Your Racist Friend
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | Your Racist Friend |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Flood, Your Racist Friend (Promo), Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, A User's Guide To They Might Be Giants: Melody, Fidelity, Quantity, Rhino Hi-Five: They Might Be Giants, Flood + Apollo 18, 50,000,000 They Might Be Giants Songs Can't Be Wrong |
| year | 1990 |
| first played | June 17, 1988 (501 known performances) |
| run time | 2:54 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh, John Linnell harmonizes |
Trivia/Info
- John Flansburgh on the song's inspiration at a 1988 show at the Knitting Factory in New York, NY:
I went to a party once and there was a guy there who had way too much to drink. He wasn't a pretty sight because he started telling me about a lot of really fucked up ideas in his mind, and then he sort of − put his face in my face, and that's when I decided I should write "[Your Racist Friend]".
- Flansburgh on the song's meaning in a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone:
The song is a composite of experiences, and really about the relativistic backpedaling people go through trying to get through this creepy world. This song is really wrapped up in the problem of tacit agreement, and the line 'Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding' just sums it up.
- John Linnell spoke about his initial reaction to Flansburgh presenting the song in a 2015 interview with SPIN:
I remember at the time feeling like, "Oh this is kind of opening a whole other thing." I was a little uncomfortable with becoming political in a way. It was one of those things where one of us would introduce a thing and it was like, "Well that expands the repertoire but, well, what do we mean to everybody?" What we’ve always had between us is very open, like everything's great. Whatever you think of is cool. Just do everything. That was the spirit of the band. That’s still the case. If somebody thinks of an idea that they think is cool, they don’t have to explain why or what it means or how it’s going to redefine the band.
- This song was originally titled "Racist Friend"[1], which unwittingly borrows from The Specials song of the same name. In 2015, John Linnell told Tom Robinson, "We didn't know that we were writing an identically named song when we came out with it. We found out later that there was already a song by that name."
- As heard in a Dial-A-Song demo of the song and a 1988 live performance, an initial lyric for the song was "Listen to some bullet-head and the bullshit that he's saying". The expletive was later replaced by the word "madness", which Flansburgh would explain in a 1990 interview with Throttle Magazine:
"Bullshit" just sort of stuck out too much. There are a lot of things about the songs that get changed as they evolve. I think part of it is that when you're writing a song, you're trying to create something that is going to hold up to repeated listenings. So there are things that might have an immediate impact, that seem kind of cool, but over the long run they seem kind of bogus. Just the notion of saying the word "bullshit" over and over again seemed inarticulate.
- "My head can't tolerate" is often replaced with "My head is tired of" in live performances.
- Australian singer Mick Thomas occasionally covers this in concert; one such performance is featured on the 2007 live album Paddock Bomb. It has also been covered by Australian punk band Bodyjar.
Song Themes
Bad English, Body Parts, Drinking, Egoism And Pretentiousness, Friendship, Heads, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Politics, Religion, Swing Feel
Videos
- Live at The Town & Country Club, London England. Watch it on
– Recorded live on June 17, 1990
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