Meredith Graves is a musician and writer. She also runs a small record label called Honor Press. You can follow her on Twitter here and on Instagram here.
Talkhouse writers are musicians, and they write with a passion, insight, poetry and empathy that you’re just not going to find anywhere else. That’s why we’d rank the best writing in the Talkhouse with the best music writing anywhere. This week, we’re celebrating some of our favorite Talkhouse pieces of 2014.
— Michael Azerrad, Talkhouse editor-in-chief
I started having trouble on the bus when I was six years old. I was a little nerd who couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I would lip off to boys twice my size and get picked on, shoved around. Day after day, I’d end up skulking off the bus, crying. My father, employing an intuition I still admire in him to this day, gave me a Walkman and some cassettes. He knew that sitting quietly and listening to music was the only thing that would get me to stop talking.
They Might Be Giants’ 1990 album Flood might be the only reason I’m still alive today.
Dad made sure I was aware of They Might Be Giants early on. He’d been listening to punk, jazz and experimental music since the ‘70s. When I was born in 1987, during a Hüsker Dü binge, he would become, without really trying, a “cool dad” whose record collection took up three-quarters of our small living room. As soon as I was old enough to talk, he began to introduce me to some of the thousands of cassettes, records and CDs at my disposal. They were meticulously organized, so I could find Flood in a dark room with my eyes closed. It was the first album that ever really meant something to me, and it became the soundtrack to my early life with my dad. He’d come home early from his job as a TV news reporter and we’d blast “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” I’d close my eyes, we’d swing around the room.
It took me another decade of active listening to recognize TMBG as a punk band. John Flansburgh and John Linnell have done everything differently from how they’re supposed to, bypassing decades of trends in favor of making highly creative records that experiment with genres and formats. Early on, they released singles on an answering machine service, and later they became the first band to release a full album as MP3s. They’ve written everything from children’s music to scores for film and television. They’ve worked with major labels as well as self-releasing much of their material. They seem steadfast in their belief that their listeners are smart. They know what my dad taught me a long time ago: don’t ever talk down to people. Don’t change who you are in an attempt to be understood. Just do whatever you can to best communicate your ideas. People will listen, he promised me; people will catch up.
Early singles like “Don’t Let’s Start” and “Ana Ng” were up-tempo dance songs played in the style of punk. They were weird and truly sweet, and did quite well on college radio and the dawning days of MTV. The videos for these songs introduced people to the band’s love of props, jump-cuts and choreography — they were long collages devoid of narrative or continuity. In the video for “Don’t Let’s Start” Linnell hollers, “I don’t want to live in this world any more”; as he shouts, his voice cracks and he breaks out in full-body thrashing. He’s as tough and assertive as Ian MacKaye, but he’s a skinny new waver in a turtleneck.
Flood was the band’s major label debut and remains their most popular record. It also stands as proof of the band’s commitment to artistic integrity over commercial palatability. Innovative, humorous songs like “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” and “Particle Man” became the most beloved and recognizable songs on the record. But Flood also has songs that exhibit a major leap from the early singles, with jerky up-tempo tracks like “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” picking up where the early MTV-friendly singles left off.
They Might Be Giants also continually kept their videos creative and theatrical. The video for “Birdhouse in Your Soul” is surreal, akin to the cut-ups made by Burroughs and Gysin. Every other shot is a crop of a body part, a crowd of people appear in identical outfits, dancing the robot in masks, the band members appear in lighting reminiscent of the early short films of Man Ray. Later, the robot crowd appears wearing sandwich boards that read “STOP ROCK VIDEO” on the back, while the front displays an eye that makes you think of “Un Chien Andalou.” This is intercut with shots of the band swinging their bodies and instruments wildly; they function as Buñuel’s infamous razor, threatening to split that eye.
These images, both funny and challenging, might have been the two Johns’ way of shaking up the college radio audience. They’ve always promoted a sort of active listening, a level of physical and mental engagement that doesn’t jibe with traditional stereotypes of passive, buy-anything hipsters or dopey, no-future drunk-punks. They require a commitment, a promise to think. A good example of this is “Your Racist Friend,” an ode to calling out drunk assholes who say offensive things at parties. The accordion, especially in live versions, is as aggressively empty as a Catholic Discipline song, and the arrangement leaves room for a couple of heavy, distorted guitar solos that hover on the edge of hardcore, making the listener question the background and hobbies of the “bullethead” the song refers to. Best of all, the song concludes without resolve — “Your friend apologizes, he can see it my way/He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking/Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.” There’s no parade for a racist who sees the error of his ways. It’s not a story of redemption — it’s established that there’s no reasoning away that sort of shitty behavior, and it’s left there. No excuses, just action.
This is the critical difference between sounding punk and being punk, and it also explains why the Johns have managed to be a thriving band for 32 years. One of the functions of punk is to bridge the gap between sounding dumb and ugly, but actually being critical and smart. The lasting contribution of punk to contemporary music and culture is its ability to make people understand the fatal condition of our species and meet it head-on, with a smile. Committing to the aesthetic of no future can take the form of a Germs burn, or it can take the form of a couple of nerds in spectacles and turtlenecks flailing around with an accordion. No future means you can’t care what other people think or worry too much about embarrassing yourself. The bands that stay relevant are the innovators, who combine attitude with a sound that distinguishes them from their peers; the perfect balance of not giving a fuck about anything except the precious few things you give a whole lot of fucks about.
That’s the lesson more bands could stand to learn from TMBG: don’t fear not being liked. Don’t waste time caring about other people’s standards. It’s OK to make music that doesn’t sound like whatever the rest of the world thinks is cool and great. Appreciate that music, but put what you learn from it toward making something new, constantly changing, pushing out perpetually in all directions against monotony and form. Bonus if you do it with other weirdos whom you genuinely care about.
Because yeah, it’s tempting to start another genre-worship band, to allow the structural confines of a subgenre to define your instrumentation and songwriting, but I vote in favor of starting more bands by TMBG rules: developing supportive, long-term relationships with collaborators, being open-minded and willing to experiment, saying yes to things that might seem new or scary, no fucks given except when giving all the fucks. Talk to punks, children, scientists, college radio listeners — and never, ever talk down to anyone. If you do these things — if you stay true to yourself, ignore most of the things society tells you are important, and remain generous to others — you will dwell in a place of great personal freedom. These are the lasting lessons to be taken away from They Might Be Giants — this is why they continue to inspire wider audiences with every release, and why their records will continue to be important long into the future.
