YOUTH CULTURE POLLED MY DOG: They Might Be Giants (first 21 years) POLL RESULTS

missed opportunity to call it (She Will Have Been A) Hotel Detective

70: Turn Around
378 points, 6 votes

on Apollo 18 album, 1992

I sort of see this as the Apollo 18 version of "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" (which I like somewhat better.)

Think I didn't vote for this, probably should have.

69: Piece Of Dirt
406 points, 9 votes

on Lincoln LP, 1988
performed by The Avatars Of They, 2015

I voted for “Turn Around” downballot. I’ve always enjoyed the song though the chorus does fall a bit flat.

I like Turn Around. Their songs about the shadow of death are usually good. Where You're Eyes Don't Go is another one similar one.

The last verse about the train engineer with the paper-white mask of evil face is one of my favourite moments

68: A Self Called Nowhere
416 points, 6 votes, 1 #1

on John Henry album, 1994

piece of dirt was a late cut for me, i just couldn't vote for that vocal

"Or to fly... I'd fly away" is great tho

“A Self Called Nowhere” at #1? Wild. I have never once thought about this song, though I’ve heard nothing t dozens of times.

Wtf autocorrect “I’ve heard it dozens of times”

wow at that #1 vote. the joys of fandom, it takes all kinds!

i did once think the song sounded pretty dark and cool-sounding, and i think about it almost any time i encounter an electric organ. another one where i'd love to hear it in a pre-JH arrangement, perhaps a less ponderous one. "it's a thing named it, in a bottomless pit, you can't see it there" sounds cool to me.

apparently they made simple MIDI versions of all the john henry tracks and put them out as a hypercard stack?? you can hear them here though they're obviously not finished TMBG songs. this site supposedly emulates the hypercard stack, but requires Flash.

a 2007 podcast also unveiled full-band demos (follow link to MP3) which i'm just now skimming. they're not radically different but they sound better to my ears. i'm not enough of a production head to be precise about this but maybe what i'm hearing is the absence of compression? "no one knows my plan," one of my favorites from the album, sounds a little looser, and a little less cluttered without guitar overdubs (and no solo!) muddying up the mix. "out of jail" isn't better than the album version (another one of my favorites from that record) but something about the guitar attack makes it clearer how it belongs in the flans staccato-guitar canon going back to "ana ng" etc. "a self called nowhere's" chorus still lands hard but there's no effect on linnell's voice and that too is fairly refreshing i gotta say.

they're releasing a full remastered CD edition of the John Henry demos in December: https://tmbgifc.com/ -- sign up by midnight to also get two posters designed by the screenwriter of Antz, sign up any time to get downloads of three new albums from 2018, one not-available-to-the-public live album from 2018, a 7", a T-shirt, a keychain, two guitar picks and various other stuff.

https://tmbgifc.com/static/ifc2018/images/product_images/Poster_SaturdayEveningPost_ToddAlcott.jpg

67: I Should Be Allowed To Think
429 points, 7 votes

on John Henry album, 1994
earlier Dial-A-Song version

whoa thought that would be top 20

So far, not a lot of songs I voted for, but "For Science" is awesome

When I prepped my ballot, I first made a playlist of my indisputable all time top fave TMBG tracks. That ended up amounting to 26 songs. This is the first of those 26 to appear. I have to admit, I’m a bit sad to see it so low.

You've started! Re: albums, did the 1986 S/T "Pink" LP get no votes beside mine then?

(All the cool kids favour the demo, maybe? Or I'm amongst those those failing to grasp eligibility criteria? :) )

i also voted for the s/t album, in third place. wondering if maybe that got counted as a vote for the demo? not that many album ballots overall so it's no biggie imo.

hands up, who else's first introduction to "howl" was through the opening lines of "i should be allowed to think"?

really love the way these guys do those soaring background vocals on their choruses. this song is probably one of the best examples of that

I had Hide Away Folk Family in my top 5 I think, surprised it's so low

(All the cool kids favour the demo, maybe? Or I'm amongst those those failing to grasp eligibility criteria? :) )

you and I were the only two to vote for The Pink Album - as I hinted, I assume the five votes for They Might Be Giants meant to vote Pink, but it was funnier to run with the votes as submitted since nobody really cared about the EPs / albums element

66: South Carolina
431 points, 6 votes

on John Linnell's State Songs EP, 1994 & album, 1999

I love this song. Happy it made the list, it was in my top 25

this stuff about the s/t / pink album is going right over my head - it's called they might be giants right?

South Carolina SO GOOD, I was worried I was the only State Songs Stan here. "Lift that fork, eat that snail, garçon summon up a new cocktail" one of their very finest convoluted strings of syllables.

Somehow missed "Hide Away Folk Family," yes, that's surprisingly low! To me it's one of the defining songs on the debut.

AQUARIUS: ABANDON HOPE FOR FUTURE PLANNNNS

I think I like every song where the bridge consists of one John doing a megaphone declarative over some kind of chaotic musical interlude.

^ ha ha, otm

it's called they might be giants right?

yes, but so was the sold-for-money 1985 cassette (reissued in 1993), so I called the 1986 LP "The Pink Album" in all the eligibility lists

65: Sleeping in the Flowers
443 points, 8 votes

on John Henry album, 1994

there's this whole aspect to the debut, in things like that "daily home astrology report," which puts them much much closer to idk laurie anderson and talking heads and was not was.... stuff that today has much more "cool" nyc 80s art-world type cred, versus the "beloved by high school dorks like doctor casino" image. not saying they should be ranked as more cool than they are just that they've maybe been misread a bit. or maybe a lot of those 80s art postures became standard high school dork moves via channels including TMBG, i dunno. i think i've made this exact post before, and recently maybe.

xxp oh ha, i didn't read the eligibility lists, just the line that said you could vote for x number of albums or EPs. that's on me then!

I think I've made that exact post before DC! In that early TMBG is 100% definitely a downtown performance experiment about the concept of the "rock band" which sort of accidentally turns into an actual rock band.

there is a strong, sad possibility i read it from you, repeated it out loud at some point, and convinced myself it was my brilliant original thought

Well, whoever's thought it was, it's definitely the case.

downtown performance experiment about the concept of the "rock band"

Oh god! I realised while compiling a ballot that I'm hopelessly biased toward the early output and could only come up with "there's a tiny of bit more of The Residents to them" or something. Y'all capture it better.

"South Carolina" was my #4. Would be the standout track on any of the TMBG albums of that time period.

"32 Footsteps" was my #5. I'm old enough to have Lou Reed's pre-death vocal range, but I can still sing this one.

Started a Spotify playlist, if only as a means of belatedly 'getting' John Henry. :) Just made it 'collaborative' if anyone's into that.

https://open.spotify.com/user/empeecee/playlist/33vPnKhNeF8NA5ZDNC8k6D?si=-_WjGXjrRSuaj2YUpijmNw

the back wheel's 'O' is now a letter 'D'/ I was an 'I' and now I am a 'V'

- I love this, feel like it's another one of those lyrics Dr Casino mentioned earlier that's right on the verge of being too cute for its own good but just gets away with it

I was think I posted something in the voting thread about how it seemed a big part of the TMBG aesthetic is the kind of stuff that kids think about to blow their minds, like when you'd write your address but keep going after the street, town etc so it said "the earth, the solar system, the milky way, the universe" etc

like, I remember being a child and reading about astronomy, and sort of enjoying that vertiginous feeling of catching a glimpse of how tiny and irrelevant you are compared to the vastness of the universe, kind of like the Total Perspective Vortex from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I think this broken perspective is something evoked in a lot of TMBG songs, a connection between something very small/specific/close and the hugeness of the world or the universe? like the stopped clock in Four Of Two that's still there in the far future world is kind of like the endlessly continuing address thing, this fixed point from which you navigate the enormity of everything, and I think there's that kind of perspective in A Self Called Nowhere as well

they have lots of songs about being in two places at once, or being in one place and thinking of another place - and there's a kind of paradox where this ruminating of the vastness of the world/universe is 'looking outwards', but also - because you can't see this stuff directly. you can only conceive of it - it's also 'looking inwards'? in practise it means creating a private inner world apart from the actual world and landscape and society around you, TMBG capture something about that woozy perspective and sensation of moving outwards and inwards at the same time

My familiarity with TMBG is pretty much Flood-and-a-bit-of-Lincoln, but yeah, that sounds otm to me. It's less than 50 seconds from "Particle Man" to "Size of the Entire Universe Man".

I re-read the bit of Hitchhikers where the Total Perspective Vortex appears and it sounds very TMBG-esque imo -

The total perspective vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic amalyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a single piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realised that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

- especially those songs that describe a thing that can obliterate someone just by them looking at it or thinking about it - "the statue made me fry/my coat contained a furnace where there used to be a guy', "the spiraling shape will make you go insane" etc

the Total Perspective Vortex reminds me of descriptions I've read of the experience of taking LSD, (I guess that is at least part of the inspiration for the concept?), stripping away the sense of self, allowing you to 'perceive' the universe as a whole? a lot of TMBG deals with similar subjects to pop music that is drug inspired (weird sensory stuff, disorientation) but the TMBG version always sounds very un-druggy to me, and reminds me more of childhood stuff where you would be aware of the sheer weirdness of having a body (I guess this is less pronounced as you get older as you get used to it, or just because you have less time to sit around on your own thinking about this stuff?) - e.g. I remember spending time looking in a mirror closing and opening my eyes hoping that if I did it quickly enough I'd catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror with my eyes closed, that kind of thing.

there's not a clear distinction between the TMBG songs about being involved in a vivid inner life, like Nobody Knows My Plans, and the ones about the outer world, the vastness of the universe and the relative smallness of you and your inner world, if you go far enough in one direction you meet yourself coming back (and all those songs where recursion shows up) - it all gives this feeling of someone exploring the universe from inside their own head

"I will never say the word 'procrastinate' again; I'll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed.". Great posts soref.

Yeah soref highly otm. I would add that the preoccupation with death is definitely part of this -- the awareness that your lifespan is a tiny bounded zone of existence inside the vast realms of time in which either no longer exist or have never existed.

also i would note that their explorations of these concepts never feel in any way druggy or drug-inspired. maybe in part because the meticulous construction of their MIDI/sampler recordings produces a tightly-wired, clockwork-machine effect when listening, no trippy instrumental journeys or even a hair's breath for the track. you wind up "purple toupee" and it's just clattering down the track. but conceptually they're also more like twilight zone episodes or brain-teaser puzzles than "woahhh did you ever really think about how we'll all turn to dust, maaaan" musings. they're interested in the boundary between life and death and the expanding universe in the same way they're interested in, like, the formalist challenge of writing a palindromic lyric, or a "house that jack built" style song, also things popular with nerdy and verbally-oriented kids. whether this is the chicken or the egg of them seeming kind of square and tame when i try to sell friends on them, i dunno.

tiny toons obviously an important factor here if you're of a certain age

I can't tell you how often "No one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful. Everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful" pops into my head. One of the all-time great lyrics.

Xposts - Toad's place! I am not from CT but my best friend growing up was so I've been to a bunch of shows there. This was at The Globe in Norwalk.