The chicken? Or the egg? A debate most "fowl" that has raged for eons. A quarrel of such infinite magnitude that it has ended marriages, triggered nuclear conflicts, and given Joy Behar and Elizabeth Hasselbeck something to squabble about.
The timeless query has even managed to come up occasionally in the music world in some uniquely subtle ways. Don't tell me that you've never wondered if Lady Gaga had to work for her po-po-po-poker face – or if she was just born that way.
And long before they were the collective tuneful titans that they've become, They Might Be Giants' John Linnell and John Flansburgh were individually hugely talented – or is it the other way around?
Southern Arizonans can answer the question for themselves on Jan. 30 as the Johns and their longtime band rock The Rialto Theatre. The Giants are in town for the Tucson stop of their tour in support of the group's 2011 release Join Us, the duo's 15th studio album.
Over their diverse 30-year career, the alternative rockers from Brooklyn have won two Grammy Awards (one for their Malcolm In The Middle theme song "Boss Of Me", and the other for their children's album Here Come The 123s), had a platinum-selling album (1990's Flood) – and raised the bar for inspired, yet refreshingly unconventional music.
Examiner.com caught up with Linnell to chat about the tour and their wonderfully unpredictable sound as TMBG prepped for their 2012 tour dates. The exceptional artist was eager for the current leg of the tour to begin – especially since the band will be playing in locations other than the "not-so-great white north."
"You know, it's fun. It's still fun," acknowledged Linnell. "This is definitely not our first rodeo. But we went out and covered most of the two coasts and the northern sort of middle of the United States at the end of last year. And this month is going to be sort of everything else – Texas, and Southwest and Florida. It's a good time to go to all of those places for us – get out of the North!"
While Linnell felt that life on the road is much the same as it was when Giants began touring almost 30 years ago, he confessed to one "significant" change.
"We now have a cappuccino maker (chuckling). That's been an improvement. It's not radically different. I guess mainly, now almost everybody in the band has kids, so there's a lot more skyping home every day than there used to be."
"And everybody's a little more concerned about their health now. We're middle-aged guys. It's not the most healthy environment being on a bus with eleven other guys (laughing)."
Linnell, Flansburgh and their bandmates, drummer Marty Beller, guitarist Dan Miller, and bassist Danny Weinkauf, have a brilliant instinctive ability to make serious music without taking themselves too seriously.
"I don't know if it was voluntary. Well who among us is so humorless that would not be able to find any humor in their own foibles? That seems like a pretty bleak outlook. You're just grimly going through your life."
"Yeah, we are all ridiculous people. And I guess as we carry on sort of the goofiness of it, it does loom ever larger. But we're trying to do a good job. We take the job seriously and we're trying to keep it good and keep it interesting and that requires some thought and some work."
Occasionally, even the most experienced fans forget that it is work – especially when it's so apparent that the band enjoys the pursuit of a magical melody. And for TMBG it's almost as if being able to make a living from it is just icing on the cake.
"You know, I suppose there wouldn't be any cake really, if we couldn't support it. Or it would be drastically reduced. . .it would be a cupcake. If we were having to do day jobs and try and do this, it would be a different experience. We're incredibly lucky actually to have it support itself, you know?"
"I can't even imagine what it would be like to have been doing this for this long and having to work day jobs, 'cause I'm a naturally lazy person so that's a terrifying idea to me. But you know, we certainly did when we started out."
"We had three years where we were working day jobs and we were obsessively writing and recording at that time. So it's possible."
And speaking of that cake, there's no doubt that one of the key ingredients in the Giants' success throughout their varied career has been their matchless musical creativity – a unique sound that has created some unique challenges.
"It's not easy to come up with something new when you've been doing this for thirty years. It's sort of like, 'Well, we really, really don't want to repeat ourselves.' So we have to work a little harder to come up with something we haven't already done."
"It's a pretty long, pretty beat catalogue at this point. So in that way it is hard; and also because we don't want to blow our standards. I think the other bands aren't as interesting once they've been around after a while and it kind of motivates us to try a little harder."
"Even if we were just as good as we were twenty-five years ago, that's still not good enough. Because people aren't gonna stay with you necessarily, if you're just doing the same thing. We have to keep coming up with something new and that's sometimes very difficult."
The band's remarkable use of atypical instrumentation has certainly been an integral piece of their melodious inventiveness – and that hasn't been by accident.
"Without making it into a shtick, we always were attracted to using different sounds and some of the compelling sounds that we found were not the regular. We kind of started off on the position of, 'The Beatles were the greatest thing that ever happened,' so why would you need anything other than two guitars, a bass and a drum? And I still sort of think like that."
"You should be able to do what you're doing with this sort of simple instrumentation. But I'm coming out of playing in the high school concert band and I played a bunch of woodwinds and things as a teenager. So I always felt like I just like those sounds."
"Early on when we started out, I picked up the accordion because you could stand up and walk around with it. That seemed great you know? It seemed very appealing to me. And even from the beginning, we've always been interested in electronic sounds."
"We're just interested in a lot of different things and we haven't decided to edit them out. I think if we hadn't been doing those things, we could have just gotten along as a straightforward rock band. But I'm a pretty crappy guitar player, so I guess I would've been the drummer."
TMBG's distinctive creativity has gained them a loyal following throughout the world. But as Linnell explains, a common love for the band's music doesn't necessarily equate to a common way of expressing it.
"That's probably true, but it's a little hard to tell from the stage. I do know that in the eighties when we started playing in Europe, we had a sense that there was a different way that people enjoy themselves at concerts, especially for example playing in Germany."
"When we were young men we played our first show in Berlin. It was a very startling experience because the people that turned out really liked what we were doing, but they were standing very quietly and respectfully."
"We had played for a room full of people in Berlin and we'd finish a song. And then there was this little pause, this respectful silence, and then they started making kind of an appreciative sound. It was very weird. I wasn't sure if they liked it, but we had some of our best shows and some of our best audiences in Europe and in Holland and Germany."
"But completely off the beaten track for us, we played spring break in Panama City and I got the feeling that people just thought of us as sort of the background music to the woman pulling her shirt off (laughing). It wasn't even about us at those shows. It was just sort of the spring break wallpaper."
The Giants' willingness to explore musical territories off the beaten track has led them down some unexpected, yet gratifying pathways. The band's fortuitous foray into children's music has proven to be both rewarding and awarding.
"That was a coincidence. We got an invitation from Disney to make a kids' record, which we weren't thinking was a big deal. It didn't seem like a serious career move for us and it turned out it outsold our then current LP or whatever it was, CD, by about two to one. It was like a strange runaway success. So all of the sudden, it made us take notice."
"We did not think we were gonna have a wing of our career doing kids' music. But following on that, we got a deal from Disney to make these DVDs and they were also successful. And it managed to get a Grammy and it kind of became its own thing, not out of a plan."
"We were really not planning on doing this. Maybe part of the thing is that the first project we did was such pure fun. I mean, we were not taking this seriously for any particular age and we were not trying to make it remedial. It wasn't supposed to be good for you."
"We kind of hated that whole idea of 'This music is supposed to improve you,' although ironically, we did wind up doing these CDs, which were supposedly educational. But I always felt like they were secretly just entertainment but disguised as education (chuckling). Kids deserve to enjoy music just as much as adults do and it doesn't have to be medicine."
"We also felt like we could just take the same spirit to it that we had taken to the adult music, just apply the same standard of interestingness and funness. So that was kind of how that wound up being a real thing, not being a shtick. It wasn't a mercenary thing as it turned out."
Given the band's varied musical ventures, might there be anything left on They Might Be Giants' wish list?
"Well, the thing that's kind of insane is we've never actually had a wish list. We think in a more general way. We've hoped that we'd come up with things unexpected and surprising, out of the box each time."
"Every time we try to write a song, we're not quite sure what we're doing and sort of feeling around in the darkness as it were. And so really that process has just continued. We don't ever quite know where we're going and that's managed to sustain us for almost thirty years now, just groping around. So I think we're gonna stick with that program and see where it takes us."
"I read this interview with Randy Newman where he was saying, 'There's nobody around to tell you when you start sucking.' Not in so many words, but he said, 'There's nobody who taps you on the shoulder and says stop the fight.'"
If the next 30 years of music sound as fresh as the last 30 years, They Might Be Giants will be fighting for awhile.
See you at The Rialto.