Among Giants

Despite dance-floor excursions on his latest album, They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh is still ‘in love with the song’

By JOE TEPPERMAN
Music Editor
They Might Be Giants is living, evolving musical proof that nothing ever changes. Despite the clear progression from experimental studio pop to high-energy live rock, John Flansburgh and John Linnell's nearly two-decade-old, bizarre but addictive band has always been conceptually perfect in that it has no sense of concept whatsoever. The closest the Johns have come to any sort of unifying album idea, not counting solo efforts, was "Fingertips" on 1992's Apollo 18, and even that was just this next part to be read sarcastically the penultimate 21 ingenious, quick-cut, free-association songs, not a rock opera or anything.
The newest release, Mink Car, is no exception it probably illustrates They Might Be Giants' song-specific orientation better than any previous album. A recurring penchant for style collecting has hopefully exhausted Flansburgh and Linnell's secret stash of lame irony, as Mink Car roves from the Bacharach-esque title track to the Pet Shop Boys school of synth pop on "Man, It's So Loud in Here."
But in a way, it fits. Who else would put such disposable, cringe-worthy nonsense as "Wicked Little Critta" just tracks away from "Cyclops Rock," certainly They Might Be Giants' best song since "Doctor Worm?"
During a break from this fall's successful tour in support of Mink Car, Flansburgh revealed that "Cyclops Rock," like all great They Might Be Giants songs, "really is about somebody who feels profoundly rejected, and how harsh that is."
In the same sense that Mink Car, though not a cohesive album, can be thought of as essentially, undeniably and disjointedly TMBG, "Cyclops Rock" is the ultimate They Might Be Giants song. With its references to "Child's Play" (I'm sick / Like Chuckie was sick) and allusions to fictional dance crazes and heartbreak (no distinction, mind you), the lyrics are gloriously indecipherable: Cyclops time, Cyclops mind, Cyclops this, Cyclops that an amorphous adjective that best typifies a trademark Giants narrator: someone who is neither Flansburgh nor Linnell, but a character with whom they can identify all the same.
"I think it's safe to say that we're officially outsiders," Flansburgh said, and thank goodness. "Whether you think of us as not-handsome guys in a rock band or not-trendy people in the field of rock music or kind of do-it-yourself alternative-from-the-mainstream people Š like, however you want to define what makes something outside, it's safe to say that that's where we are."
Maybe so, but real outsiders don't play sold-out tours, don't do the theme music for "Malcolm in the Middle" and definitely wouldn't have a documentary in the works to commemorate their band's 20th anniversary.
"Yeah, I think maybe Œoutsider' isn't the right word," Flansburgh said, correcting himself. "How about Œhaunted loner?' I do think there's something cool about being free to write about stuff that kind of destroys any notion of the writer as a cool person. We can write about disfigurement and people don't think it's about us. They just think we're nuts."
Disfigurement does seem to be an unconscious half-theme running throughout Mink Car. It at least goes for "Hopeless Bleak Despair," "I've Got a Fang" and "My Man" all lighthearted songs about depression, deformity and paralysis, respectively. Now who says They Might Be Giants has no conceptual sense?
Flansburgh himself: "I haven't really thought about (ŒCyclops Rock') that much in terms of how it reflects on us." Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.
Flansburgh and Linnell do have a natural talent for this sort of thing, regardless of their inability to notice (much less exploit) said talent. But then there's "Mr. Xcitement," just one of a handful of songs on Mink Car that is only in character with the band insofar as it is completely out of character and, not coincidentally, fails in its attempt at genre-hopping and blatantly incorporating some undeniably trendy elements pseudo-breakbeats, turntables, whatever's cool as of late.
So what's going on here? Is They Might Be Giants little by little selling out, or what? John Flansburgh, where do your associations lie with the dweebs or the DJs?
"You know, music has a lot more in common with music than people might let on," Flansburgh said. "I mean, I think people overemphasize the difference between genres. And for me, I have to say, when I'm listening to the radio, I'll often be listening to the hip-hop station, much to the frustration of my wife, who's really not into the messages of a lot of hip-hop songs Š But it's the production. As somebody who was raised on experimental music and electronic music, to hear the way those tracks get put together is, like, totally exciting. There's nothing more exciting to me than hearing an interesting hip-hop song, you know? I mean, it gets your feet going. It blew my mind when I heard it."
And to Flansburgh, it's the same for other types of music too. "I like listening to doo-wop records," he said, "and I don't listen to them thinking, like, how authentic they are. It's more like visiting a musical haunted house. When I hear doo-wop, I find it scary. There's something so weird about hearing the bass singer go, like, (sings) ŒHooowooo,' you know? It's like monster music!"
OK, points well-taken. In fact, it explains quite a bit. So that's what happened with all those seemingly superfluous remixes amongst the otherwise entertaining b-sides.
"I think it's safe to say I'm probably responsible for that kind of misguided thread of our career," Flansburgh admitted unapologetically.
Similarly, the production on Mink Car isn't meant to be overly ironic or hip or anything, it's just exploring the possibilities and doing what the members of They Might Be Giants have been interested in for a long time, but have never had the chance to really mess with until now.
"It's only been in the last five years that we've really acclimated ourselves to a live band, a live rhythm section and all this other stuff," he said. "Because we do a lot of electronic production as well as band stuff, there are a lot of different kinds of instrumentation that we bring into play."
An example would be the arcane and outmoded woodwinds on the latest incarnation of "Older," a song that, like much of Mink Car, has been recorded and distributed at least once before. "When I heard things like the new version of ŒOlder' with the rauschpfife and the sarrusophone," said Flansburgh, "it was hard not to feel like, ŒHey, that sounds cool.'"
He wasn't joking, either. Apparently, Mink Car was a vehicle (no pun intended) for brand-new versions of "Working Undercover for the Man," "She Thinks She's Edith Head" and a few others previously made available in unfinished form through TMBG Unlimited, an online MP3 subscription club exclusively for TMBG fanatics. But having all these different versions floating about begs the question of why.
"There's no master plan behind having multiple versions of songs in the world," Flansburgh explained. "I think it's more of an indication of how untogether we are."
That, and how MP3-friendly you are. The format works surprisingly well for They Might Be Giants, both as a logical extension of their Dial-a-Song phone service, which dates back to the band's inception (a time when the very idea of giving away music was heretical), and because of an aforementioned devotion to individual songs, not albums.
Which comes back to the fundamental point about the new TMBG: naysayers who dismiss Mink Car as a mildly insulting appeal to the lowest common fan denominator (i.e. people who only know They Might Be Giants as the "Istanbul" band) have to admit that, no matter how stylistically inconsistent or self-consciously idiosyncratic the ride gets, it will forever be a blast seeing as Linnell and Flansburgh still write the catchiest, prettiest and most zanily complex songs since their unwitting hybrid of Elvis Costello and Frank Zappa gave birth to the intelligently immature.
"I mean, it's one thing to have better grooves and incorporate it into your music," Flansburgh said, "and it's sort of something else to actually be doing dance-floor music. We have a hard enough time even just writing a song that's three minutes long I don't know how we'd ever get dance-floor stuff happening, short of actually bringing in ringer DJ people. Which is not out of the realm of possibility. But it's not our orientation. We're still in love with the song."
As you should be, Flansburgh it's what you're best at.

Copyright 2001 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 144, No. 36 (Wednesday, October 17, 2001), beginning on page 7 and ending on page 10.