Many folks maintain a soft spot for They Might Be Giants in this, their twentieth year. Poor guys, they survived John Henry, one of the least interesting albums ever released. And bless their hearts, their last album-- their most fun since the eighties-- bore the ugly street date of September 11th, 2001, and Pitchfork centurion Matt LeMay crucified it, etching 2.8 onto its tomb.
Crawl into my porcelain Nostalgidildo: back in the day, TMBG lingered in a strange new section at the Oak Nook Mall's Record Bar, a section called "alternative" which they shared with a host of quirktastic acts such as Suicidal Tendencies, The Pixies, Dead Milkmen, Siouxsie with Banshees, and Violent Femmes. The big time didn't want them. On MTV's "Randee of the Redwoods" special (a production that Flansburgh told me in an interview was run by some cocaine-pocked simps), they opened for Run-DMC. Everyone in the crowd froze, allowing their rejection to manifest. Hard to believe that these Brooklyn art-punks would go on to earn a grubby Grammy for the theme song to a clunky TV show.
In 2002, this children's album is a logical move, since any hardcore fans who still swear by this band are obviously suffering from arrested development, and since any passive fans who remember when TMBG were the freshest thing going now have ten grandkids to babysit. But what song from the band's first ten years wouldn't already multitask as kiddie fodder? As-is, "Toddler Hiway" and "Whistling In the Dark" were safe for the I-can-poop-solo set. Cartoon shows were already co-opting their standard fare. "Particle Man" is otherwise known as "Smells Like Toddler Spirit." What the hell-hey?
That's where they get ya: this album is really a subversive, anarchic manifesto, brimming with songs about cultural revolution and plunging hypodermic needles into scrotums. Aw, I'm just joshing. It's this spiked Ovaltine, making everything feisty and asymmetric. The album is surprisingly agenda-free, considering how dread-mired and literately jaded their best work is/was. I was thinking, "TMBG's going to get their depressive hooks into the whippersnappers of the Baby Gap Generation-- thass tight!" But nay, a thousand times nay, this album mercifully prefers to dangle kids over their toyboxes rather than over the abyss of their potentially meaningless existence.
Several songs provide that patented, relentlessly melodic, fitful polka you either love or hate. Among the best are the lie-happy "Fibber Island," the quantum-leaping "Four of Two," the exponentially multiplying "The House at the Top of the Tree," and the kinda-dumb "Sleepwalkers." "Robot Parade," one of several old songs reworked here, is a vocoded nightmare of a cyborg utopia and it's just as grand on disc as it is live (I'd prefer TMBG's smarmy, vaudevillian anti-banter over some Indie-Cum-Lately's Junior Jeff Buckley leers and deepness-displaying segues any day).
The song "No!" manages to be an effective, mildly nihilistic look at how much of kids' conversations and desires end in negation. "Violin" is as insane and surreal as classics like "Boat of Car," as it repeats the words "hippo" and "mop," and then slices up the head of George Washington. "In the Middle" covers a public service announcement about the hazards of pedestrianhood. Live nugget "I Am Not Your Broom," and "I Am a Grocery Bag" are sung, predictably, from the point of view of inanimate objects, though only "Broom" sustains a metaphorical heft, as the pre-leafblower organic tool tires of being exploited. The consumer-product-listing "Grocery Bag" is particularly a stoop for the band that penned Flood's "Dead," a song that presented the plight of yon coupon-clipping grocery shopper as being on par with the cyclic horror of Sisyphus pushing his rigged rock up a pointless hill.
The rest of No! consists of oddly considerate and patient full-on kids' songs, meaning that they're repetitive and sometimes even "Teletubbies"-caliber stupefying (although "Wake Up Call," which repeats the syllable 'bo' 135+ times, is somehow still a hit). The disc is enhanced with gleefully absurd, marginally interactive cartoons, and packed with that Eisenhower-era zip-twinkle. And never once do the Johns go so nasal that you wince with their every exhortation. Those of you who arrived at Pitchforkmedia.com via a sick, degenerate teleology of Tool-to-Promise Ring-to-Pinback might not understand the need to give TMBG props, at least as talented multi-instrumentalists. Well, keep sewing those patches on your Eastpaks, and try to understand that this kid-disc was critic-proof. Who wants to be the dickhead to trash something for the wee demo? It's like those Michelin commercials with the "whole lot riding on your tires." They beg the question: do you want to kill babies, FREAK? You unhurdlable ASSHOLE!
Respect is due, yo. TMBG still runs a dial-a-song service. They're the focus of a flick, Gigantic, coming to an arthouse near you and featuring the praise of empowered pop-vulture Dave Eggers. They used to quote Wallace Stevens and sing that youth culture killed their dog, and that they hope they get old before they die. But now, all crick-nicked, they don't give a damn that Shakespeare's kid-unfriendly Lady MacBeth said that she would handle a kid by acting "while it was my smiling in face;" she would "have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums/ And dashed the brains out." TMBG doesn't care that poet Phillip Larkin noted that "they fuck you up, your mum and dad," and that you should "get out as early as you can/ and don't have any kids yourself." Or that Nickelodeon prints up pamphlets like the "What We Know About Kids" dossier that a friend smuggled to me, arguing that kids are "armed with brand influences" and that "kids' fast food preference is confirmed!"
A They Might Be Giants record is one of the last places from which you'd expect hope for a generation of attention-bags that won't remember ad-free space, and that begins every sentence with "I want." And TMBG are probably harbingers of an era when old-guard 'alternative' standouts reach out to kids. Look forward to Sonic Youth's Playpen Cesspool and Unca Lou Barlow's Don't Rub Flimsy.