's favorite Venue Song is Dallas.
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I am The Silver Chauffeur. I say it's all in your head.
Some artists besides TMBG that I like:
- Prog-rockers and experimentalists: King Crimson, Yes, Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen, Brian Eno
- Singer-songwriters: Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Sophie B. Hawkins, Bob Dylan, Neil Young
- Miscellaneous: Joanna Newsom, Björk, Fairport Convention, The Microphones, Andy M. Stewart
I have posted tracklists and comments for three TMBG mixes of mine over the years:
They Might Magically Be Giants (2006, 35 tracks)
God Bless You, Professor Flans (2008, 34 tracks)
Doppelgängers Of They (2015, 17 tracks)
Some thoughts about some selected TMBG songs, things that are probably too personal to go on the interpretations pages:
- It's Kickin' In, from The Spine (2004)
- Flansburgh, well, he's the practical man of TMBG. Helps with the liner notes, keeps the live shows together, philosophizes about the band's direction. In that sense, "It's Kickin' In" is a perfect Flansburgh song. It's pure function: TMBG's best party song ever. It's also gotten to be my favorite song on The Spine, which I'm definitely more than a little surprised about.
- But then, isn't The Spine the album where Flans really starts taking his Paul McCartney role to heart? There's two Flans songs on the album where Flans's new party hat really shows its colors, and Damn Good Times isn't one of them. Prevenge (first single) is the pop equivalent to "It's Kickin' In" -- it's a song whose title seems indubitably inspired by the Bush Administration and the remainder of whose content leaves you guessing as to just how Mr. F is pulling a fast one on W. It's not the only time he's found fit to leave us scratching our heads: a guy who goes through all the trouble of organizing the Future Soundtrack For America only to have his own band's contribution be a cover of an 1840 presidential campaign song for a candidate that (interpreters have pointed out) TMBG probably wouldn't even have politically supported, has got to be either an expert self-saboteur, or a vision man.
- Why? Why go to the trouble of publicly speaking out against the powers that be, and then at the same time crafting a piece of seeming musical fluff like "It's Kickin' In"? Is this some sort of deep nihilism fostered and helped along by a more-than-happy love of '80s rock? No, They Might Be Giants are not Satanists.... You see, the thing is, sometimes Flansburgh doesn't cut it. We all know the feeling. Actually, "Prevenge" still leaves me scratching my head; you won't see me writing an essay on it here any time soon. But if there was ever an argument that the head has access to the heart (and those old dancin' feet of rock 'n roll) after all, "It's Kickin' In" could be Exhibit A.
- Here's a song where Flansburgh intentionally constructs half-formed, dream lines and gives you free rein to dance after him. "Shocked awake in the middle of the day / In a fight over shadows of the night" -- what does that mean? Sure, there are plenty of things it *could* mean, but that's not the point. There are other Flansburgh calls to dance among TMBG's repertoire, like the aforementioned "Damn Good Times" (strange how that song never got me carried away like this one has) and that ironic stadium cheer, Twisting. But "It's Kickin' In" is the one where I really lose myself. Why? It's the McCartneyesque free play of ideas, associations, interpretations even (given TMBG's history, why not?) -- dancing from one to another.
- You see, Flans really is a subversive, a true one. This is the only one of Mr. Burgh's party songs that's really just about a party, and in it, and through it, he recognizes that the thrill of enjoying yourself comes when things just don't make sense any more, and not from this, or that, or the other thing. He strives for the effect in a lot of songs; here it's purified. If the chant ends up following the song and going "Time to appreciate it / Let's hear the boyfriends say it", it's just people abandoning themselves to themselves, because everyone's going to know everyone else doesn't hear quite what they hear, and yet, it doesn't matter.
- How does Linnell fit into this equation? Well, Linnell doesn't try to force anything on you, which Flansburgh seems to in his worse moments (Q U, say). He's got to be a fair bit more popular than Flans, and really, I'm surely more entranced with him as well. But, they take that unstated TMBG goal of mental liberation and run down pretty different roads with it. Sometimes Flansburgh can sound like a pop imitator in his quest to take you somewhere; sometimes Linnell can sound pedantic when his interpretations of the TMBG Trademark Otherness (Elseness?) become overly literal (let's say, Au Contraire, or for that matter James K. Polk, which has always been a mite or ten too stuffy for me). Linnell's free even when he fails; Flansburgh on the other hand does have the ability to come off as manipulative, since his missteps can only be classed as failed experiments in pop. But in "It's Kickin' In" the failsafe is always blaring, just because Flans has already got his characters to manipulate; and so he could even soften it up, rather than kick it in, and it'd just be fine. What's the "it" that's kicking in anyway? If it's drugs, that's fine, and still fits with the song. I feel like it's more just metaphorical drugs -- the endless partygoers themselves being the ones making the metaphor, and the party itself is the drug. Or maybe "It's Kickin' In" is ultimately just a song about itself. That's an old Linnell trick, of course, and one Flansburgh is wise to use. When you're enveloped in yourself, you have to admit, how can you help but free-play along?
- To A Forest, from Phone Power (2016)
- Maybe it’s hyperbole, but I think there’s an argument to be made that the most important word in “To A Forest”’s lyrics is the one that isn’t sung. I completely agree with the interpretations “Dreaming” and “Loop” that after “Our consciousness has been…” there would naturally follow the word “erased”, except the word has been, well, erased. But what I want to propose in my own exegesis of this song is that this erasure of consciousness might well be, miraculously, positive.
- As is my wont, I’m going to go all quasi-philosophical now and say, what exactly does “consciousness” mean? My stance is that this is an issue that goes beyond just “To A Forest”, so I’ll start off by just quoting two seemingly conflicting ideas about it from other, divergent sources. In his introduction to his 2017 book The Wilds of Poetry, anthologist and translator David Hinton talks about “an original nature of consciousness prior to its separation from the world as an alien soul: consciousness in its primitive openness, before writing and ideas and religions started closing us in on ourselves, separating us out as centers of identity somehow disconnected from all that other. In this openness… consciousness moves with the same patterns and rhythms as everything else — the seasons and winds, mountains and stars.” (5) That, I think, is a nice image.
- In opposition to this, we have Heinrich von Kleist in his 1810 essay “On the Marionette Theatre” (yes, I’m using ideas from more than two centuries ago to talk about They Might Be Giants), which reports, “I was well aware how consciousness can disturb natural grace. A young acquaintance of mine had as it were lost his innocence before my very eyes, and all because of a chance remark. He had never found his way back to that Paradise of innocence, in spite of all conceivable efforts.” Kleist goes on to recount the story of how he had, at one point, embarrassed this young acquaintance and made him conscious of himself as his body existed in the world, after which “an extraordinary change came over this boy” and “A year later nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who looked at him.”
- The resolution of this apparent paradox, though, I’d say is that what both Hinton and Kleist really seem to be setting themselves against is self-consciousness. Hinton talks about consciousness going through “separation from the world as an alien soul”, and after this process takes place, it becomes the consciousness that Kleist describes as disturbing natural grace. I think Hinton and Kleist are fundamentally in agreement with each other. So, I would say, is John Flansburgh.
- Sure: “To A Forest”’s narrator might have a thing or two to say back to these writers. “We’re alone in this freaky place” doesn’t really sound like being in a graceful state. But, I think it’s important that the lyrics of the song introduce themselves with the following words: “This stuff is complex. Never figured out the part that comes next. I’m out of my depth.” What’s the stuff that’s complex? It’s the universe. It’s everything.
- Here’s Hinton on self-consciousness again, from the same introduction: “This transcendental soul is the center of abstract rational thought… The implications of this scheme are manifold, but they all devalue the physical earth and our relation to it. Abstract ‘truth’ is valued over immediate experience. Rational mind is valued over body, which is considered impure and evil.” (3) The concept of rationality introduced here is, well, a tricky one to deal with in the context of They Might Be Giants. These days, it seems like it’s supposed to go with ideas like the primacy of science as a way of understanding the world, and, by extension, the supposed nerdiness of a lot of TMBG’s audience. But, I think it’s very relevant to include here that the roots of Western rationality — which, after all, Hinton blames on the concept of a “transcendental soul” — are religious. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” was the first step in his proof of God.
- (And, anyway, you have Flans quotes like this one, from Reed and Sandifer’s book on Flood: “For me, when people say, 'you guys are such nerds,' I am a million miles away from that”. Even his quote on this wiki about being a nerd, “I think most of what's going on in the world culturally is kind of jive and sexist and repellent. If that makes me a nerd, I guess I am one”, seems to me to be sarcastic and resigned. If Reed and Sandifer are to be believed, TMBG did end up approaching the interests and aesthetics of the “geek” community eventually, but from a completely different direction.)
- I bring up specifically Western rationality, as opposed to rationality at large, due to such statements as this, by David Turnbull in his essay “Rationality and the Disunity of the Sciences” in this book, referring to Western rationality: “The development of this concept of rationality was not universal. For example, it was not paralleled in Islamic society where men were denied rational agency. They were held to lack the capacity to change nature or to understand it.” (47) Although nowadays, of course, nature is indeed very much being changed by humanity, you have Hinton, in response to that, lamenting on the subject of the Maine woods (the very forest that we’ll be dragged to?) that “white colonizers devastated the ecosystem in a matter of decades” (3) in the same paragraph where he talks about “devalu[ing] the physical earth and our relation to it.” In contrast to such positions, Hinton brings up a Taoist framework, according to which, at least in his idiosyncratic reading of it, one might as well throw up one’s hands and say “This stuff is complex. Never figured out the part that comes next. I’m out of my depth,” or, as it’s put by A.R. Ammons in “Corsons Inlet”, one of the poems The Wilds of Poetry anthologizes:
... Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events /
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting /
beyond the account: /
… /
I will try /
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening /
scope, but enjoying the freedom that /
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, /
that I have perceived nothing completely…. (229-231)
- Everything is shifting, and shifting again. Or as Laozi says in Chapter 34 of the Daodejing, “The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right.” The “freaky place” is the entire universe, and Flans’ statement that this is where “we’re alone” is entirely concordant with other TMBG bitter-truth pills like the one in Last Wave: “We die alone, we die afraid, we live in terror, we’re naked and alone and the grave is the loneliest place.” Yet overall, I think “To A Forest” is much more hopeful than that song. If you say you’re out of your depth, you’re free from the pressure of mastery over nature, and you’re also free from having to make sure that what you say is true in a really watertight way. I think that’s also why I like songs like Canajoharie so much, which, as my interpretation there says, I think of as being a surprisingly respectful portrait of a pseudoscientst. Yes, “To A Forest” is filled with horror imagery, but I think its overall picture is that of a universe in which humans can give up control, and do not “change nature or… understand it”. The forest itself is a symbol of that, of… dare I say?… rewilding.
- There’s also an awesome guitar solo.
