They Might Be Giants' Flood

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS’ FLOOD

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there

is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as

significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in

the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and

eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal

celebration — The New York Times Book Review

Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes

just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone

One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut

These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic

design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look

cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it

down in startling minutiae. We love these.

We are huge nerds — Vice

A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK)

Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon

Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype

[A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK)

We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only

source for reading about music (but if we had our way …

watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything

there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check

out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork

For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit

our blog at 333sound.com and our website at

http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies

Follow us on Twitter: @333books

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books

For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series:

I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

Selected Ambient Works Vol. II by Marc Weidenbaum

Smile by Luis Sanchez

Biophilia by Nicola Dibben

Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley

Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

Entertainment! by Kevin Dettmar

Live Through This by Anwyn Crawford

Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

Dangerous by Susan Fast

Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

Blank Generation by Pete Astor

Sigur Ros: ( ) by Ethan Hayden

Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

and many more …

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway

50 Bedford Square

New York

London

NY 10018

WC1B 3DP

USA

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury

Publishing Plc

First published 2014

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information

storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from

the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization

acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this

publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

They Might Be Giants’ Flood / S. Alexander Reed and Philip

Sandifer. -- 1st edition.

pages cm. -- (33 1/3)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62356-915-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. They Might Be

Giants (Musical group) 2. They Might Be Giants (Musical group)

Flood. 3. Rock musicians--United States--Biography. 4. Rock

music--1981-1990--History and criticism. I. Sandifer, Phillip,

author. II. Title. III. Title: Flood.

ML421.T514R44 2013

782.42166092'2--dc23

2013024807

ISBN: 978-1-62356-965-5

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk

NR21 8NN

Flood

They Might Be Giants

1. “

Theme From Flood

” (0:28)

2. “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

” (3:20)

3. “

Lucky Ball & Chain

” (2:46)

4. “

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

” (2:38)

5. “

Dead

” (2:58)

6. “

Your Racist Friend

” (2:54)

7. “

Particle Man

” (1:59)

8. “

Twisting

” (1:56)

9. “

We Want a Rock

” (2:47)

10. “

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

” (2:23)

11. “

Hearing Aid

” (3:26)

12. “

Minimum Wage

” (0:47)

13. “

Letterbox

” (1:25)

14. “

Whistling in the Dark

” (3:25)

15. “

Hot Cha

” (1:34)

16. “

Women & Men

” (1:46)

17. “

Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love

” (1:36)

18. “

They Might Be Giants

” (2:45)

19. “

Road Movie to Berlin

” (2:22)

•

viii

•

Prologue: Theme from Flood

Two F l o o d s ( T h e re ’s a P i c t u re O p p o s i t e M e o f

M y P r i m i t i ve A n c e s t r y )

A photograph of the Ohio River’s 1937 deluge emblazons

the cover of They Might Be Giants’ 1990 album Flood.

Both Floods poured into a million American homes, but

while the former killed 385 people, the latter managed to

kill absolutely no one. Flood is, after all, not a ferocious

record. Where rock fans might want John Flansburgh’s

guitar to roar, they get a pinched meow instead. There

are no awesome drum solos or trancelike beats, just a

sterile, tinny rhythm machine. Flansburgh and his accor-

dionist bandmate John Linnell sing in voices so nasal

that a rock critic once asked them if they sounded like

Olive Oyl on purpose. This is not music for cool people.

But there’s actually something more interesting

happening on Flood than rocking out. Despite the sleeve

photo, the flood that the album uncorks doesn’t refer to

a past event, but instead we might hear it as a creative

practice. And not to put too fine a point on it, the

band’s “flooding” on this album can tell us a lot about

an important shift around 1990 that gave a new social,

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

technological, and ultimately economic legitimacy to

what we might call geek culture.

The authors of this book first heard Flood as middle

schoolers at an academic summer camp. The program’s

name was CTY—Center for Talented Youth—but to our

classmates during the regular school year, it was usually

just called nerd camp. In our public schools, it was a

statement of fact that we were nerds; there was no use

denying it. CTY by its nature attracted a lot of people

like us from the outskirts of various social groups, and

its own culture was heavily impacted by the fact that

for large swaths of its student population, those three

summer weeks were the first time that they had been

in a like-minded social environment. Campers’ parents

sent them for the academics, but more than coursework,

every kid there treasured that sense of belonging, and

as such, the weekly dances served as major centerpieces

of the larger experience. Each Friday, Flood’s iconic

single “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

” marked a peak of giddy,

electrified togetherness for 400 teenagers. For a few

minutes, being a nerd wasn’t about isolation.

If the media’s portrait of They Might Be Giants is

to be believed, this experience was no fluke. Billboard

magazine declares them “nerd-rock heroes,” Pitchfork

Media champions them as “geek-rock kings,” and

England’s New Musical Express dubs them a “nerdhouse

cabaret act.” The words geek and nerd—setting aside

any arguable differences between them—are cavalierly

tossed around in writeups of the band without much

definition or qualification, which suggests there’s an

unwritten assumption that readers not only understand

the terms, but that they also understand why such labels

F L O O D

•

might be applied to They Might Be Giants’ music, fairly

or otherwise. The implication is that whatever it is that

makes someone a geek, you’ll find it on Flood.

Flood, then, helps us to understand a certain identity,

a way of being. It’s especially interesting to scope out

the album’s supposed geekdom in the context of its

time, because 1990 was a transformative moment for

that pocket of culture. For the band’s own part, the

Johns Linnell and Flansburgh grew up in the 1960s and

1970s, a time when the meanings of nerd and geek first

came to specify bookish social outcasts, limited in both

physical strength and traditional attractiveness. To their

generation, geekdom offered little more than ostracism,

and so accordingly the band is defensive about the label:

Linnell explains, “As far as the ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’ thing goes,

I think that’s a way of describing unusual things when

you’re uncomfortable with them.”

But part of Flood’s importance in 1990 comes precisely

from its dearness to that culture—most of whom were

a half-generation younger than the two Johns—who

reclaimed the smear of geek and shaped it into a viable

social identity. To some, it even became an identity worth

aspiring to. After all, when Flood came out on January 5

of that year, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time

ranked as a top-ten New York Times bestseller, Garry

Kasparov had secured genuine rock star status just a few

weeks earlier when he defeated the Deep Thought chess

supercomputer, and Bill Gates was the richest thirty-

something on the planet.

For geek to turn from an insult into a source of

individual and collective empowerment meant that it

needed to connote more than booksmarts, Star Trek

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

fandom, or an enthusiasm for Dungeons & Dragons.

Indeed, Flood doesn’t offer much in the way of tradi-

tionally geeky iconography. It’s true that after Flood, the

band was declared “Musical Ambassadors to International

Space Year” (as endorsed by the United Nations in 1992),

and they released the children’s record Here Comes Science

in 2009, but these achievements serve less to market the

band to geeks than to reaffirm a longstanding public

identity. Instead, Flood encapsulates in 43 minutes and

14 seconds a moment when geekdom demanded recog-

nition not as a set of interests, but as a way of thinking.

It’s not reasonable to claim that the record on its own

turned the tides of outcast identity, but Flood nonetheless

helps us to understand how and when such a shift could

happen. The appeal of They Might Be Giants doesn’t

come from what they write songs about, but instead

from how they write songs. What other explanation is

there for fans’ dizzy adoration of “

Minimum Wage

”—a

song containing nothing more than John Flansburgh’s

triumphant belting of the title, a crack of a whip, and 45

seconds of retro lounge sauntering?

O ve r f l o w ( T h a t ’s A l l I C a n T h i n k o f, b u t I ’ m

S u re T h e re ’s S o m e t h i n g E l s e )

This is where the notion of the flood comes in. In the

music of They Might Be Giants, flooding is an artistic

overflow; it is a supply of creative resources that so

overwhelms the demands of creation that songwriting

ceases to be about clearly expressing a single idea, and

turns into a playground of excess ideas.

F L O O D

•

xii

•

John Flansburgh explained to the New York Times in

1987: “Most people just don’t bring everything they’ve

got to what they do. We don’t feel we have to strip

things away and make the songs more simple for people

to understand what we’re about… it’s a cornucopia, a

myriad.”

The notion of sheer quantity arises time and again

in the band’s output. In the 1990 promotional video for

Flood, the two Johns make their case clear:

Linnell: Some records that come out today only have ten
songs, or less.

Flansburgh: This makes us angry.

Linnell: But instead of cursing the darkness, John and I
have decided to do something about it. We’ve put out a
record with nineteen songs on it.

Flansburgh: And that’s why our record is better.

Behind this joke lurks a telling possibility. If nonsense,

variability, and excess are the hallmarks of “cornucopia,”

then the songwriting practices of clarity, focus, and

restraint are the stuff of famine—certainly boring, and

quite possibly stupid.

As we’ll explore, even as the album’s nineteen songs

overflow by virtue of their number, the songs themselves

are little floods. With no stylistic foreshadowing, the

heavy metal guitar solo of “

Your Racist Friend

” suddenly

drowns beneath a calypso trumpet interlude. In the

chorus of “

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

,” the

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

xiii

•

vocal rhythm is every bit as non-sequitur as the lyric.

The knowledge of musical genre on parade throughout

Flood might seem outright boastful if its specifics weren’t

so desperately uncool by 1990 standards: Edwardian

musical theatre in “

Theme from Flood

,” rockabilly in

“Lucky Ball and Chain,” contradance in “We Want a

Rock,” and sea chantey in “Women and Men.” Humbly

armed with a cheap Alesis SR-16 drum machine, the

two Johns actually exhibit little interest in showing off;

conspicuous virtuosity is additive within a rock song,

whereas They Might Be Giants’ music is, as Flansburgh

says, the result of not stripping things away. One gets the

sense that the music is really just that effortlessly overrun.

What’s going on here is playfulness. Flood embodies

the idea that creativity is an open-ended result of

asking “what if,” and not the single-minded pursuit

of a pre-imagined ideal. The band’s music rejoices in

a continual sense of play, altering and subverting the

expected order of things, whether imagining the world

from the perspective of a canary-shaped nightlight or

inventing bizarre fictional fads involving prosthetic

foreheads. The point isn’t whether “

Particle Man

” is a

metaphor for the struggle between science and religion

(as many fans suppose it is), but instead that “Particle

Man” is both unwriteable and incomprehensible under

the assumptions of order and of one-to-one lyrical

meaning that a lot of performers and audiences bring

to their musical experience. Because They Might Be

Giants’ music is (almost) never in service of a joke, the

silliness of songs like “

Particle Man

” is exploratory, not

goal-driven. Musical, lyrical, and visual ideas then exist

for their own sake.

F L O O D

•

xiv

•

The word flood shares a root with affluence, and it’s

easy to see that there’s an economics of mental resources

at work here, both on the part of the band in playing

haphazardly with ideas (rather than investing them

carefully) and on the part of audiences in relating to this

particular sort of mental excess. Enjoying Flood’s brand

of playfulness affirms a listener’s sense of her own intel-

ligence, imbues fandom with a secret language shared

between artist and audience, and celebrates weirdness

for its own sake. See why this might be appealing to an

auditorium of allegedly gifted teens at nerd camp?

All of this has further implications in terms of cultural

criticism. Geek culture occupies an unusual social space.

On the one hand it is defined by the enormous privilege

implicit in having access to computers, wide swaths

of literature and media, and education. Unspoken in

an aesthetic of playfulness is the economic security

necessary to “play” in the first place (it’s fitting that

private college campuses have been a lynchpin of the

band’s tours since the beginning). On the other hand,

geekdom is often marked by a sense of social isolation

and even by bullying.

This mix of privilege and outsider status is, in many

ways, also mirrored by the band itself, particularly during

its time at Elektra Records, starting with Flood. They

Might Be Giants were in many ways an odd choice for

so large a record company, and Flood is an exceedingly

strange animal. On the one hand it is self-consciously

designed in its production and song sequencing to be a

breakthrough major-label debut. On the other, it is nearly

self-evident that the two Johns were destined never

to become mainstream stars. This tension is audible

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

throughout the album, and it speaks to the oddness of

1990’s musical moment, when the reversal of social tides

loomed large enough in culture (and sounded clearly

enough in the band’s music) that somebody figured—

rightly, as it turned out—a million people wanted to

hear this.

What follows, then, is an exploration of the thicket of

historical and cultural contexts that Flood encompasses.

This means tracing the musical and cultural origins

of They Might Be Giants inasmuch as they help us to

understand why and how this record matters. It also

means looking at the people who have embraced this

album and investigating how in 1990 it was so poised to

interact with their own particular ways of being. In the

pages that follow, we’ll see the collisions of childhood,

technology, and subculture, their unintended effects

rippling well beyond the domain of music.

•

Who Might Be Giants?

D o n ’t L e t ’s S t a r t ( T h e Wo rs t Pa r t )

Having given a glimpse of what this book is, we want

to acknowledge what it isn’t (hopefully we’re still

early enough for this page to show up in the online

“preview this book” feature). We’re not dishing out

a tell-all about the Johns, nor trying to offer some

Rosetta Stone promising the secret meanings of all

of their songs. This approach would be useless in

explaining anything interesting about Flood. This isn’t

that kind of book largely because They Might Be

Giants aren’t that kind of band. But explaining what

kind of band they are is a trickier proposition. Much

of it stems from understanding what the band is often

mistaken for being.

One of the most irritatingly frequent descriptions of

They Might Be Giants is that they’re “funny.” But Flood

is decidedly not a novelty record, because long after

its novelty wears off, audiences persistently return and

find new interpretive possibilities. It responds in kind to

listeners’ heady acrobatics and heartfelt affection alike,

which can make listening to it feel more dialectic and

F L O O D

•

participatory than pop’s Great Album paradigm usually

affords.

A big factor here is that John Flansburgh and John

Linnell’s egos never take center stage on their records,

or even really in their daily lives. Says Flansburgh, “We

really don’t put a lot of ourselves—our personal lives—

into the world,” and while they’ve given hundreds of

interviews over the years, they avoid talking interpre-

tively about themselves or their work.

This is a little unusual in pop music, where tabloids

and groupies most often reward spectacles of catharsis

and confession. It’s therefore pretty unsatisfying to

approach the band’s music with the journalist’s well-worn

approach of biographical analysis.

We can actually witness in the band’s music itself the

degree to which it functions independently of their “real”

lives: 1988’s “Ana Ng” is They Might Be Giants’ most

iconic love song, but it serenades a complete stranger—

one whose appeal is, in fact, her very status as a stranger.

Says Linnell, “in the phone book… there were about

four pages of this name that contains no vowels, Ng. I

was fascinated.” The enterprising journalist who tracks

down Miss Ana Ng herself for a salacious tell-all will be

sorely disappointed.

In fact, across the band’s oeuvre, the stylized perfor-

mance of personality that pop trains listeners to hear as

“authentic” is effectively absent. Usually it’s submerged

beneath or jettisoned by the songs’ offbeat topics

(“

Particle Man

,” “

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

”),

their unreliable narrators (“

Whistling in the Dark

,”

“

Hearing Aid

”), and their foregrounding of wordplay or

stylistic put-ons (“

Letterbox

,” “

Women and Men

”).

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

Even on the rare occasions when their work might

be identifiably autobiographical, this dimension is

strangely unhelpful in understanding the songs, almost

without exception. Some fans maintain, for instance, that

Flansburgh wrote “

Hot Cha

” about his older brother,

with whom he’d had an occasionally fraught relationship,

and who moved into a commune in 1988. In fact, his

brother has blogged that he agrees with this interpre-

tation. But even if it were true, it’s not actually helpful

in understanding the song, most notably because the

lyrics are so focused on the particular. Nothing about the

image of Hot Cha leaving the bathtub running over and

bacon cooking on the stove is clarified or augmented by

hunting down the details of Flansburgh’s supposed angst.

Even when the song starts to play towards a moment of

emotional catharsis and expression in the third verse,

there’s a clear distancing effect. No matter how revealing

Flansburgh’s declaration that they “would throw such a

party” if Hot Cha were to return, the detail of “fondue

forks for everybody” is still so particular as to hobble any

act of individual relating.

Allow us to drive the message home by pointing

out a moment buried in Flood’s seventeenth track,

“

Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love

.” Between the song’s

noir-ish musical passages (built on a bass ascent of the

augmented fourth, or the “Devil’s interval”), both the

band’s members harmonize each other on the dire lyric,

“John, I’ve been bad, and they’re comin’ after me. Done

someone wrong and I fear that it was me.” The duo’s

invocation of “John” almost compels a double-take. After

sixteen tracks in which it’s nearly impossible to attempt

any sort of biographical reading, the album suddenly

F L O O D

•

doubles down on autobiography with a direct invocation

of the singers’ name. This is, generally speaking, not

done in pop music; as much as “authentic” emotional

confessionalism is valued, to have a song be absolutely

and unequivocally about the singer prevents the audience

identification that is part of singing along. And so, at

first glance, the line seems not only autobiographical but

shockingly so.

But if we as listeners have any sense of the people

behind this music, a frantic world of gunshots, bullets,

and retribution is an unthinkable “real” place for them

to inhabit. Any “John” available to the audience is just a

character.

And lest we deny this in search of a grander

biographical truth, the duo’s vocal harmonies and the

lyric’s reflexive revelation that “someone” is “me” effec-

tively obliterate any differentiation between subject and

object. Indeed, the knowledge that allows the line to be

read autobiographically also forecloses the reading: the

fact that the line is sung by two Johns undermines the

apparent singularity of the direct address.

But paradox of this sort is the norm here. Just as

the repeating Devil’s interval in the bass musically

highlights two seemingly irreconcilable notes, the

“bullets from a revolver” are revealed to be “bullets

of pure love.” The unexpected warmth of the song’s

ending communicates clearly: there is no conflict;

embrace the paradox.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

R e s i s t i n g A t t r i b u t i o n ( H e ’s E ve n G o t a Tw i n

L i ke M e )

Fans sometimes can’t tell Linnell and Flansburgh apart

on the band’s records, and their album credits offer no

info about what song is whose. Maybe these listeners’

difficulty arises because the Johns sing with similarly

reedy voices and write with comparable styles—though

it’s not hard to tune in to Flansburgh’s punkishness and

Linnell’s penchant for chord progressions straight from a

third-year music theory textbook. But maybe their music

actually resists attribution by placing its concerns so firmly

outside pop’s ethos where identities must be stable,

brandable, and constructed around ideals of authenticity,

audacity, beauty, and/or wealth.

(Here’s a fun game to play at home: go find a They

Might Be Giants album that features a photo of the

Johns’ faces on its cover. We’ll wait. Really.)

The thing that stands out isn’t just the fact that these

songs resist attribution, but it’s how they accomplish that.

The band in effect produces an anonymity of specificity.

Most pop music creates a sense of authentic emotion

and confession that is nevertheless broad enough for

audience to (mis)identify with the songs. And so we

have the spectacle, for instance, of simultaneously trying

to figure out who Taylor Swift has broken up with this

time and imagining that the song is really about our

own latest heartbreak. But They Might Be Giants goes

to the opposite extreme: their songs are so packed with

idiosyncratic details and specifics that they become

completely anonymous, often even with relation to each

other.

F L O O D

•

So it’s both more sensitive to Flood and more generally

productive to argue for a way of hearing the album than

for any one dogmatic hearing of it. In the outpouring

of references, details, and ideas within Flood and They

Might Be Giants’ work at large, the appropriate response

is not to attempt to contain the ideas, but to accept them

in their multitude.

A funny twist here is that the Johns’ personal

backstories do actually give us useful information when

it comes to the creative sensibility of flooding, even if

they tell us nothing about the actual contents of their

songs. The broad stylistic approach and the supernatural

chemistry that Linnell and Flansburgh share both come

into clearer focus when we learn that they have known

each other since they were tweens, and that they come

from the same history-rich place. When fans learn this

fact, they usually fail spectacularly to be surprised by it.

This is because, broadly speaking, history and childhood

thematically pervade the band’s work (as an example, their

song “Purple Toupée” encompasses both ideas nicely).

Looking to the duo’s origins and early days is therefore

not just an exercise in Behind-the-Music fan service.

More specifically, despite Linnell and Flansburgh’s

public identity as “Direct From Brooklyn”—as their 1999

video collection declares—their hometown of Lincoln,

Massachusetts looms large. This is most bluntly obvious

in the title of their second LP Lincoln and in the ridiculous

accents that John Linnell affects on tracks such as “A

Self Called Nowhere” and “Wicked Little Critta.” But

beyond these entertaining superficialities, Lincoln played

a deeper, ever more subtle role in shaping the personality

of the two Johns and the character of their music.

•

Lincoln

E a s t e r n M a s s a ch u s e t t s Fo r B eg i n n e rs

( T h i s I n k S p o t W h e re I S t a n d )

Approximately four hundred million years ago the ancient

micro-continent of Avalonia collided with Laurentia as

part of the formation of Pangaea. Two hundred million

years later the continents split up again, and what was

formerly Avalonia was rent apart, leaving bits of itself

in eastern New England while other parts went and

formed bits of Europe and the Scottish Highlands (in

actuality a continuation of the Appalachian Mountains).

Some two hundred million years after that (give or take

a hundred thousand) the terrain was smoothed out by

the Wisconsin glaciation, which had the side effect, a few

thousand miles west, of allowing humans to cross what is

now the Bering Strait and settle the continent.

Roughly twenty thousand years later a group of

people approached the continent from the other

direction and renamed everything in the hopes that

people would like it better that way. In 1654 they named

a settlement Concord. A century later, a region of

Concord petitioned to be split off. Chambers Russell,

F L O O D

•

a bureaucrat instrumental in accomplishing this split,

was invited to name the newly formed town, and opted

to christen it after his ancestral home in Lincolnshire,

England, making it one of only two Lincolns in America

not named after Abraham. It was here that Paul Revere’s

famed midnight ride came to the end shared by so many

late-night revolutionary activities: getting nicked by the

authorities. Still, minutemen from Lincoln were among

the first troops mustered to fight the British.

In 1962, Cornell-trained architect Earl Flansburgh

scouted out a patch of woods in the south end of Lincoln,

near Valley Pond. He decided it was an ideal spot to build

an adventurously contemporary home for his young

family. Strikingly modernist with all right-angles, clean

white paneling, and endless glass, the Flansburgh house

was completed in 1963, exactly 25 years after Bauhaus

designer Walter Gropius set up his own residence in

town, just a few miles north. Magazine photographers

soon descended on the place, stepping carefully around

the family’s Would-Be-Giant. At age 5, John Conant

Flansburgh probably missed the 1965 writeup that his

house got in Architectural Record, but he may well have

been shown the pictures of his living room that graced

the pages of Better Homes and Gardens a year later.

Middlesex County is home to the tenth most million-

aires of any in the country, and Lincoln prides itself on

a legacy of education, a knack for the artistic, and a Paul

Revere-esque attitude of political questioning and even

confrontation. The cars on Lincoln’s streets don’t have

spoilers, but those snow tires don’t come cheap. One

could surely criticize the town as sheltered and a little

sleepy, but to the Johns Linnell and Flansburgh, Lincoln

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

rewarded a bookishness and brashness that would have

branded them outcasts in many American high schools

of the 1970s. Lincoln held open the floodgates.

The palpable sense of history in Lincoln is less a

bragging point than a simple fact—and indeed this could

be said for most of Eastern Massachusetts. Two hours

south on the Cape is Barnstable, the 1644 landing spot

and home of London-born Robert Linnell, eleventh

great-grandfather of John Sydney Linnell. The family

tree winds through Wisconsin and Illinois, where in

1860 Lewis Linnell dropped out of college to work on

Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign; his photo-

graph, fittingly, would appear on the cover of 1988’s

Lincoln album. But the family returned to Massachusetts

when Zenos Linnell—John’s father—came to study

psychiatry at Harvard and Boston University in the

1940s. The elder Linnell worked briefly in New York,

where his children were born, but the family had moved

to Lincoln by John’s tenth birthday.

Being where it is, Lincoln bears an easy connection

to the past, and that can make a hefty impact on the kids

who grow up there. It’s the sort of place where nobody

makes a big deal out of tracing a family’s lineage 350

years. (For those keeping score, at least one source places

the seventeenth-century Flansburghs, not to be outdone,

in old New York, back when it was New Amsterdam.)

As John Flansburgh recalls, the annual Independence

Day parade in Lincoln was foundational—“Like the

Mummer’s Parade on a really small scale. There was

something very Seussian about the whole affair.”

F L O O D

•

H i g h S ch o o l Ava n t - G a rd e ( I S h o u l d B e

A l l o we d t o S h o o t M y M o u t h O f f )

The Johns were largely unaware of the firmly neoliberal

privilege that surrounded them when they met at Ephraim

Curtis Middle School (named for a Massachusetts school-

master born in 1642, of course). Within a few years,

though, the radical setup of Lincoln-Sudbury Regional

High School had begun to tip them off. Under the vision

of its superintendent and principal Willard Ruliffson,

students were free to come and go through classrooms

and hallways, were encouraged in actively radical politics

by a faculty whose average age was below thirty, and were

guided toward intellectual esoterica by a curriculum that

offered the choice of over 70 electives in English and 35

in History. Teachers and students loaded up in school

buses to attend political protests together. It was in these

years that Linnell and Flansburgh came to be friends

while writing and cartooning for The Promethean, “the

only high school newspaper without a sports section,”

cracks Linnell.

The band’s self-titled first record—“The Pink Album,”

as many fans call it—is dedicated to James McIntyre.

Although it’s easy to think of Linnell and Flansburgh as

a matched pair, back at Lincoln-Sudbury the Johns both

constellated in Jimmy McIntyre’s orbit. In an interview

with musician and überfan Myke Weiskopf, the Johns’

former teacher Bill Schechter says of Jimmy: “He was

an incredibly bright, smart, clever, witty, knowledgeable

kid. When I think of Flansburgh and Linnell, I think

of McIntyre; these were kids who were really in the

avant-garde of the school. McIntyre would write 90

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

percent of the newspaper in one night… I think that you

can’t understand their high-school years without under-

standing the catalytic qualities of Jimmy McIntyre. This

is the kid who was the genius.”

The three formed an oddball clique whose excitable

weirdness was a sort that only 15-year-olds seem capable

of: a geeked-out pseudo-Dada flair for randomness amid

a passionate, even political belief that absolutely every-

thing mattered; a jubilance at being newly alive within

the world’s flood of ideas. In particular, Jimmy’s appetite

for underground rock was contagious, and it helped coax

the Johns away from their primary ambitions of art and

writing, turning them instead toward music—he was the

one who gave Flansburgh his first Ramones record and

convinced him to learn the guitar. Jimmy dropped out

of Lincoln-Sudbury after his sophomore year, but by

that time his record reviews were already appearing in

the Boston Phoenix newspaper. At age twenty, he became

the music director at the city’s top rock station WBCN,

where, as “Jimmy Mack,” he proved pivotal in breaking

the likes of U2 stateside. He remained close with Linnell

and Flansburgh as they went off to college at UMass

and George Washington University, respectively, and he

continued to keep in touch when the Johns both moved

to Brooklyn in 1981.

Openly gay, Jimmy contracted HIV in the early

1980s, and his health quickly worsened. Linnell and

Flansburgh traveled to be with him in his last days, when

he was hospitalized in Virginia.

Jimmy McIntyre has stuck with the band in a lot of

ways. As Schechter remembers, he “was a ‘third Giant’…

I’m not talking about ‘you should know they had a friend

F L O O D

•

who later died’ and that sentimental business, [but] this

is why the Giants agreed to come back to Lincoln-Sud

and do a benefit for this MLK Action AIDS project [in

1993]; they did it in Jimmy’s memory.” We can also see

the continuing connection in the Johns’ contribution to

2003’s Wig In A Box benefit record for Harvey Milk High

School. And if we turn our ear toward the spectral, we

might hear the echo of this third giant when Flansburgh

sings in 1992’s “The Guitar,” “Who’s that playing the

guitar? Is it Jim?”

•

Brooklyn’s Ambassadors of Love

C o m i n g t o N e w Yo rk ( N o w I Wa l k T h r o u g h

B l i z z a rd s Ju s t t o G e t U s B a ck To ge t h e r )

The road from Lincoln to New York was not entirely

straightforward. From high school both Johns followed

the normative path to college, with John Linnell going

to UMass Amherst and John Flansburgh to George

Washington University in D.C. As a freshman at UMass,

Linnell had enjoyed a handful of classes in English and

music theory, but he decided to take a year off from

school before returning. That year off has stretched, as

of this writing, into 32 years off. He probably isn’t going

to re-enroll.

Instead, he spent some time playing keyboards with

Rhode Island-based act The Mundanes, who sounded

more than a little like Blondie. The six-piece had built

a regional following playing shows with the Ramones,

the B-52s, and a not-yet-famous Cyndi Lauper, and

so in 1981, when seemingly every new wave band was

landing a record deal, they moved to New York City in

hopes of hitting it big too. The band’s aspirations were

high, but for his part, Linnell didn’t get to contribute

F L O O D

•

much creatively, and he was never the focus of attention

onstage—even when he bleached his hair blond. Right as

Linnell and the other Mundanes came to the city, John

Flansburgh transferred to Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute to

study printmaking (he’d most recently been at Antioch

College in Ohio, having left George Washington

University). Planning their respective relocations, the

Johns got back in contact with each other and moved

into the same building in Fort Greene, allegedly on the

same day.

Like Linnell, Flansburgh had also spent some time by

this point slogging it in “real” rock bands that were a far

cry from the willfully bizarre tape-machine recordings

they’d made together in high school—most infamously

a cover of Yoko Ono’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s

Only Looking for her Hand in the Snow).” Maybe it

was because the Johns’ adventures in pop music hadn’t

translated to genuinely encouraging opportunities yet,

or maybe it was just the giddy reignition of a friendship

already built on years of mutually understood weirdness,

but the Johns, now in close proximity again, found a

greater explosive creativity and personal recognition in

each other’s company than in their separate bids for rock

immortality. They’d found in one another a way to bring

Lincoln to Brooklyn.

T h e B a d Pa r t o f To w n ( M a ke R o o m Fo r t h e

To r n D o w n G a rage )

Fort Greene in Brooklyn was in bad shape at the time,

having been all but left for dead by the real estate and

financial industries. The banks had unilaterally stopped

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

approving home purchase loans for the area 15 years

earlier, and while a civic revitalization plan was newly in

place, the neighborhood’s unemployment rate was still

above 35 percent. Outside of the Pratt Institute itself,

very little social and creative support reached into John

and John’s immediate vicinity. Flansburgh remembers, “I

arrived here at a time where it seemed like it was only

going to go one way, and it was gonna just get worse and

worse.” “Like a Kurt Russell movie,” chimes in Linnell.

Even though the Johns in time developed an affection

for Brooklyn’s hardboiled grit, there was no denying

that the borough was far from an artistic hotspot. It

had diffuse cultural energy and it was badly segregated.

Instead, the siege of dinginess on all sides pointed their

creativity inward. Holed up in their building, they would

stop by each other’s apartments to talk music, and bit by

bit they inadvertently created the first They Might Be

Giants demos, negotiating the best way to merge their

rock tendencies with their reel-to-reel experimentation.

Given Brooklyn’s lack of obvious venues for their

nascent and weird little songs, and given that Linnell

had a few Manhattan-based gigging connections from

his work in The Mundanes (whom he quit at the end

of 1981), the duo’s prospects for finding peers and fans

seemed a little less hazy across the East River. Their

first show as They Might Be Giants came on January

23, 1983 at Dr. B’s, a tiny venue at 77 Greene Street in

SoHo, just a stone’s throw from Greenwich Village and

the Lower East Side. (As El Grupo de Rock and Roll,

they’d given one earlier Farfisa-driven performance in

August 1982 at a Sandanista reunion event in Central

Park—a gig they’d arbitrarily sprung for when they

F L O O D

•

heard a band was needed.) In short time, this stretch of

Manhattan would become the band’s testing ground for

their Brooklyn-made fare.

Although the area was every bit as run down as

Fort Greene, the East Village and Lower East Side

had a promising reputation among those in the know.

They were home to a creative-minded community of

squatters, druggies, sculptors, and high-concept rockers

from all races and levels of education, hungry for new

blood and fluent in an artistic language familiar to

the modernist-inclined Johns. This crowd overlapped

heavily with the postpunk No Wave scene, and at places

like the Mudd Club and Tier 3, they played a noisy,

abject eulogy to disco and punk, cross-pollinating with

performance art, Fluxus, free jazz, and “downtown”

classical music. Largely snubbing the corporate overtures

that had tempted Manhattan’s previous wave of Patti

Smith, Blondie, and Talking Heads, this crowd stirred

a highbrow industrial nihilism into their mix. Gritty as

the Lower East Side art scene was, it immediately struck

Linnell and Flansburgh as more fertile and encouraging

than their own neighborhood.

Singer and scenester Lydia Lunch recalls in an

interview with Marc Masters: “There was a lack of

light that New York had at that time, especially consid-

ering the condition of the Lower East Side, which was

nothing like it is now. There were just blocks and blocks

of abandoned buildings, set on fire nightly from people

sleeping under tea lights… $75 per month—that was my

rent when I got an apartment on 12th Street. You could

eat for two or three dollars a day. You begged, borrowed,

stole, sold drugs, worked a couple of days at a titty bar if

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

you had to. I don’t know how I got by, but it didn’t take

much.”

The darkness of that scene found its meanest and

most enduring exponents in acts like Suicide, Swans, and

Missing Foundation, but the addled fire of masochism

and poverty that fueled No Wave’s miserablist streak

would largely burn out by the end of 1982. “We managed

to get booked at the Mudd Club and then the place

closed [in 1983] right before we got to play. It was like

the ‘mirage’ of New York disappeared right after we

arrived,” Linnell tells BrightestYoungThings.com.

The upbeat, funky corners of New York’s punk

diaspora proved in these years to be the heartier—and

more marketable—strain. From the East River over

to Greenwich Village, an arts scene took shape that

affirmed its relative autonomy by celebrating members’

unity and diversity instead of amputating all ties to the

urban bourgeois. This was the variegated New York

of Keith Haring, the teenage Beastie Boys, and Sonic

Youth, and as they came up, so arose the generation

of semi-legal venues in which They Might Be Giants

learned to perform—Darinka’s, 8BC, and the Pyramid.

Bill Krauss, a friend of Flansburgh’s from Antioch,

started helping the band with their home recordings,

and he ran live sound for them, which largely consisted

of stopping their canned backing tapes between songs

to allow for applause. He says of the group in this post-

postpunk moment: “They started when things were on

the slow side—which, ultimately, I think, worked to their

advantage, because what it meant was, when the East

Village scene started to happen, they were ready… It was

like catching the crest of a wave.”

F L O O D

•

In their gleeful flood of upbeat weirdness, the band

quickly established themselves as a breath of fresh air

for audiences who’d long since replaced their adolescent

rage with exhausted post-intellectual hedonism. As

Flansburgh remembers: “We were younger than the

audiences we were playing for at the Pyramid Club

and 8BC in New York. The whole nightclub scene

was very late-night, very druggy, and very commit-

tedly Bohemian, living alternative lifestyles. They’d had

sexual experiences that we had not even thought about.

They’d had drug experiences that we’d never dare

have. They were much cooler people than we were.

Trying to figure out how to win over and entertain an

audience who actively intimidates you might have been

the biggest professional challenge of our lives.” To meet

this challenge, the band, with Bill Krauss’s help, started

overhauling their stage show from week to week and

making sure they always had something new to offer

each time they played. New songs come fast when

they don’t have to be four minutes long, have verses, a

chorus, or a bridge.

Part of the success of this era also came from a sense

among the whole scene that people were game—that

they were ready for community. Linnell recounts to

the EV Grieve blog: “The East Village performance art

scene of the early- and mid-1980s was like a godsend

for us.” Acknowledging the uniqueness of the scene’s

social and urban situation, he continues: “We played

all the time in these rinky-dink places that were very

sweet. Darinka was an incredibly warm place… the size

of a small apartment with a stage at one end. Gary Ray

was the owner. He named the club after his mother,

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

Darinka. We’d be playing a show, then he’d come out

and announce that his cat’s just had kittens backstage.”

Despite the duo’s star rising over Southeast Manhattan,

they stayed living in Brooklyn, where Flansburgh toughed

it out at Pratt, finally picking up his BFA in 1984. (His

cut of the Flood proceeds paid off his student loans.)

Linnell continues: “We considered moving in together,

and we looked at a place in the East Village. It would

have been convenient because that was where we were

playing all the time. Almost all our New York gigs were

in this few-block radius.” Eventually, though, staying

in Brooklyn became a point of stubborn pride, and

when the band started branding themselves Brooklyn’s

Ambassadors of Love, they suggested implicitly that

their duty was to spread a localized affection that might

otherwise go unseen. It was a reconciliation of home and

abroad.

B re a k i n g O u t ( I ’d L i ke T h i s S o n g t o B e

N u m b e r O n e )

And they indeed took their Brooklyn-made fare well

beyond Manhattan. The demo tapes they cut were

finding wider and wider audiences as they played more

and more shows. The duo really took off in the year

1985, playing about forty concerts in New York City

alone and branching into Massachusetts, Vermont, and

New Jersey by autumn. The whopping 23-song tape they

were hawking for $8.95 (shipping included) managed

to land a review in People magazine, which effusively

buzzed: “Flansburgh and Linnell champion the Ogden

Nash school of lyric writing.”

F L O O D

•

That demo also gave them a shot at recording a

proper album. Glenn Morrow and Tom Pendergast

had set up Bar/None Records as a vanity imprint for

Morrow’s band Rage to Live, whose album hadn’t sold

very well. In early 1986, Morrow was given a copy of

the 23-song demo by his friend Margaret Seiler (who

sings on “Boat of Car”), and it appealed immediately.

Pendergast recalls: “I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to

continue with Bar/None Records at the time, [but then]

Glenn brought this tape to me… and I thought, ‘I’ll

give it another go.’” That summer, Bill Krauss and the

Johns went to Dubway Studios at 42 Broadway, owned

by Al Houghton, who’d helped engineer some of their

earliest recordings. When they emerged, the 19-song,

self-titled “Pink Album” was done. Bar/None released it

in November of 1986.

It’s worth reiterating the mindboggling amount

of gigging that the band did in this time. Between

December 1984 and June 1989, the few weeks during

which they recorded their debut marked the only time

they ever went a full calendar month without playing

a concert. Not only did their NYC audience expand

beyond the postpunk set as they began playing venues

like the Village Gate, Limelight, and Irving Plaza, but

they quickly found a younger crowd beyond the city.

A small part of this might have been related to the

album art—says Linnell, “there was some confusion,

because the cover was this wonderful illustration by

Rodney Alan Greenblat: sort of a cartoon landscape with

me and John and all these cartoon figures and stuff, and

people mistakenly thought that it was a kid’s record.”

But much more importantly, in 1987, the band’s surreal

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

and kinetic video for “Don’t Let’s Start” hit MTV in a

big way.

“To this day, I’m still kind of confused as to how

the whole MTV thing happened,” says Flansburgh to

Magnet. “I think we were the happy solution to other

issues at MTV.” One of these issues was a seeming

arms race among artists for videos that were ever

bigger and more serious. Another was the fact that as

MTV went from a ragtag station to a cultural force

over its first five years, major labels exerted increasing

pressure on it. A breezy but appealing indie production,

“Don’t Let’s Start” symbolized an alternative to both of

these strangle holds, and even though it didn’t genuinely

change MTV’s course, its role as the channel’s first

independent video in regular rotation all but ensured

the band’s success.

The band’s signal was boosted even further when,

out in Los Angeles, “Don’t Let’s Start” was championed

by KROQ, the leading alternative music station on the

planet. It’s helpful to understand that when KROQ aired

the song—as often as four times a day—most of their

playlist was synth-heavy Europop; this is the station, after

all, that effectively broke Depeche Mode in the United

States. As such, “Don’t Let’s Start” sounded brash and

even ballsy in that context. Sandwiched between Erasure

and The Cure, it popped out with unique vibrance.

The buzz didn’t slow down, and their touring quickly

went international. By the time the band recorded

Lincoln for Bar/None in 1988, as label head Tom

Pendergast says, “it was obvious that they were going

to go somewhere else.” The album sold a quarter of a

million copies in its first year. Prendergast sighs, “You

F L O O D

•

realize at some point that you’re incapable of doing

justice to the act.”

Major labels had come knocking before. Manager

Jamie Kitman remembers a senior VP at Columbia

Records telling him, “I love you guys, but we decided

you’re too smart.” Another exec from Island Records

mistakenly called the band They Must Be Giants,

declaring that while Lincoln was okay, their new fare

“needs to sound more like, I don’t know… ‘Don’t Let’s

Stop.’” And that wasn’t the worst of it. As Kitman writes:

Back in New York, the then head of EMI records, a 40ish
bald guy with an unlikely ponytail, welcomed me and
John Linnell into his opulent tower office…

Guy with ponytail: “I’ve seen you guys’ shows. They’re
brilliant and I don’t think that’s too strong a word. Your
videos!?! I’ve seen them on MTV, over and over again.
They’re the most innovative thing on television today! I
love your tunes. And you, my friend (pointing to me) are
a motherfucker guitarist!”

Jamie: “Thank you. But I’m the manager, actually.”

Guy with ponytail: “Manager? Guitarist? It doesn’t
surprise me… can you believe this? The guy’s the
manager and he’s a motherfucker guitarist. You guys are
fucking smart, I’m tellin’ ya. I always said so…”

Linnell: “Er, my partner John Flansburgh couldn’t make
it today. He plays the guitar.”

Guy with ponytail: “I knew that.” (Meeting over.)

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

T h e E l e k t ra C o m p l e x ( T h e S i g n T h a t S ay s

P r o s O n l y )

A&R rep Sue Drew stood apart from the crowd of men

who were baffled by the band. She had wanted to sign

them to Polygram back in 1986, remarking in a memo,

“The quantity and quality of their songs is amazing.”

She’d jumped ship to Elektra by the time she approached

the band again in 1989. Flansburgh recalls: “Unlike a

whole generation of A&R people who had come before

her, she was actually not on drugs, and [was] thoughtful.

She also had her own taste, and was signing stuff that

she thought was interesting.” Sue Drew’s taste is not

only idiosyncratic, but it’s synonymous with a particular

moment of cultural quirk—in addition to boasting They

Might Be Giants, she signed Barenaked Ladies and

Phish.

A few of the band’s Lower East Side fans had written

them off as sellouts—and in 1989 they even stopped

working with producer and quasi-third-member Bill

Krauss—but the move to Elektra was, for the Johns, an

uncomplicatedly positive one. Far from the nightmarish

caricature of the overbearing major label, Elektra granted

them complete creative control over their music—a

factor that had proved important in fueling the careers

of other Elektra artists like Iggy Pop, the Pixies, and the

Sugarcubes.

Says Flansburgh: “We had the opposite experience

that most bands have with record companies where they

get some weird, weird idea shoved down their throat

and they’re resistant to the whole thing the whole time.

Basically, the people at Elektra were like ‘whatever you

F L O O D

•

want!’” The label presented themselves to the band as

facilitators: they would provide marketing, strategy, and

tour support.

Flansburgh gushes: “The beginning of the Flood

experience was extremely exciting in how pleasant and

how smart it felt to graduate from the hustle of the

DIY thing, and to actually work with people who had

their own plan and their own cultural access. At Elektra,

people were invested in figuring out how to crack the

code on our behalf.”

Elektra also provided access to equipment and

producers that were simply beyond the budget of either

the Johns themselves or of Bar/None. While the band

chose to produce the record primarily themselves, they

decided that a few songs—what they initially thought

were the likeliest singles—deserved an expert’s touch, so

they called in Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, whose

records with Elvis Costello and Madness they’d particu-

larly enjoyed. The team all got along very well, and the

Johns especially enjoyed relaxing with Clive and Alan at

New York’s goofy tourist destinations like the Empire

State Building. “And Alan Winstanley constantly wanted

to buy sneakers,” Linnell reminisces. “I don’t know why

he needed sneakers every week.”

Despite the team’s easy rapport, the Johns were a little

intimidated by the ritziness of their new homebase at

Skyline Studios. Skyline was only a mile or two physically

north of Pass Studios, where the band had recorded their

1985 demo tape, but on the inside, there was a world of

difference. With a bit of bewildered awe, Flansburgh

lists: “The year we made Flood at Skyline, Stevie Ray

Vaughn was recording at Skyline, David Bowie was

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

recording at Skyline, Madonna was recording at Skyline,

C+C Music Factory was recording at Skyline. We were

sharing the lounge with the people who were on the

television.” Linnell adds, “I felt like we were bumpkins.”

The sense of awe at the cadre who was now ostensibly

their contemporaries marks a rare moment when, in

the face of excess, They Might Be Giants actually seem

to be overwhelmed themselves. (Another came later

when Elektra solicited Elvis Costello to produce Apollo

18—the band was aghast because they were uncom-

fortable with the idea of working directly with someone

they so idolized.) But far from being intimidated by the

experience of being overwhelmed, the band more often

found considerable creative inspiration in it. This, more

than anything, explains the appeal of the New York

music scene to them. They’re not a less-is-more outfit.

The Johns’ experience in the New York scene carried

them from avant-garde squats to glitzy dream studios.

The path from Eastern Massachusetts to Elektra was

in some ways a tour of American art and commerce in

action, and viewed broadly in this way, it invites a lot

of questions about how They Might Be Giants’ music

relates to and comments on its surroundings. Having

explored how Lincoln and New York shaped the band,

let’s zoom out even further now and consider how

the expressly American sensibility of their music in

return comments on the United States, pop culture, and

citizenship.

•

America

Tra n s a t l a n t i c S t u d i e s ( T h e re ’s N o Wo rd i n

E n g l i s h f o r M y S t y l e )

We trust it’s not controversial to state that They Might Be

Giants are a particularly American band. The support for

this observation goes even deeper than their connection

to Lincoln and New York: John Linnell recorded an

entire album entitled State Songs, while the debut record

by John Flansburgh’s solo project Mono Puff includes

the song “Nixon’s the One,” with tongue so far in cheek

as to bore through it. They Might Be Giants named two

consecutive albums after specifically American icons—

the unsent Apollo 18 mission and folk hero John Henry (to

say nothing, of course, of Lincoln)—and their catalogue

includes songs like “James K. Polk” and a cover of the

1840 Presidential campaign song “Tippecanoe and Tyler

Too.” Beyond that, their 1992 concerts for Apollo 18 were

dubbed the Don’t Tread on the Cut-Up Snake Tour, after

the famous Gadsden flag and Benjamin Franklin’s “Join

or Die” cartoon. Should this litany prove insufficient,

we might also personally relate that upon arriving at the

restaurant where we first met them, the Johns promptly

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

bypassed our table to marvel at a framed playbill for

the 1865 Ford’s Theatre run of Our American Cousin

before sitting down and talking animatedly about the

anachronistic font used in the logo of Steven Spielberg’s

then-upcoming Lincoln.

And yet there’s something odd and strangely distancing

about this affiliation. They Might Be Giants may be

particularly American, but as with most adjectives that

label the band as a whole, it’s difficult to justify concluding

that they are simply and unironically American—which,

though the evidence is strictly anecdotal, seems to be

the case for much of their fanbase as well. Indeed, as

we’ll see in Chapter 8, some of the cultural signifiers

that fans have most consistently embraced alongside

They Might Be Giants actually come from a particular

English lineage, like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this regard, They

Might Be Giants might be mistaken as one of those

American bands who would have been much happier if

they’d been English—a common enough phenomenon

in the wake of the second British Invasion of the 1980s.

The question mark that hovers over this possibility

serves as a roundabout indication that in understanding

They Might Be Giants’ relation to US history and

identity as a whole—following through on the sense of

history and place that Lincoln and New York imbued—a

useful starting point can be found in looking at the band’s

reception outside the United States. (This goes back to

the idea that understanding what the band is entails

understanding what it’s not.)

When Lincoln and Flood came out, They Might Be

Giants spent a lot of energy trying to drum up a

F L O O D

•

UK and European fanbase. In the end, though, they

never quite managed to become a career band overseas,

having (at least in the English media narrative) effec-

tively exchanged a shot at a large and devoted audience

for one-hit wonder status: indeed, the high point of their

international campaign was when “Birdhouse in Your

Soul” hit number six on the UK Singles Chart.

But then, anything can hit number six on the UK

Singles Chart. (No, really. The number six they unseated

was an all-instrumental wretchfest by Dutch saxophonist

Candy Dulfer, whose album was called—wait for it—

Saxuality.) At least in England, weird hits like this

were made possible by a national media body (the

BBC) which, as a tax-funded public service broadcaster,

was legally and ethically bound not to show favoritism

in commercial matters. However, this state of affairs

effectively guaranteed that leftfield hits would remain

token anomalies, whether they were novelty songs like

“Star Trekkin’” by The Firm (number one in 1987)

or revelatory masterpieces like Laurie Anderson’s “O

Superman” (number two in 1981). This, in turn, helped

inure a whole nation to a sense of pop consumption

unfazed by quirkiness but mostly uncompelled by

devotion to cult acts—hence the stereotype of England

(and Europe more broadly) as a market for singles, not

albums.

Ta k i n g E u r o p e B y S c a t t e re d S h o we r ( W h o ’s

K n o ck i n g O n t h e Wa l l ? )

Part of the band’s inconsistent response abroad owed to

a mutual incomprehension between them and European

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

audiences. John Flansburgh describes how “in Germany,

people would stand respectfully and not even make

any noise until we’d clearly, completely finished—until

the last echo from the last note had died out,” which

is a model of audience response that borders on active

hostility when matched up with the sort of unfiltered

exuberance of They Might Be Giants.

In England, meanwhile, They Might Be Giants may

have had easier communication with audiences at the

linguistic level, but that exuberant and floodlike sensi-

bility, a part of the “funny” tag with which they were

marketed, proved an odd fit in the context of the British

humor tradition. While both play with the idea of excess,

it’s crucial to recall the English valuation of excess is in

part a transgressive response to the stereotypical “stiff

upper lip.” For example, among the most common

tropes in Monty Python’s work is John Cleese slowly

transitioning from an overly stuffy gentleman into a

frothing font of incoherent rage. They Might Be Giants,

who never focused particularly on the contrast between

the flood and a sense of restraint, or, for that matter, on

restraint at all, were always going to be a partial match at

best for European audiences.

In fact, Flood itself prophesies this incongruity in

its closing track, “

Road Movie to Berlin

.” The song

is unusual in that, unlike the tendency of their other

“dark” work (for lack of a better term), it isn’t paranoid,

but instead it’s claustrophobic. Harmonically, the song’s

cadences never go to the most satisfying chord, dodging

and deflecting instead of ever arriving. Its central

image is that of an inescapable situation, “can’t drive

out the way we drove in,” and the song’s imagery is

F L O O D

•

uncharacteristically anesthetizing, desiring nothing so

much as the numbing powers of a glass of bourbon.

“Can we talk about 1989?” asks John Flansburgh

when we mention this song to the pair. Written while

the Berlin Wall still stood, “

Road Movie to Berlin

” was

released in the wake of its demolition. The issue was

very much in the air. Like almost all They Might Be

Giants’ work, the song bears a sense of excess, but here

the lyrical tone is the excess of the European absurd. It’s

the perversity of getting a medal for being “the nicest

of the damned,” or the sense of a chaotic system pushed

into madness by too many cooks in the kitchen—implicit

in the song’s separating the steering wheel and pedal-

pushing duties of driving.

The tight-lipped and cruelly saccharine bleakness

in the song fits well with a sizable European tradition

of absurdism and existentialism. And the song connects

identifiably with the Johns’ own experience touring

Europe in the late 1980s, where they encountered the

vagaries of bureaucracy that inspired such absurdism.

John Flansburgh recalls how drivers on the road to Berlin

were carefully timed from the moment they entered the

highway, such that “if you went through the corridor

too fast you’d get a speeding ticket, which encouraged

you to stop at their government-sponsored rest stops

which had weird TVs for sale”—an observation that

prompts Linnell to chime in with his memories of the

“weird kind of vodka you couldn’t get anywhere else.”

It is not exaggerating to note that this is the actual sort

of experience for which the adjective “Kafkaesque” was

coined.

But the song’s loping rhythmic swing and its lazy

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

whistle are unambiguously the stuff of weepy American

cowboy music. Amid all its claustrophobia, we might

hear its longing for wide open spaces, and so the track

makes one stab at They Might Be Giants’ unbounded

brand of excess with a bombast of jazzy New York brass

that seem to rail against the lyric’s confines—one last

attempt to smash their way out of their road movie—

only to confirm, as we feared at the start, that we cannot

simply drive out the way we drove in.

So there is, as it happens, a near-fundamental irrec-

oncilability between the Johns’ tendency towards

ever-widening excess and a European aesthetic of

tunneling down into the depths of the singular. It’s as if

a dam or some wall is holding back the flood. Quick—

guess which wall it could be.

Unable to flow and expand, “

Road Movie to Berlin

”

thus ricochets abruptly back to where it began, restating

the opening verse. Rebuffed, the song peters out, and

with it, so does Flood, coldly marking a boundary: an

incompatibility between its bubbling fullness and the

totalizing bleakness that lies just beyond the border of

the band’s aesthetic.

A n A m e r i c a n B a n d ( P h i l O ch s G o t M a r r i e d )

If “

Road Movie to Berlin

” butts against the foreign

outside, then all the stuff that comes before it is, of

necessity, domestic. They Might Be Giants were always

better suited to the American traditions of strangeness.

Indeed, American-ness and Americana are among the

pools of imagery and knowledge the band most frequently

draws from, but beyond mere stylistic quotation; by the

F L O O D

•

end of this chapter, we’ll see the degree to which the

band’s political concerns and approaches to ambiguity

overlay some fairly central tenets of specifically American

identity.

In 1990, the year of Flood, the band’s record company

Elektra marked its fortieth anniversary with the Rubaiyat

compilation, to which They Might Be Giants contributed

a cover of “One More Parade,” a dourly ironic march

penned by the folksinger Phil Ochs (whom Flansburgh

had namechecked back in 1986’s “The Day”). Both in

the faux-community band setting that they lend the

production and in their choice to reach back to 1964 for

the song at all, it’s easy to hear a certain dialogue with an

American musical past.

The playful way that the duo tries on different

musical styles from song to song can suggest that

their investment in any particular aesthetic is pretty

minimal. Zoom out and patterns emerge, though, and

among the most pronounced is the apparent revelry

their music takes in a specific valuation of American

history—an unblinkingly austere ancestor worship that

has seemed hopelessly hokey since the Nixon era. This

is the stuff of fifth-grade social studies classes, reverent

childhood reenactments of the first Thanksgiving, and

Disney World’s Hall of Presidents. Linnell’s work takes

seemingly special interest in this brand of pageantry.

Of “

Theme from Flood

,” he highlights the function

of parade and solemnity, saying, “it seemed appro-

priate to inaugurate our major-label debut by having

the listener pass through a ceremonial archway.” On

his utterly bizarre 1996 solo EP House of Mayors, the

pomp and circumstance hits fever pitch as street organ

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

processionals guide the listener past “creaking autom-

atons” of the Big Apple’s erstwhile mayors, pausing for

a disarmingly earnest rendition of “Will You Love Me

in December As You Do in May?” written by the city’s

Depression-era honcho Jimmy Walker. In addition to

singing vocals on “One More Parade” and co-writing

1991’s magisterial “The Edison Museum,” Linnell also

masterminded the “

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

”

b-side “James K. Polk,” a musically triumphant if lyrically

bone-dry bio of America’s eleventh president. (During

live performances of the latter song, confetti explodes

onto the crowd from cannons when the lyrics note

that 1844 Democratic candidate Louis Cass favored

expansionism.)

It’s peculiar and telling that Linnell gets defensive

about “James K. Polk.” Reacting to fans’ common under-

standing of the song as chiefly educational, he protests in

an interview with Salon.com that the track’s neutrality

is itself more an experiment than an endorsement: “the

idea of that song was this sort of trippy thing of doing

a song that didn’t appear to have any personality, like a

textbook.” He continues: “The weird thing about Polk

is that I actually have stuff to say about James K. Polk—

like, highly opinionated stuff that doesn’t get into the

song whatsoever.”

The fact that John Linnell is the sort of person who

has highly opinionated stuff to say about James K.

Polk might actually be taken as a single-line demon-

stration of this book’s entire argument, but putting that

aside, he reveals in this quip the underbelly of all that

cornball historicity. Just as “One More Parade” is equal

parts stirring jauntiness and thinly-veiled cynicism, the

F L O O D

•

aesthetic quasi-nostalgia that the band’s inflections of

Americana exude comes cloaked always in a wizened

suspicion. Sometimes the fare is less subtle, extending

the gestures of American traditional music as takedowns

of conservative economics, politics, and religion (as in

“Kiss Me, Son of God” or “Alienation’s for the Rich”),

but in general, the band favors what we might call the

Lincoln, Massachusetts approach, where the affection-

ately detached put-on of historical pageantry doubles as

an incisive political critique of that self-same pageantry.

On Flood, the obvious entry is “Whistling in the

Dark,” whose huge-sounding modal harmonies and sung

parallel fifths imbue its parading brass regiment with

fanfarish, almost medieval heft. Flansburgh particularly

remembers trying to make the percussion sound suffi-

ciently bombastic: “The bass drum sound was something

we actually worked on for quite a while in the studio and

we weren’t so happy with it even in the end—but I think

in our imaginations even an atomic blast would have

been too small.” Amid the rigid protocol majestically

emanated by the song’s triumphant outro, however, a

lone trumpet (courtesy of the Klezmatics’ Frank London)

begins whistling its own tune, glissing, burping, freaking

out, and, unsupervised, having a real good time. On one

interpretive level (and more will follow) this inspired

moment seems to thumb its nose at all the self-impor-

tance that the parade circularly celebrates—the insipidly

tautological declaration that We deserve your recognition

because we deserve your recognition.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

T h e Jo y s o f A m b i g u i t y ( A S a d P u n T h a t

R e f l e c t s a S a d d e r M e s s )

There is an embittered sense of satire here that situates

the band firmly in a particular lineage of American

letters. The band’s leftist sympathies are no secret, and

their knack for recursively wistful, whimsical children’s

fare puts them easily in the company of Abraham Lincoln

biographer Carl Sandburg. The wit that rock journalists

seem so incapable of not mentioning in writeups of the

band recalls in its more biting moments the work of

satirist (and socialist) Ambrose Bierce. The aforemen-

tioned Phil Ochs, with whom they align themselves, also

fits in here as a voice of pacifism and protest even before

the Vietnam War. And in early videos and at live shows,

the Johns brandish huge cutout portraits of 1923 Pulitzer

Prize-winning journalist William Allen White, whose

presence might be easy to interpret as an absurdist and

arbitrary choice, but whose own status as a leader of the

Progressive movement is tough to ignore.

The effectiveness of both They Might Be Giants’

music and their political positioning would suffer if

the band offered too many straightforward editorials.

The ambiguity of songs like “

Whistling in the Dark

”

encourages simultaneous interpretations that can clash

ideologically with each other—in this case, the genuinely

redolent mushiness for whitebread America versus the

takedown of conformity posited by that rogue trumpet.

But these ambiguities reflect an important and real part

of being human: from moment to moment, from whim

to whim, and between the differing compartments of our

personalities, we are swayed by conflicting worldviews.

F L O O D

•

And this sort of song allows us (and maybe allows

Linnell himself—who knows?) to confront the dissonant

simultaneity of paranoia and play: the oblivious self-

importance of a reverent symbol like Sousa (whose

“Liberty Bell March” is, incidentally, the theme song

of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) is both innocently life-

affirming and thoroughly creepy. “Wrong ideas that

appeal to you” indeed.

This tension has an almost congratulatory appeal to

the clever sorts of audiences that the band pulls in. As the

Marxist Baltimorean F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936,

“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold

two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still

retain the ability to function.”

It’s especially easy to geek out about “Whistling in the

Dark,” given that the song offers up decidedly more than

two opposed ideas. Within a larger consideration of the

band’s American-ness, the song’s stylistic treatment of

pageantry—and by extension, its questioning of what we

should collectively celebrate—overlaps somewhat with

its treatment of individualism as an idea. As we’ve noted,

that unhinged trumpeter and some of the lyrics seemingly

paint the song as a cheerily individualist celebration of

idiosyncrasies: one owes oneself the playful indulgence

of whistling in the dark. But for all the galumphing glee,

this is a song about a man who is in jail for some reason,

recreationally bangs his head on things, and who has

apparently nothing whatsoever to offer the world but

his ability to whistle, and even then only in low-light

situations. As John Linnell put it to Rolling Stone, “the

narrator is comfortable and capable in the role of being

what he’s like. However, as the wise men say, an ‘is’ is not

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

an ‘ought.’” The dopey voice Linnell affects on this track

is indicative.

Nested in appealingly American musical austerity,

then, is a scrappy rebellion against simple conformist

pleasures, but nested within that is a frank wariness

toward the competence of actual individuals. Politically

speaking, the song is a veritable Dagwood sandwich, its

pickles and peanut butter aromatically betraying the

incongruence of unity and diversity as values. Those

who wish for a single ideological flavor from the song

are happily denied when the nonconformist trumpet,

fully lost in its own squirrelly universe, squawks a furtive

question mark.

T h e D i re c t A p p r o a ch ( B l a s t Yo u r M i s s i ve , Te l l

t h e Wo rd l e s s M e s s age )

It’s worth contrasting “

Whistling in the Dark

” with

“

Your Racist Friend

” in this regard. On account of its

lyrical straightforwardness, “

Your Racist Friend

” can

actually seem outright bizarre in the context of Flood.

It’s an overtly catchy number, and its sequencing on the

album ensures it’s at least well-remembered. The song

was originally flagged as among the album’s likeliest hits,

being one of the four tracks produced by Alan Winstanley

and Clive Langer, whose efforts accounted for two-thirds

of Flood’s recording budget. And yet it never saw release

as a single, passed up in favor of “

Twisting

,” another

Flansburgh composition.

Unlike many of its stablemates, “

Your Racist Friend

”

indicates to listeners a clear narrative, specifically one

about getting mad at a racist jerk at a party. The racist

F L O O D

•

jerk is a jerk because he is racist. The party, while

otherwise nice, is spoiled. That’s about it. But as it

turns out, when set to task on such straightforward and

ethically clear matters, They Might Be Giants don’t fully

seem in their element.

“

Your Racist Friend

” is arguably the Flood song

best suited for people who aren’t fans of the band.

In the February 5, 1990 issue of New York magazine,

Elizabeth Wurtzel (later author of Prozac Nation) penned

an eyebrow-raising set of album reviews in which she

praises Michelle Shocked for her lack of preachiness

and dismisses Tracy Chapman as a “party-line washout”

before finally coming to Flood, an album she suggests

starts badly with “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

” and “heads

south from there.” The one song Wurtzel singles out for

praise is, of course, “

Your Racist Friend

,” which, in her

view, “might actually get people to think.”

The irony is here is that while the lyrical verdict that

“racism is bad” is both accurate and well-intentioned, its

earnestness and certainty can shut down more nuanced

interpretive possibilities—and plenty do exist, especially

in the song’s thrilling blast-off into trumpet exotica.

But when immediately offered an upshot so agreeable

as anti-racism, few listeners will decide to stick around

and see what the other options might be. In this way,

“

Your Racist Friend

” can actually do the opposite of what

Wurtzel says: it becomes the rare They Might Be Giants

song that gives listeners the impression that there’s not

much to think about.

“

Your Racist Friend

” is an outlier in the album, and

saner—or, perhaps, less sane—heads prevailed in most

other regards. For instance, John Linnell talks about

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

nearly wrecking “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

” in its second

demo in pursuit of, as he put it, being “more impressive

and professional sounding.” Instead of the familiar drum

pattern with the snare on every beat, Linnell switched

to a straight-forward rock groove with a snare drum on

the second and fourth beats of every measure. “To their

enormous credit,” Linnell notes, “Clive and Alan said,

‘You wrecked it, why are you playing this? You ruined

it,’” thus rescuing the song from excessive populism—an

approach that mostly won the day in making the album,

and, for that matter, in the band’s career.

And interestingly, it’s in this way that we can hear

the apparent political simplicity of “

Your Racist Friend

”

being critiqued by the rest of the band’s work. Although

this was surely not the Johns’ intent, the effect for

thoughtful fans is a reinforcement of the back-and-forth

questioning that “

Whistling in the Dark

” suggests.

When politics get involved with this aesthetic of

all-meanings-at-once, these songs can reveal an inter-

mittent gulf between the ethos of the music and of many

of its fans. “

Whistling in the Dark

” is frankly skeptical

toward the inherent value of individual quirkiness, and

that deals a shallow blow to some audiences’ appro-

priation of They Might Be Giants as a potential source

of relief from social ostracism and conformity. Favoring

neither the collective nor the individual, They Might Be

Giants stand with particular savvy above a set of concerns

that, taken together, seem particularly American. But

rather than choose between the streams of liberty and

mutuality, they submerge them both in excess.

To understand this claim more meaningfully, we’ll

need to articulate just what flooding is.

•

Flooding

E x c e s s ( N o w T h a t I H a ve E ve r y t h i n g )

Central to understanding the appeal of the album

is the aesthetic of flooding. We’re coining this term

to mean, on its most reductive level, an aesthetic of

creative excess. Flooding isn’t merely a case of a lot, but

of too much. Its hyperstimulation is exuberant, but in a

way that goes beyond both delight and overripeness.

Consider that inaugural number, “

Theme from Flood

.”

A jaunty chorus proclaims that the world is in love and

marching hand in hand, but that seemingly utopian

vision is juxtaposed with the threat of sea levels rising.

This isn’t simply a contrast between a devastating flood

(as the album cover depicts) and the ridiculous joy of

the opening two lines, but they are part and parcel of

the same thing.

Which makes sense. After all, the sentimentality of

that imagined worldwide love-in, marching in happy

unison is, in its own way, every bit as excessive as the

water rising up to consume the land. Flooding goes

beyond what can easily be resolved simply as sappiness or

overstimulation. It’s where creative fruitfulness, without

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

care, wildly overgrows the needs of any conceivable fruit

salad.

Creative practices and their byproducts don’t need to

be straightforwardly cheery in order to become appre-

ciable aesthetics, but aesthetics are nonetheless ways

by which people recognize and assign value, and so

understanding flooding as such means recognizing it as

somehow positive. They Might Be Giants’ music does

this not by lyrically touting the straightforward virtues

of excess—to do so would situate the music as separate

from the flood, looking in from the outside. Instead, it is

the flood, jubilant to be its inordinate self.

In this way, it’s easy to understand what rock critic

Robert Christgau meant when, upon first hearing They

Might Be Giants, he declared: “The hits just keep on

coming in an exuberantly annoying show of creative

superabundance. Their secret is that as unmediated

pop postmodernists they can be themselves stealing

from anywhere, modulating without strain or personal

commitment from hick to nut to nerd… Their great

subject is the information overload that lends these songs

their form.” Amid grocery bag reincarnation, tabloid

footprints, green magic markers, and fondue forks for

everybody, on some level these songs, when taken collec-

tively, stop being about their nominal topics and instead

spin into a barrage. Heard this way, the Johns’ records

can seem overwhelming, which might contribute to why

they strike so many people as simultaneously funny and

sad: when we are overloaded, our instinct is to laugh or

cry.

The sense of excess in They Might Be Giants’ music

is freely creative, but not driven by any premeditated

F L O O D

•

artistic ideal. It is thoroughly experiential, but never

hungry for any particular experience. In fact, their music

engages tellingly little with the sense of directed longing

that dominates so much pop, whether it’s aimed at sex,

money, or love. Goal-oriented desire, at least in the sense

of craving specific things, is more or less preempted.

And so when direct wishes are voiced on Flood, they’re

frequently a desire for some momentary abatement of

the flood: “I’m having a wonderful time, but I’d rather

be whistling in the dark,” for instance, or “This is

where the party ends.” Even the album’s two breakup

numbers—songs that, in the usual milieu of pop music,

would be hotbeds of explicit desire—are oddly free of

it. The narrator of “

Lucky Ball and Chain

” not only

expresses little sadness about his having been left, but

he doesn’t even wish for answers or closure, instead

providing “confidentially” an abundance of embarrassing

clues that effectively tell us just why she walked out the

door. Similarly, “

Twisting

” comes out completely against

trying to win one’s ex back, warning us that the tech-

heavy excess of a smoke machine and Marshall stack

will get us nowhere when it comes to desire (think John

Cusack in Say Anything); rather, “she doesn’t miss you”

and the only way “she wants to see you again” is “slowly

twisting in the wind”—from a noose, presumably.

The flood instead presents itself as the unmitigated

state of things, the effortlessly hyperassociative stream

(there’s that word!) of consciousness. The joy of flooding

isn’t just the seemingly random juxtapositions of its

uncovered objects, but also the hint of their infinitude.

This is one reason why Flood fixates on posing questions

and ambiguities, then leaving them unresolved, as we

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

saw with its treatment of individuality in Chapter 4.

Non-resolution gushes from the album:

“When he’s underwater does he get wet, or does the
water get him instead? Nobody knows.”

“Why did Constantinople get the works? That’s nobody’s
business but the Turks.”

“Where was I? I forgot the point that I was making.”

“I’m your only friend, I’m not your only friend… but
really not I’m actually your friend—but I am.”

“Did a large procession wave their torches as my head fell
in the basket, and was everybody dancing on the casket?”

“Left the bathtub running over, stereo on, and cooking
bacon—never came back to tell us why.”

“I’ll never know what you’ll find when you open up your
letterbox tomorrow.”

When we ask John Flansburgh about this trend, he

boisterously replies, “If you love setup…!” then freezes,

jazz hands held high.

The possibilities that bubble beneath the flood’s

surface not only suggest utopian sentimentality and

eschatological terror alike, but in their unresolved

unknowability, they whorl into a dark, spiraling shape.

A listener gets the sense that the specific Flood LP we all

know is only one of the countless records that could have

F L O O D

•

washed ashore from the Skyline Studio sessions. For all

that the Johns are themselves perfectionists, their music

can seem thrillingly arbitrary, casually brimming with

whatever.

In this way, understanding They Might Be Giants

means recognizing the role that quantity plays in their

work. Their 2005 compilation A User’s Guide to They

Might Be Giants is, after all, subtitled Melody, Fidelity,

Quantity. Writing for Spin in February 1990, Ira Robbins

gushes of the band’s “boundless imagination” and the

“avalanche of how’d-they-come-up-with-that ideas.”

Recalling Robert Christgau’s initial quote about the

band’s sense of overload, it’s telling that on a later date—

presumably after having stubbed his toe and spilled

his coffee—he reminds us that flooding exceeds simple

assessments of good-versus-bad, agonizing about the

album, “tunes, aarghh, tunes—please not more tunes.”

But the deluge is not just one of tunes—it’s in the tunes

themselves. Examples of counting things and magnitude

abound in the band’s lyrics. Noting just a few on Flood,

we have: “countless screaming Argonauts,” “a watch with

a minute hand, millennium hand, and an eon hand,”

“more coffee for me, boss,” and the counting tricks of

“two by two… three by three as well as four by four” and

on track three, “she’s four years gone, she’s five feet tall

and si[x] [sic] of me.”

Pa ra n o i a ( A N i g h t m a re T h a t Yo u ’ l l N e ve r

B e D i s c o ve r i n g )

The sense of constant expansion and overload in They

Might Be Giants’ music bespeaks an awareness of

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

everythingness, which isn’t always a good thing; as the

Johns themselves sing (fittingly on a hidden track),

“complete paranoia is total awareness,” or reframed

slightly, as awareness floods, paranoia increases.

Consider that exemplar of paranoia, the conspiracy

theory, which is characterized by its continual assimi-

lation of new details. It searches endlessly for more

information and more clues, constructing an ever-more

sprawling narrative. This requires both ceaseless inves-

tigation, looking for the one piece of evidence that will

finally prove the existence of the conspiracy, and a sort

of narrative excess: the story of the conspiracy must be

told over and over again in a desperate bid to persuade

someone. As the standard example of paranoia and

conspiracy theories of the 1990s says, “The Truth Is Out

There.”

But The X-Files’ other tagline, “Trust No One,” is also

apropos. Paranoia is not merely a belief in an external

flood of revealing information. It’s also the belief that

the vast amount of information in the world is hostile.

What’s notable about the conspiracy theory is not so

much the number of facts that support it but the vastness

of the theory—the way in which any fact about the world

is evidence of the conspiracy. Paranoia is in many ways

the simplest totalizing narrative of the flood: it’s all out

to get you. It is the individual subject’s last throw of the

dice in hopes of gaining some differentiation within the

unfathomable giantness of the world, taking refuge in

a fiction constructed to offer reassurance that it’s still

somehow all about you—even if it means playing the

victim. It is one of the basic coping mechanisms for the

flood. But notably, it doesn’t cut one off from the flood.

F L O O D

•

The flood is simultaneously there to be recoiled from

and there to explore. One must mistrust the entire world

while still probing it to extract the sacred truth that will

make light of it.

Although Flood itself is not a particularly paranoid

album, the theme recurs elsewhere in They Might Be

Giants’ work: “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go,” “Bastard

Wants to Hit Me,” or “Turn Around,” to name only

a handful. On Flood the best example of paranoia is

probably “

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

.” Seen

one way, the song presents a situation in which paranoia

seems justified: Mr. Horrible is, after all, genuinely the

subject of a concentrated effort by anonymous people

to ruin his life. But in the face of a situation accurately

described by the old joke—“I’m not paranoid, they really

are out to get me”—Mr. Horrible finds himself obsessed

with a second paranoia: the unknown figure who myste-

riously keeps moving his chair. This demonstrates not

merely flooding in the gratuitous excess of indignities

that Mr. Horrible must face, but also one of the basic

responses to flooding: the single-minded focus on one

arbitrary part of the cascade.

It also highlights something that is easily and often

overlooked about They Might Be Giants, which is

that for all of their supposed “silliness,” their music is

sometimes rather bleak stuff, tarrying in the paranoid or

the otherwise unpleasant. As Linnell notes of Flood’s title,

“while it suggests an abundance, it also of course suggests

a catastrophe. There’s a dark thing lurking behind.”

Again, flooding is not shown as an ideal state but simply

as the actual state—even if it’s just a state of mind.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

P l ay ( We R a c e d U p a n d D o w n t h e S i d e wa l k

Twe n t y T h o u s a n d M i l l i o n Ti m e s )

If on one hand flooding implies paranoia, its non-direct-

ional overflow has a cheerier aspect too, and the name

we have for is it play. Both ideas lurk in the deluvian

sentence anything is possible, and they’re distinguished

only by whether that’s good or bad news.

The thread of play in They Might Be Giants’ music

runs through its childlike appeal and its geekishness,

tracing the band’s common affinity for the circular, the

apparently random, the material, and for free riffing

on ideas. The whiplash shifts of imagined scenery in

“

Birdhouse in Your Soul

,” from a child’s bedroom to

the rocky shores of the Aegean Sea are the stuff of

unrestrained playground improvisors—and for that

matter, whimsical dungeonmasters. (Both childhood and

geek culture will get a properly gigantic treatment in the

upcoming chapters.)

The most obvious exemplar of this approach on Flood

is “

They Might Be Giants

” itself, probably the most

unhinged and bacchanalian piece of animalistic excess

they’d put to tape. The song is focused on an endless

litany of possibilities as to what they might be: giants,

rain, heat, frying up a stalk of wheat, and ever more. Even

here the specter of paranoia is not entirely vanquished—

there is a clear menace to the possibility that the song’s

acceleration might hurl everyone to the wolves—but

for the most part this is a song about a vast profusion

of options and possibilities, barely keeping its wild self

together on a merry-go-round of deranged glee. This is

even mirrored musically in the sections where the song

F L O O D

•

seems to peter out, only to be suddenly reinvigorated

by another round of exuberant speculation as to what

they might be. Its placement just before “Road Movie to

Berlin” marks its as the conceptual climax of the album,

because where else can one go from there?

Most of They Might Be Giants’ work rushes

somewhere between these two extremes, but the key

here is that they mark the ebb and flow of the same tide.

Flooding is the aesthetic of the untamed “random”—

even as we acknowledge Cracked.com’s warning that one

“should put ‘randomness’ in quotes, because it’s hardly

ever truly random,” drawn instead from “this weird

little list of words” coded as wacky. This is nonetheless

an identifiable and, as we argue, theorizable aesthetic.

Flooding suggests, at its very least, the illusion of the

hyperactive brain. It represents the refusal to compart-

mentalize. And for lots of people at different times in

their lives with different relationships to the world, to

technology, and to one another, flooding can itself exceed

mere aesthetics, verging even on personality.

•

Childhood

C h i l d l i ke - n e s s ( I Wa s B o r n i n a L i g h t h o u s e ,

M y M o t h e r Wa s t h e S e a )

There are many perspectives from which to consider the

concept of the flood, but one of the most basic is that of

childhood. For one thing, there is an instinctive point

of comparison between a child’s subjective experience

of the world as something that is built to a scale far

larger than they are and the experience of flooding. For

another, childhood has always been a favorite theme

of They Might Be Giants, so much so that they’ve

recorded a handful of children’s albums. But perhaps

most importantly—although this is a point we can only

assert anecdotally—They Might Be Giants at the time of

Flood were influential in part because of their appeal to

a particular young generation who heard a vibrant, new

potential in the record.

It is not as though all seminal albums of the early

1990s were influential by way of their pre-teen and

early teen audiences. But They Might Be Giants have

always had a fascination with childhood. As Linnell

tells writer Mark Dery, “Our deepest concerns have to

F L O O D

•

do with the music we listened to when we were nine.

That’s very conscious.” On this level, the memories

of a specifically twentieth-century childhood recur in

their work: consider “Toddler Hiway,” “Rabid Child,”

“Hide Away Folk Family,” and “Purple Toupee,” to name

some pre-Flood examples. But beyond the particulars of

the Johns’ own youth, we might view childhood more

broadly as a methodology in They Might Be Giants’ music.

Simply put, They Might Be Giants frequently approach

their subject matter in an overtly childlike way. “What’s

the sense in ever thinkin’ bout the tomb when you’re

much too busy returning to the womb?” asks a 1988 lyric

that we may as well take to be self-analysis.

It’s apt in a discussion of childhood in They Might Be

Giants’ work to nod toward John Linnell’s father, Zenos

Linnell, whose academic publications on children’s

development resonate with the band’s music and share a

certain aesthetic sensibility.

Dr. Linnell’s work is dense, technical, and well

outside the scope of this book. But it highlights an

important facet of the way They Might Be Giants

treat childhood as a concept. He focuses his research

on the way in which a child’s sense of self and

identity is initially developed, particularly via what

is called object relations theory. The title of the elder

Linnell’s 2002 paper “Thinking about Thinking about

‘Thinking about Thinking’,” a study of the way in which

recursive thought develops over childhood, might as well

have just referenced Lincoln’s “Where Your Eyes Don’t

Go,” calling itself “Every Jumbled Pile of Person has

a Thinking Part that Wonders what the Part that Isn’t

Thinking Isn’t Thinking Of.” Specifically, he harkens

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

back to the earlier work of psychologists like Melanie

Klein and Jean Piaget, whose models of how infants

interact with objects bear striking resemblance to the

aesthetic of flooding.

Piaget developed the idea of assimilation—an idea

cited by Linnell in some of his papers—in which the

infant draws in objects, often by sucking on them, in

order to make them a part of her own mental schema.

This represents a flood of literal consumption, as object

after object is drawn into the child’s all-devouring mental

system. This closely mirrors the way that flooding in the

band’s music not only rewards (and comes from) fertile

minds, but also rewards (and comes from) people with

access to a lot of cultural points of reference. There’s a

sense that the music innocently tries out ideas for the

sake of their own enjoyable assimilation. As the All Music

Guide says of the band, they “borrowed from every-

where.” And so the genre play on “

Women and Men

” and

“

Twisting

”—or more explicitly on non-Flood tracks like

“We’re The Replacements”—smacks of the curious child

blithely and arbitrarily shoving sea chanteys and garage

rock into its drooling maw.

Melanie Klein, on the other hand, developed the idea

of splitting, in which infants formulate “good” and “bad”

versions of objects based on their presence or absence,

distinguishing between the “good breast” that’s present

when they are hungry and the “bad breast” that is not,

treating these objects as wholly separate things. What

is key to the Kleinian model is that the infant’s own ego

is split as well, leading to what she calls the “paranoid-

schizoid position” in which children fragment themselves

and their world into a multitude of part-objects. This is

F L O O D

•

no less a flood, albeit in a different direction. Instead of a

flood of objects into the infant’s subjectivity, the infant’s

subjectivity redoubles the world into a flood, where,

despite all physical evidence to the contrary, Istanbul is

decidedly not Constantinople.

The important point here is not that these theories

enjoy particular credibility—child psychology as

a field has moved on for a variety of well-founded

empirical reasons. Rather it is that these theories seem,

to adult audiences, to capture some essential nature

of childhood as they recall it. This is, of course, quite

different from capturing the essential nature of childhood

as experienced by children—a point we will return to

later.

Either way, childhood experience as envisioned by

seminal child psychologists is an experience of flooding.

Which makes sense—childhood is, after all, largely a

period defined by the experience of play and the sense

of a vast and oversized world. The practice of flooding is

easily played out over a backdrop of childhood—whether

a literal childhood, as in many of the songs off of their

self-titled album, or in a more figurative sense, as in

many of the songs on Flood.

T h e E x p e r i e n c e o f G r o w i n g U p ( We ’ re

D r o w n e d by T h i s Fe e l i n g We S u r r o u n d )

A big part of what separates childhood from adulthood

is discernment—the apprehension of the world’s

dizziness, the channeling of its everythingness into

sensical categories. This goes for intake and output

alike, with a large part of growing up being an education

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

in behavioral propriety and conversational relevance.

The sort of transmodality by which a person becomes a

bag of groceries (as in “

Dead

”) makes much less sense

to a well-adjusted, reasoning adult than to a child, who

has encountered few models that explain either where

people ultimately go or where grocery bags really come

from.

This plays into why the band’s music always strikes

adult reviewers as quirky, but can seem unremarkably

factual to young kids. Sure, the Johns’ post-2000

children’s albums (No!, Here Come the ABCs, Here Come

the 123s, and Here Comes Science) might lack a certain

signature morbidity, but the fact that parents hear these

records “speak[ing] to kids on their level” (according to

an Amazon.com review) might not indicate a difference

between the band’s tot-oriented and grownup fare so

much as an ability retained by those adults—most of

them longstanding fans now with families of their own—

to slip into a childlike headspace when they knowingly

reframe their hearing of They Might Be Giants as music

for tykes.

This hints at a peculiar fact of the band’s focus on

childhood, which is that the primary audience for it

seems at times to be parents rather than children. They

Might Be Giants provide a particularly safe sort of

rebelliousness—one that is more invested in negating

boundaries than breaking through them. It allows for

individuality without getting dangerous. And, if we’re

being honest, this is part of what makes it ideal music

for the middle school “gifted” set, a group of variously

outcast kids who, nevertheless, don’t actually want to piss

off their parents. They Might Be Giants, in other words,

F L O O D

•

provide the sort of music reasonably progressive parents

wish their teens and pre-teens would listen to.

The adolescent cusp, though, is arguably the moment

at which we have greatest access to both the undifferen-

tiated overload of childhood and the ordered routines

of adulthood—and vitally, it’s a moment when the latter

has not yet fully supplanted the former as a base state

of mind. This last point is why some cultures (notably

Victorian England) have venerated the child’s point of

view: kids, so the thinking goes, can spot the absurdities

of adult behaviors, not yet having been inured to them.

The flipside in They Might Be Giants’ music is a deep

distrust of the grownup world, hence the bleakness with

which “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair,” “Hearing

Aid,” and “Minimum Wage” all paint careerism and the

suspicious amorality with which “

Women and Men

”

implicitly equates humans’ tautological breeding with

imperialism.

Hence the kinship of They Might Be Giants’ music

with the tween crowd. As John Flansburgh remembers,

when the band’s music first broke on KROQ in the late

1980s, “all of a sudden the entire general teen population

of Los Angeles was really interested in us. We were

getting the Seventeen magazine experience that the Bay

City Rollers had.” These were the fans young enough to

understand their own childhood without nostalgia and

old enough to differentiate its playful headspace from the

world that lay immediately before them.

This existence on a cusp between childhood and

adulthood plays out within the duo’s music as well,

perhaps most notably (on Flood at least) on “

Letterbox

.”

On one hand, the lyrics seem to be from a position of

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

someone with enough of a past to feel profound regret—

the meditation on how he would have “a lot of eyes on

the other side” or the concern that it might be “too late

or soon to make noise about love, and there’s no time

for sorrow” come across as positively weary. But on the

other hand there’s a clear sense of innocence and naïveté

in the song’s basic conceit, with the singer’s avian bestie

sounding like nothing so much as a childhood invisible

friend. The song at once sutures these two disparate

experiences into one and willfully lingers in the strange

space between them. It is at once a childish look at

adulthood and a mature look at childhood experience.

T h e I n e v i t a b l e “ B i rd h o u s e ” S e c t i o n ( W h a t D o

Yo u M a ke o u t o f T h a t R e c o rd i n g ? )

“

Letterbox

” is, however, only the second most obvious

place to discuss birds and childhood on Flood. “

Letterbox

”

merely suggests an imaginary friend, as opposed to

outright invoking a fundamental image of childhood:

the nightlight. What is most striking about “Birdhouse

in Your Soul” in this regard, however, is the way in

which the child herself is absent from the song except

as the “you” whom the narrating lamp watches over.

The child is entreated to make a birdhouse in her

soul, but this desire comes from the nightlight. Nothing

of the child’s subjectivity enters into the song at all, with

the child’s identity being entirely projected by the blue

canary.

Going back to Melanie Klein’s idea of splitting, the

song could be read as an inversion of the Kleinian

part-object paradigm. Here the nightlight enters the

F L O O D

•

paranoid-schizoid position as it splits itself and the

child into part-objects: your only friend, not your only

friend, a little glowing friend, not actually your friend—a

process that notably doesn’t ever resolve, but instead

leaves off in mid-split with a “but I am…” as the electric

organ’s octaves beckon the drums.

The song, in other words, makes the world around

its nameless child into one organized according to an

apparently childlike logic, but, crucially, does so without

actually looking at the world from a child’s perspective.

Although it might sound paradoxical, this actually

makes for a more authentic world because the song’s

narrative never disrupts the enveloping completeness of

its universe by overtly crossing into “your” headspace;

instead it reinforces the unquestioned and unques-

tionable rightness with which children universalize their

experience. Of course your nightlight has a rich inner life

and an historical lineage going back millennia. What the

heck kind of nightlight doesn’t?

This move is quintessential They Might Be Giants,

both in the decision to turn away from the autobio-

graphical or confessional model of pop singing that

would demand the child’s perspective to be foregrounded

and in its reworking of the exterior world according to

alternative and playful logics.

Now let’s visit “

Dead

” again for a moment, this

time recognizing its application of childhood logic as

a bit more nightmarish than the factual recognition

that sometimes people turn into grocery bags. At its

most basic level, the song is based off of an elision

of two different contexts for the act of returning:

that of returning groceries to the store and that of

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

reincarnation. The logic at work here is also ostensibly

childlike—or at least dreamlike—playing uncertainly

between two different meanings of a word. And while

one might hear “

Dead

” as a song about the regrets of

old age, its individual images are far more in line with

this developmental logic, with the narrator regretting

how “I’ll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes

closed.” The most telling line, of course, is “I never

apologized for when I was eight and I made my younger

brother have to be my personal slave.” The metaphysical

rules of reincarnation, in other words, remain hung up

on a worry over perfectly ordinary acts of inter-sibling

terrorism, such that the narrator is remade into bag of

groceries expressly because of his lingering remorse over

something his brother has surely long since forgiven and

forgotten. As in “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

,” the world

is shown to work actually according to a childhood

logic—this time of guilt and justice—but here the logic

is a source of concern as the universe steps into the role

of the parents, come to punish the narrator for crimes

committed in their absence.

T h e Ti ny To o n S o n g s ( I D o n ’t U n d e rs t a n d

W h a t Yo u D i d t o M y D o g )

Although nothing in “

Particle Man

” overtly references

childhood, its reception shows clearly that it’s a song

that echoes particularly for children. Not only did it

receive an animated music video on Tiny Toon Adventures

(more about that in a moment) but it shows up on the

anthology Then: The Earlier Years as sung by a second-

grade class at Ottawa Elementary School in Buchanan,

F L O O D

•

Michigan, which John Linnell has cited as his favorite

version of the song.

To start, of course, one must point out that the song

is structured musically like a sing-along, a fact demon-

strated straightforwardly by the schoolchildren’s version.

Repetition reigns supreme, and the opening motifs are

simple arpeggios up and down from the major key’s

third scale degree—the note coded in Western music as

most traditionally cheery. The lyrics to “

Particle Man

”

also engage in the same sorts of playful differences of

magnitude that characterize “Dead” and “Birdhouse in

Your Soul,” as quantum particles get turned into cute-

sounding superheroes who battle abstract geometric

forms. Of particular note is the way in which the unfath-

omable vastness of the cosmic timescale is collapsed into

the image of “a watch with a minute hand, millennium

hand, and an eon hand.”

This sense of childishness is, of course, particularly

stressed by the Tiny Toon Adventures video for the song.

This video is interesting both in how it takes the song to

its logical endpoint and in how it fundamentally alters

parts of it. Its setting—a series of arena fights featuring

Particle Man as played by Plucky Duck—is strained, even

when we allow for the multiplicity of interpretation that

“

Particle Man

” intends. For this and other reasons, the

Johns are ambivalent about the videos that Tiny Toons did

of their songs. Flansburgh personally observes, “There’s

just something about being animated as a pig that leaves

you coming back for less,” although Linnell tosses out, “If

the money were right, I’d consider a whole TV series.”

The video makes blatant additions and alterations to

the song, most notably the sequence in which Universe

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

Man pummels Particle Man and the introduction of an

unnamed character who continues to beat Plucky up

once he’s reverted to Person Man. Furthermore, there’s

an almost mean-spirited violence to the video that seems

to abandon the tentative balance between cheeriness and

bleakness that the song itself walks.

Despite these apparent flaws, however, something

rings perfectly true about the video. Its structure is that

of a standard Looney Tunes short. Plucky Duck, a child

version of Daffy Duck, is cast in the standard role of the

character who is subjected to an unending and increas-

ingly absurd set of physical torments. In just over two

minutes he is splashed in the face with a bucket of water,

punched in the face by an obese middle-aged woman,

smashed in an accordion, pounded into the ground,

slapped, crushed underneath a massive wrestler, tied into

a knot, crumpled up like a piece of paper, whipped by

hounds in a reverse dog-sledding scenario, and, inevi-

tably, hit in the head with a frying pan. These torments

are, of course, ultimately good-natured, as indicated by

the extremity of physical indignities to which Plucky is

subjected. Plucky, like any Looney Tunes stooge character,

is defined by his intense elasticity—the fact that he can

be put through ludicrous situations like being literally

flattened to two dimensions by a frying pan or being tied

into a knot and emerge essentially unscathed, save for his

dignity, not that he has any to begin with.

The entire thing, in other words, has an aesthetic of

excess, of flooding. Triangle Man is defined primarily

by her prodigious girth and size, and Universe Man by

the fact that he is even larger still. The end sequence, as

Plucky Duck attempts to flee his tormentors (only to end

F L O O D

•

up seeking sanctuary in a remote cabin where they are

already waiting for him) consists of a fast-cut montage

of Plucky constantly running through various far-flung

locales. Everything about the short is defined by this

sense of excess. Even its initial setup, a poster indicating

that “Today Only Particle Man Takes On the Universe”

in the “Fight of the Millennium,” points towards this

basic aesthetic of excess.

(Much of this goes equally well for the Tiny Toons

video for “

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

,” which is

similarly invested in an aesthetic of excess. In this case it’s

based not so much on the practice of ludicrous physical

torment as it is on a continual depiction of excess in the

subtle details: the way that Plucky Duck’s tongue extends

so far as to wrap around his head several times when he

gazes upon a photo of a beautiful veiled woman, the way

in which Yosemite Sam produces a sack of money larger

than himself seemingly from nowhere to try to employ

Plucky’s detective services, and even the way in which

Istanbul is depicted as a ludicrously, excessively vast

collection of spires and minarets.)

T h e U n e a s i n e s s o f C h i l d h o o d ( T h e K n o w n , t h e

U n k n o w n , a n d t h e U n d e rk n o w n )

But for all its instantly lovable superheroes, “Particle

Man” is uneasy—a truth belied by the odd placement

of those two-beat measures that truncate its verses. As

soon as Particle Man is introduced, he’s beaten in a

fight by Triangle Man, and by the end of the song the

already rather grim Person Man suffers the same fate. It’s

difficult to get away from the fact that this is a song in

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

which the unlikable bully character mostly wins the day,

with the closest thing to a ray of hope in the song being

that Universe Man gets a fancy woodwind solo instead

of a fight scene. Even the Tiny Toon Adventures video is

cynical, positioning the song in the simultaneously enter-

taining and bleak context of Chuck Jones’s Road Runner

cartoons, with their eternally suffering Wile E. Coyote.

Here, then, is a reminder that the best children’s

media has always been prone to a little darkness. It

would be a stretch to describe They Might Be Giants

as a dark band—indeed, the bulk of their work for the

soundtrack of the grade school horror film Coraline was

dropped on account of its insufficient gloom—but their

music recognizes that childhood’s mission of grasping

and constructing a universe is by nature strange and

maybe a little scary. As ever, the flood is treated as essen-

tially value-neutral, a site of both possibility and fear. A

childlike view of the world brings wonder and worry in

equal measure. The bluebird of friendliness abuts with

the drowning screams of the Argonauts, Particle Man

gets beaten up, and the word games of “

Dead

” obscure a

No Exit proposition.

All of which is to say that They Might Be Giants are

not only focused on the theme of childhood, they’re

particularly good at capturing it with something resem-

bling authenticity. The result of this is that they are

particularly well suited to be a formative band: a body

of music that is designed to grab a still-impressionable

audience and to shape their worldview. And as later

chapters will show, there was, in 1990, a rapidly growing

young audience that was particularly receptive to the

aesthetic on offer. But before we turn to the ways in

•

Mediality

S t u f f ( M y M e t a l D e t e c t o r I s Wi t h M e A l l

o f t h e Ti m e )

Flooding within They Might Be Giants’ music is

largely a conceptual process. The band doesn’t focus

on a profusion of things so much as on a profusion of

ideas and possibilities: information overload. But that

doesn’t mean that flooding isn’t a material process, just

that flooding’s materialism takes the form of a focus on

media—the way in which the overflow of information

is provided. As we’ll discuss later, this is evident in the

so-called “hacker ethic”—the focus on playing with

and learning the nature of a new system or piece of

technology—but the idea predates computer culture,

most obviously in the form of Marshall McLuhan’s famed

maxim that “the medium is the message.” However one

frames it, though, the basic point remains: They Might

Be Giants, as a band, are particularly focused on the

material aspects of their music, both within their music

as a subject and in terms of their musicianship itself.

Most musicians and record company folks treat

records, tapes, CDs, and mp3s as functionally transparent

F L O O D

•

formats, effectively letting the music do all the talking.

This was never the case with They Might Be Giants.

Take a moment to remember how physical a child’s

first experiences with recorded media can be: there’s

a tactile, ritualistic gravity to putting on a record or

in recording that first tape. The 1986 song “Toddler

Hiway” namechecks the Close N’Play, a turntable that

Kenner debuted in 1967 to a generation of kindergar-

teners—one of whom was John Flansburgh, writer of

the song. Like the product’s name suggests, kids operated

the Close N’Play by opening and closing its bright red

plastic case, which had a sturdy handle for carrying

around. McLuhan would have been proud of Kenner’s

marketing campaign, which effectively branded music

as little more than an excuse to use playback technology.

Hasbro also got in the medium-as-message game in 1967

with their talking G. I. Joe toy—pull his cord and hear

him say “G. I. Joe reporting for duty, sir!”

They Might Be Giants use media consciously, in

some cases championing obscure or new formats, and

in other cases highlighting and taking advantage of

a medium’s idiosyncrasies instead of ignoring them.

Examples from across their oeuvre are countless. In

1987, “Don’t Let’s Start” was purportedly the first indie-

label single ever released as a three-inch CD. “Purple

Toupee” was marketed to the press with 8-track tapes

that were so obsolete by 1989 that Bar/None didn’t

even bother putting the song on the tapes—they were

just for show. Tracks 17 through 37 on 1992’s Apollo 18

comprise the dizzying fan favorite “Fingertips,” which

imitatively highlights just how hilariously weird the

medium of TV-commercial-for-compilation-album

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

really is, juxtaposing song fragments from some universe

where “What’s that blue thing doing here?” is a viable

pop refrain; more importantly, though, by putting each

snippet in “Fingertips” onto a different CD track, the

band made Apollo 18 uniquely intriguing fodder for the

fancy “shuffle” function on CD players. The band also

takes advantage of obscure media technology when they

insert the song “Token Back to Brooklyn” as a hidden

track before the start of Factory Showroom and when they

bury “Complete Paranoia” in the commentary track of

their Direct from Brooklyn DVD. Ever the connoisseurs

of American history, They Might Be Giants furthermore

recorded a performance at Thomas Edison’s laboratories

using 1898 wax cylinder technology, with numbers like

“I Can Hear You” and “The Edison Museum” aptly

foregrounding a scratchy materiality.

Even their songs’ sense of self-containment can make

them seem somehow object-like. The band’s records

almost never use fadeouts—the familiar production

technique in which a song grows gradually quieter until

it’s no longer clear where the music ends and silence

begins. Fadeouts act to negate our understanding of

a song as a physical thing; they declare music both

permeable and endless, thereby obscuring its edges

and denying listeners access to tactile analogies. So it’s

noteworthy that although in 1990 fully half of Billboard’s

26 number-one singles melted away in a fadeout, just

two out of Flood’s 19 songs do so. Combined with their

brevity, this casts the album’s tracks as little solid things:

toys.

F L O O D

•

D i a l - A - S o n g ( T h e P h o n e I n s i d e H e r R i b c age )

In somewhat less theoretical territory, They Might Be

Giants’ most iconic conflation of an object medium

with an ideological message came in their Dial-A-Song

service, which Flansburgh set up on an answering

machine in his Brooklyn apartment in 1983. The band’s

intent at the time was probably not to explore the possi-

bilities of technoculture—mostly, they just wanted a

way to keep the momentum of their music going after

their live gigging was temporarily interrupted when

Linnell injured his hand and when their equipment

had been burglarized from Flansburgh’s apartment—“it

completely informed our notion that we were living at

the top of Kleptomaniac Mountain,” he says.

Launching Dial-A-Song was an exceedingly clever

move, in that it encouraged a kind of engagement that

allowed for actively ongoing fandom. By recording a

new Dial-A-Song tape daily, They Might Be Giants

pioneered a sort of fan participation that went far

beyond attending those Lower East Side concerts they

played in their first few years. With Dial-A-Song, callers

could act upon being They Might Be Giants fans every

single day instead of just a few nights per year. The

easy technology gave both the band and their fans a

relentless momentum: callers wanted to know what the

next day’s song would be, and so the Johns had to supply

it, whether it was a new song or an old demo that had

been out of the machine’s rotation for a while. As writer

Gene Santoro notes, the band had made three hundred

Dial-A-Song recordings before they’d even cut their

second album.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

Dial-A-Song fostered a sense of intimacy that went

beyond what either albums or live shows could offer.

In the early days of the service, the answering machine

picked up listeners’ reactions to songs, and the band

even sampled their fans’ voices on songs like “I’ll Sink

Manhattan” and “I’m Def.” The sense of give and take in

all this comes in part from the telephone’s tremendously

personal potential; as a technology, it was marketed in

terms of fundamentally intimate connections. Consider,

for instance, the famed 1979 AT&T slogan “reach out

and touch someone,” which attempts to create a tactile

relationship in the experience of calling one’s “friends

and family” (to quote yet another prominent bit of

telephone marketing).

And so Dial-A-Song brought this sense of intimacy

to the act of listening to music. They Might Be

Giants themselves were more or less aware of this,

playing up the clubby aspect of the service with

slogans like “always busy, often broken” and the

cheeky claim that it’s “free when you call from work.”

The Johns advertised the service in the Village Voice

personals section, and although they claim this was

because buying ad space in the classified section was

much more expensive, the effect was nonetheless

suggestive. Even Dial-A-Song’s name fostered a sense

of intimacy, playing off of the well-known evangelical

“Dial-a-Prayer” service and its promise of spiritual

companionship anytime, anywhere.

Dial-A-Song stayed in service well into the digital

age, finally hanging it up for good in 2006 when the

answering machine broke for the last time, an event that

Linnell described tellingly as a “technological death.”

F L O O D

•

He noted, “the Internet had kind of taken over where

Dial-A-Song left off.”

Indeed, They Might Be Giants quasi-revived

Dial-A-Song as a website housing their podcasts. But

their involvement in using the Internet to distribute

their music goes back well before 2006. They signed

up to distribute music legally online through eMusic in

1999, releasing two quasi-albums—Giants Jubilee and

Mightathon—exclusively on the service in February of

that year. The albums were, in truth, just cut-down

versions of the two discs of their Then: The Earlier Years

compilations, but they were followed up in July by Long

Tall Weekend, which, despite somewhat resembling a

b-side collection, was the first mp3-exclusive album by

a major artist.

It was nevertheless a watershed moment in the history

of music on the Internet. What’s truly remarkable about

Long Tall Weekend is that it came out only a month after

the launch of Napster. In other words, They Might Be

Giants were leagues ahead of the technological curve

with this album, quickly and savvily allying themselves

with the growing digital culture in a way that most other

bands—and, frankly, the larger music industry—were

unable to manage.

A n E l e c t r o n i c B a n d ( Tu r n I t U p, Tu r n

I t D o w n )

Through all these episodes, the Johns’ attention to media

technology indicates to their listeners that recording

and playback aren’t just the means to some artistic end,

but they are instead worthy of attention in their own

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

right. And that applies perfectly well to the recording

of Flood. Despite the big budget and the whiff of rock-

stardom, the band that entered the recording studio

in 1989 largely maintained a musical identity that

they’d begun to formulate in their earliest days and that

Dial-A-Song was characteristic of. Time has somewhat

blurred the technological differentiations between pop

practices of the 1980s, so it’s easy today to hear, for

example, the wonky steampipe percussion of “Sapphire

Bullets” as little more than an historical watermark. But

from their earliest demos through the Flood era, the duo’s

commitment to their electronic setup and sound was as

central to their self-identity as any supposed quirkiness.

Says Flansburgh, “These days the idea of using a

drum machine might seem so much smaller than life, but

in the 1980s, we didn’t feel like it made us un-rock—we

felt like we were more rock. Like we weren’t constrained

by some 1965 notion of being a combo. We could go

around Saturn and come back in a song, and your band

can’t. There was swagger in being an electronic band in

that era.”

The swaggering here is literal. With a guitar and an

accordion strapped to their respective bodies, the Johns

were not only able to move around their performing

space, but being the only two people onstage (along

with a tape machine—which itself got relegated to the

mixing board around 1985), they had to: there was a lot

of room to fill. And they wanted to; Linnell picked up the

accordion as an instrument specifically because it was a

mobile keyboard. NYC synthpop acts like Book of Love

made high-energy dance music while standing amazingly

still onstage behind synth rigs, but “the physicality and

F L O O D

•

sweatiness of our early shows would probably surprise

if not appall people,” says Flansburgh. “There was a lot

of jumping up and down and screaming. There was an

expulsive craziness to it.”

This craziness was willful, because as Flansburgh

explains to American Songwriter, “When you see a rock

show, a typical rock show, about four songs into it you

kind of know nothing is going to change. And to me

that’s a really disappointing thing about a lot of live

performances.” Ever since the band’s earliest shows, the

quasi-non-liveness of their performance had freed their

stage act to be more than a concert. At a given They

Might Be Giants show in the mid or late 1980s, the

stage would be festooned with three colossal portraits

of William Allen White, the Johns might don three-

foot-long papier-mâché gloves or sombreros, and a host

of other props and gimmicks would lie in store. When

they’d perform “Lie Still, Little Bottle,” Flansburgh

would keep time on the jazzy number’s offbeats by

thumping the stage ceremoniously with a microphone

affixed to the end of an eight-foot stick. Slide shows

played behind the band. Their TEAC tape machine

would play surreal spoken-word introductions to usher

them onstage and exit music to conclude their shows.

A glockenspiel was carted before the audience with

chanting and totemic reverence, only then to be used

for just one note of one song. They fenced with loaves

of French bread. Taking a cue from Bob Dylan’s 1965

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” video, they held up cue

cards for their audiences to see, offering instructions

and commentary that progressed from the banal to the

absurd. Cue cards might give way to rally signs. The

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

band also enjoyed involving the audience in large-scale

noisemaking, coordinating their WHOOSH sounds to

simulate planes flying overhead (an old Frank Zappa

routine). Or sometimes they’d just tell the crowd, “Now

scream like you are in Hell.” Somewhere along the line,

they started using puppets. As Linnell says to Spin, “We

like puppets. Some of our best friends are puppets.

We’re puppets.” They Might Be Giants tested the border

between music and theatre, and as we connect the dots

from gadgetry to stage props, materiality retains a privi-

leged role in the band’s public presentation.

We can also understand the band’s electronics as

an extension of their authorship. In the days of Flood

and before, Linnell and Flansburgh were accustomed

to a certain amount of musical control—after all, both

accordion and guitar can easily be played as a solo

instrument, providing melody and accompaniment alike.

An electronic setup assures its operators a degree of

uninterrupted command over the music, even if it limits

their ability to improvise or change song order on the fly.

It’s of course a lie to say that the duo’s drum machines,

playback tapes, and samplers never malfunctioned, but

during the early years, the occasional technical glitch was

nonetheless preferable to a hired rock combo’s reliably

humdrum sound and its simultaneously unreliable

command of those exacting songs. The Johns’ music is

every bit as fussy as it is fun, and John Flansburgh readily

admits that because of their desire to control their own

sound, “we sometimes seemed like the biggest divas in

the world.”

It’s fitting, then, that by eliminating the sideman,

the band’s electronic rig also served to amplify Linnell

F L O O D

•

and Flansburgh’s personalities in their music: their

awkward voices and lopsided lyrics were uncluttered in

the live mix, and each swelling bass rumble they lacked,

every time a drummer would have twitched clatter-

ously between songs (but didn’t), They Might Be Giants

resembled their contemporaries less and less. It also

allowed them to gig with a shorter setup time and to

adjust more readily to the size and desired noise level

of any given show. “The fact that we were working with

tape meant that our volume could be controlled in a way

that a band with drums wouldn’t have been,” Flansburgh

recalls. This kind of versatility was especially useful,

given that venues such as Darinka operated for many

years without licenses and were thus especially keen to

avoid police attention.

In these ways, the band’s bevy of gear became part of

their creative identity, both live and on tape. The demos of

“Hotel Detective” and “Don’t Let’s Start” and their “‘85

Radio Special Thank You” highlight the Johns’ eagerness

to filter their voices through warbling tape playback

systems, feeding themselves into their own machine,

apparently unconcerned with remaining entirely human.

(Incidentally, this is one of the ways that They Might Be

Giants’ music can set up the sci-fi punchline of mankind

serving gigantic technological overlords, despite their

real magic effervescing in less cartoonish moments of joy

or exasperation like “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

,” or “

Dead

,”

whose focus is sublimation, not submission.)

The electronic identity of the band didn’t just allow

the Johns to turn the sounds they imagined into reality,

but it suggested musical possibilities that were previ-

ously unthinkable. “The technological stuff was the

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

governor on our imaginations in one way, but it was also

a trampoline because there were all sorts of things you

could do that had never been done before. What was

coming out of these machines sounded unlike any music

that had happened before,” says Flansburgh.

Again, this is most audible on the duo’s early

recordings, where the presence of a sample or a synth

sound can seem to overpower the songwriting. In all

its lo-fi hi-tech glory, if “Boat of Car” had been the

only track They Might Be Giants ever recorded, the

ominously display of medium-as-message would have

branded them as a Residents ripoff band.

As far as the Johns are concerned, though, the specter

of technology might be even more iconic in the title of

Flood. Far from taking its name directly from a natural

event or even consciously from the aesthetic of flooding,

Flood was christened like this: “Back when we used

floppy drives, I would give the drives names that were

distinct from our actual project names,” says Flansburgh,

continuing, “There were about ten different names, just

nouns, and one of them was Flood. And Linnell just said

one day, ‘We should call the album Flood.’” To the Johns

and their fans alike, the album title might exude mystery

on its surface, but the sum total of their and our associa-

tions with the word “flood” accounts for the intuitive

rightness of its naming. The story is innocuous, but it

highlights the degree to which their attention is focused

on technology—and maybe knowing this will subtly shift

the way we hear the album.

F L O O D

•

T h e B a n d ’s S o u n d E vo l ve s ( A B ra n d N e w

R e c o rd f o r 1 9 9 0 )

Considering the medial engagement within the band’s

own history, their timeline up to Flood resembles a

mutual game of catch-up between man and machine.

From 1982 to 1989 the Johns learned how to handle

their gear and write with it and no longer for it, while the

consumer hardware market for electronic instruments

made gigantic strides toward integrated musicality. Ever

fans of expos and pageantry, the two would visit trade

shows where new equipment would be premiered, and as

Flansburgh remembers, “there were times when we had

to wait to record certain songs because the drum machine

we’d seen at the music equipment show wouldn’t ship

until a month later, and we knew the record would sound

so much better with the new gear.”

By the time the Flood sessions began, the game of

catch-up had largely run its course; the band had learned

to use their gizmos for genuinely musical ends. Even

though the band was excited to try out their new Casio

FZ-1 samplers—“We both got matching ones in a very

twinsy kind of way,” says Linnell—they found themselves

largely separating the acts of songwriting and production

from one another. “We never wrote in the studio,” he

quips.

The lion’s share of songs on both the self-titled album

and Lincoln had been written between 1984 and 1986.

Flansburgh explains, “we put our live show together

over the course of 1985, adding more and more songs,

and that created the repertoire that guided us through

the first album and Lincoln.” Linnell continues, “Lincoln

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

probably had half a dozen new songs, but like a lot of

second albums it also had all the sort of lesser songs of

the first album’s batch.”

So by 1989, “we had no original material,” explains

Flansburgh. “It was the first time in our career that

we actually had to create a whole new set of songs,

so it was a big evolution for us.” Now that the Johns

were under the gun after a long low period in their

songwriting, they found themselves writing appreciably

different stuff, more rigorously revising the sketches from

their Dial-A-Song answering machine. Whether or not

They Might Be Giants improved over their first several

years, they indubitably honed their songcraft toward

more functional pop. Across their first three albums, the

average song length increased from 2:01 to 2:12 to 2:17.

(Incidentally, this trend continues through Apollo 18, John

Henry, and Factory Showroom: 2:22 to 2:51 to 3:06.)

Only two songs weren’t newly written for the record.

One was “They Might be Giants,” which had appeared

on the band’s sprawling 1985 demo tape—albeit in

a slower, less Muppetlike incarnation. The band saw

the song as an important bridge from their past to the

present—and in the perpetuity suggested by its fadeout

ending, to their future too. As Flansburgh tells Rolling

Stone, “Any song like this is kind of a manifesto, and

although we had recorded a version early on, I think

including it here was a way to telegraph to all who might

care that we were very much going to carry on as we had

started—which is to say complicated and impossible to

pigeonhole.”

The other song they already had in the bag was

“

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

,” which had been a

F L O O D

•

top-ten single for The Four Lads in 1953, and was

similarly a long-standing part of their live show—

though notably one that they’d done sans backing

tracks. Instead, “

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

” had

been a technologically driven showcase of echoboxes.

The way they played it in the mid-1980s, after the

first two verses (accompanied by Linnell’s accordion),

the song would degenerate into an endlessly rever-

berating caterwaul of spooky-voiced dialogue and

vocalizations halfway between a yodel and an Islamic

call to prayer, warning listeners as if spoken from

the Byzantine Beyond, “You caaaan’t go baaaaack to

Constantinooooople!” before picking back up for the

third verse.

They felt the pop sensibilities of the song—which

is basically a rewrite of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the

Ritz”—but as Flansburgh explains, “it was really unclear

how to turn it into anything that would be more than

an encore song, much less a single,” so the band and

their producers treated it as an experiment; scheduled

for recording early in the Flood sessions, the song would

serve as a good exercise in mastering the FZ-1, and it also

afforded a little more time for the Johns to write a few

last-minute new songs.

After carefully piecing together a bank of samples

to work with (including the sound of blowing on Coke

bottles), Flansburgh did most of the work assembling the

track in a sequence that his Macintosh computer would

then send to the FZ-1 as MIDI triggers, activating the

song.

Even though by 1989, the band and their technology

formed a relatively unified front, the perils of being an

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

electronic band were real. Flansburgh recalls working on

the track’s pre-production at home:

A week after we’d gotten the FZ-1 samplers, I’d made
all the samples that are on “

Hot Cha

” and “Istanbul,”

and I’d pulled an all-nighter programming “Istanbul,” on
my computer triggering all the MIDI, all the samples,
everything that’s there. I had mapped out the whole song.
I’d come up with the version that you know, and it had
really taken a long time, and I was really tired. This guy
Alan was coming to my house at 10 or 11 in the morning,
and we were going to program drum fills for “

Twisting

.”

And I sat him down at my computer and said, “Dude, you
gotta check this out—this shit is on fire. I can’t believe I
did this. I’m so proud. I’m gonna go to the bathroom for
a second, but play this—I’ve worked on this and listened
to it for like twelve hours straight.”
And I come back, and he’s sitting at the computer, pale
as a ghost, just looking at me, and says, “I don’t know
what I did, man. I’m really sorry.” Everything was gone. It
was horrible. I’m actually not sure if I cried. I don’t know
what happened. I wasn’t there. I was already really tired.
But then I was given the task of actually having to
reprogram the entire thing again, which in some ways
was actually better because I’d done it once, and so the
next time round it was just a little more focused.

Little calamities like this underscore that the challenges

and small victories of making (and eventually touring

for) Flood were inseparable from the band’s investment

in technology. And importantly, the technology lends

the band’s lyrics and performances a kind of autonomy

F L O O D

•

in which they’re under no obligation to live up to the

subtexts of rock that include self-importance, hypermas-

culinity, biographical authenticity, and narrow-minded

moneymaking. The album’s 16-bit recipe preempts all

this, which is probably lucky, considering how much the

sound of rock music at large would change within a year

or two of 1990.

M e d i a l S o n g s ( I C a n Ju s t B a re l y H e a r Yo u )

In the larger scheme of the band’s extended engagement

with the material technology of their music, Flood

occupies a strange midpoint between the ostentatious

experiments of their first albums and the digital excur-

sions of the band’s late career. By early 1990 Dial-A-Song

was no longer a puzzling experiment in songwriting and

publicity, and the possibility of Long Tall Weekend was still

a glimmer in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee. Nonetheless,

there are a few captivating moments on the album that

meaningfully highlight technology and reward those

most plugged-in of listeners.

Track 11 on Flood is “

Hearing Aid

,” a Flansburgh

number sung over a cool dub reggae backing track. The

stylistic nod here is far from arbitrary: dub is a singularly

technological genre, historically created to show off

the Frankenstein assemblages of speakers that Jamaican

DJs in the 1970s cobbled together on truckbeds to

make mobile parties. Using echo boxes to create a sonic

space that connotes equal parts prison cell and dense

jungle, dub speaks a lo-fi, bass-heavy language. Because

of its cultural dialogue with underclass struggle and

technomodernity, this language spread quickly into the

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

punk scenes of New York and London, whose concerns

were similar (if less directly racial). This is one reason

why it’s fitting for “

Hearing Aid

” to feature the guitar

weirdness of dubby noiserock veteran Arto Lindsay (who

cut his teeth in the No Wave act DNA). It’s also one

of the reasons why those guitar squonks and metallic

crunches at the track’s end are so appropriate in a song

that addresses the ennui of the daily grind. The musical

style itself calls our attention to the idea of echoey urban

space.

What’s more, “

Hearing Aid

” doesn’t just direct our

tactile, physical attention to space, but it’s about techno-

logical objects. Things.

A quick survey of They Might Be Giants’ songs shows

us just how pervasively this happens: “Metal Detector,”

“Thermostat,” “They’ll Need a Crane,” “Dirt Bike,”

“Electric Car,” “Become a Robot,” “I Am a Robot,” “Robot

Parade,” and on perhaps somewhat shakier ground, we

might include “Shoehorn With Teeth.” In “

Hearing Aid

,”

though, the use of everyday technology goes beyond just

the dub stylings and the song’s title. The wobbling metal

sound at the song’s beginning is a rolling garbage can lid

(though it sounds like a Model A Ford in its death throes,

doesn’t it?). And that little solo before the second verse is

the sound of a vacuum cleaner, seemingly switched from

one intensity to another, edging ultimately toward weaker

suction, then switching off as if defeatedly admitting the

futility in trying to suck up all the lazily growing piles of

dingy stuff in one’s office. Or life.

Foregrounded technology takes on a lot of roles in

They Might Be Giants’ music, though in this case it’s

an agent of the mundane: any concern that the song’s

F L O O D

•

narrator might have for other people—namely Frosty

the supervisor—is reduced to yet another noise. As

Flansburgh says, it’s “a very personal song. It’s about

really, really, really hating your boss.” (Indeed, it’s no

surprise that “

Minimum Wage

” is the following track.)

The ambivalent line “don’t say the electric chair’s not

good enough” hints technologically at a punitive level

of excess where, like the album’s cover photo, the flood

is no longer any fun at all. Hence the song ends with an

arbitrary anticlimax. Self-indicted and self-destructive in

his object-assisted apathy, the narrator of “

Hearing Aid

”

just keeps drinking coffee.

(While we’re at it, let’s acknowledge the staggering

symbolic and functional importance of coffee in the

world of They Might Be Giants. The band namechecks

the beverage in no fewer than twenty—twenty—songs.

They also struck a rare endorsement deal a few years

ago with Dunkin’ Donuts, writing jingles. Coffee is a

logical—and crucially, legal—drug of choice for the

duo: it flows in endless refills, and it instills a pleas-

antly amped-up sense of awareness. As for the taste, its

bitterness is part of the charm. John Flansburgh tells the

website Three Imaginary Girls, “I like brewed coffee.

And I like very strong coffee that has been made very

recently. I like the very old-fashioned hotel kind, where

they make coffee in semi-industrial circumstances in a

very big coffee maker at a very, very high temperature…

I do love going into the fanciest hotel of whatever city

we are in, and they make coffee in a very old fashioned

way.”)

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

T h e O t h e r O b l i ga t o r y B i rd h o u s e S e c t i o n

( W h a t ’s T h a t B l u e T h i n g D o i n g H e re ? )

Back to the music, then. If “

Hearing Aid

” uses hi-tech

and non-old-fashioned things, in all their thingness, to

dystopian effect, then it’s the evil twin to “Birdhouse in

Your Soul,” that warmest, most utopian moment. Those

childlike sensibilities that the previous chapter identified

in “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

” lend a tactile intimacy to

the song’s sense of thingness, reaching out and touching

technology in the specific form of the nightlight.

Recall that “

Theme from Flood

,” an auspicious call

to bright-faced futurological optimism, opens the album

au naturel, with only voices and trombones in thin,

happy decorum. Thus when “Birdhouse” hits, its very

unnaturalness is immediately apparent. That comically

bouncy kick drum. That sample of a picked electric bass.

That shimmering electric organ, cheap and portentous

all at once. However much Elektra may have wanted

They Might Be Giants to be a big-sounding rock band,

they weren’t one (yet), and so as with their early days of

performing with a tape deck onstage, here again they

shine a light on their music’s inorganic scaffolding.

Several of the song’s surface-level events are actually

extended musical quotations from The Lovin’ Spoonful’s

1966 single “Summer in the City.” Linnell explains:

“1989 was a particularly brutally hot summer. When we’d

leave the studio, it was this crazy, sweaty world. This is a

little bit corny, but that was the spark for the reference in

‘Birdhouse.’” Listen to both songs back-to-back and hear

how the two-chord alternation in They Might Be Giants’

verse echoes that of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s chorus. The

F L O O D

•

keyboard sound in the earlier track is also recognizable

as Linnell’s favorite organ, the Vox Continental. During

live performances of “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

” (including

the version on Severe Tire Damage), guitars and brass

invariably quote the instrumental solo from the 1966 hit

at length. And getting back to technology, both songs

boast car horns in their middle sections.

But venturing deeper inside the birdhouse, even

the song’s thornier moments of harmonic organization

suggest a certain way of interacting with technology.

Specifically, when we listen for the relations between the

various keys that the song visits and hints at, we might

understand “

Birdhouse in Your Soul

” as among the more

musically complex songs to chart in the top ten (oh yes

it did—number three on the US Modern Rock chart and

number six in the UK singles chart, remember?).

Though Linnell penned the song in the overarching

schema of C major, its various sections emphasize other

tonal centers. Specifically when the chorus hits the

word “soul” for the first time, we’re then treated to a

parenthetical couplet that recasts the song suddenly

in E-flat major, despite its having previously offered

no meaningful indication that this was even musically

possible. The are two things to listen for here: first, note

the similarity of chord progressions that opens both the

“blue canary” and the “not to put too fine a point on

it” sections (I to IV in their respective keys); second,

notice how both of those sections conclude with a series

of chords on “make a little birdhouse in your soul”

that, despite differing, nonetheless both provide a kind

of musical resolution—the first taking us from C into

E-flat, and the second dropping us back off in C.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

In “Birdhouse,” these harmonic developments swoop

down upon us much more suddenly than they would in the

Beatles or Beethoven. One effect of such abrupt musical

changes is their potential to sound somehow mechanical.

Reinforcing this notion is the digital “transpose” function

on the sequencing software the band was using in 1989,

which meant that with the click of a mouse, whole

sections or songs could cartoonishly jump up or down by

a few notes. The suggestion here is an interchangeability

of keys and, by extension, the notion that the parts of a

song are modular—actual things to be manipulated. This

isn’t far-fetched, given, for example, how thinglike Flood’s

songs are (as suggested earlier on account of their refusal

to fade out) and how explicitly shuffleable the compo-

nents of “Fingertips” are. The pop phenomenon of a

sudden musical transposition marking a sectional divide

is widely recognized, so much that it even has a devoted

website (www.gearchange.com), which calls it the “Truck

Driver’s Gear Change”—a telling nickname that frames

harmony within the realm of the technologically tactile,

as if keys and chords belong to some vehicle whose

ratchetlike transmission is the plaything of rock bands.

Beyond the chorus, this sort of behavior happens

all over “Birdhouse.” Pay close attention to how

when the “I’m your only friend” part from the intro

comes back at the bridge; it’s in A major instead of

the original C. And those stormy chords that hit 80

seconds into the song? Just moments later, we hear an

unforeshadowed exact transposition of the progression

(gear-shifted down from A minor to F-sharp minor). The

MTV clip for the song, incidentally, uses these musical

moments to offer an ultra-rare instance in the band’s

F L O O D

•

videography of one-to-one sound-to-image correlation,

again foregrounding mechanical thingness: a syncopated

saxophone blast is visually staged as a forklift’s honking

horn, with John Flansburgh behind the wheel, outfitted

as a warehouse truck driver.

Enthusiasts of music theory will note that the song’s

points of tonal focus—C, E-flat, F-sharp, and A—

symmetrically divide the octave into four equal intervals

of three semitones each. Tricky moves like this hardly

guarantee good music, but the aesthetic payoff here is

important: they naturalize the unexpected. To harmony

and sectionality, to friends and non-friends, to objects

small and large, and to settings mythic and intimate,

the song imbues an interchangeability whose character

is above all familiar. Its focus on tangible items and

physical closeness suggests that no matter how remote

and unstable the surroundings might seem, home is never

far away. It also relatedly affirms owning, handling, and

using physical things as an empowering way of being

oneself. The “Longines Symphonette,” to which the

lyrics compare the infinitude of the nightlight’s story,

refers to a line of transistor radios, calculators, and wrist-

watches popular in the post-war decades, and the bluebird

on the nightlight is, of course, one of friendliness. For all

the light-and-dark ambiguity in the band’s flooding, the

music of “Birdhouse” can declare that happiness isn’t

just some immobile lighthouse, warning as much as it

beckons, but instead it’s something we can hold and carry

with us—something we can plug in anywhere, whether

we’re in A major or E-flat. In this way, the glowing

message of “Birdhouse” is written at the convergence of

early childhood memory, tactility, and technology.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

In the following chapter we’ll see how this particular

meeting ground is a fertile one with a fair amount of

cultural history. It both reflects and gives rise to a certain

way of being in the world. This convergence helps to

explain why 1990 was such a good time to be invested

in material technology. And to bring our discussion

back around to the phenomenon of Flood itself, it helps

us to get at how, why, and for whom this record was so

important.

•

Geek Culture

G e e k C h i c ( T h e i r N a m e s A re C a l l e d , T h e y

R a i s e a Pa w )

They Might Be Giants never auditioned for the role

of geek rock kings, and so their being cast as such has

historically been a sensitive topic. As John Linnell puts

it to Magnet, “we did feel like we were being carica-

tured in a way that was unfortunate… people thought it

was a schtick, that we were some kind of nerd-themed

project.” He continues, though, noting that “at one

time, ‘nerd’ was a much more pejorative term. But

something has changed in the culture now, and that’s no

longer a horrible thing to be.” This isn’t code for some

if-you-can’t-beat-’em-then-join-’em resignation; to the

contrary, Linnell doesn’t give the band nearly enough

credit here. One of those things that he talks about

having changed in culture, in fact, was They Might Be

Giants, and specifically the album Flood. Nonetheless,

Linnell is correct in observing that pigeonholing them

as such displays a limited understanding of what they do.

To wit, it’s worth contrasting the band with, for instance,

Jonathan Coulton, another “geek rock” musician, and one

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

whom they’re close to—Coulton opened for the band

several times, and Flansburgh produced Coulton’s 2011

Artificial Heart album. Coulton’s music is overtly steeped

in geek references, with songs like “Code Monkey”

(the tale of a put-upon programmer) and “Skullcrusher

Mountain” (a mad scientist love song). Nothing in They

Might Be Giants’ catalogue is nearly so overtly geeky.

And where Coulton’s background was as a computer

programmer, They Might Be Giants came up through

a postpunk scene with no overtly geeky elements. As

Flansburgh puts it in a joint interview with Coulton:

“For me, when people say ‘you guys are such nerds,’ I

am a million miles away from that. If it were not for the

Sex Pistols and the Ramones and Patti Smith and Elvis

Costello and the Tuff Darts and Mink DeVille and Pere

Ubu and The Residents, I would not be in a rock band,

because those things are my cultural lighthouses. Those

people punched people in the face.”

How, then, did They Might Be Giants end up bridging

the divide between this hard-rocking lineage and their

eventual role as statesmen of geek rock? Much of it

has to do with the particular cultural context of 1990,

when Flood came out, and with the way in which the

album, without trying to or meaning to, tapped into

the tastes of a geek culture that was rapidly growing,

both in the sense of raw numbers and in the sense of a

widening umbrella of what “geekiness” signified. We’ve

already looked at the aesthetic of flooding and how it

characterizes They Might Be Giants’ work. But the

early 1990s was a period where the boundaries of what

could be considered geeky were rapidly expanding, and,

generally speaking, expanding in line with the idea of

F L O O D

•

flooding. Accordingly, They Might Be Giants were, with

a major-label debut, in the exact right place at the exact

right time. But explaining that will involve coming at the

divide from the side that They Might Be Giants didn’t.

So let’s put the band aside for just a moment and look at

geek culture in 1990.

Te ch n o l o g y i n 1 9 9 0 ( P u t Yo u r H a n d o n

t h e C o m p u t e r )

The biggest single factor in the geek culture of 1990

was the increasingly meteoric rise of the personal

computer, with ownership rates more than doubling

over the 1980s. It was also a time when major advance-

ments in the history of computers as a consumer

product took place. In late 1989 Creative Labs released

the Sound Blaster, significantly advancing the audio

capabilities of computers. The year 1990 saw the release

of Windows 3.0, the version of Microsoft Windows that

began Microsoft’s expansive dominance of the operating

system market. It was also the year of the standardi-

zation of computer graphics under the Video Electronic

Standard Association. Beyond that, 1990 witnessed the

then-nascent Internet in the form of the Usenet. Its now

most familiar form, the World Wide Web, did not exist

yet, but Usenet, a system of discussion forums called

newsgroups, did, which allowed like-minded folk to

converse about a dizzying and ever-expanding array of

topics. There also existed a patchwork of local systems

called BBSes. These generally consisted of people with

a personal computer and a modem who had configured

their machine to accept dial-in connections from other

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

users, and provided geographically focused forums for

discussion.

The experience of using these systems is noteworthy.

Trawling the vast number of newsgroups or using

local BBSes involved a continual act of searching and

exploring as tangents in conversations or off-handed

mentions of other BBSes progressively deepened the

rabbit hole. Integral to the pleasure of an online life

was the seemingly infinite amount of stuff that could

be found online. Although it was in no way true that

every thinkable triviality was being discussed somewhere

online, it was self-evidently true that discussions existed

on far more topics than one could possibly imagine.

Obviously one of the issues in 1990 is that of who has

access to the emerging technology. The divide separating

those with economic means of access to computers and

the Internet is still a major issue in any discussion of

digital culture today, and so it’s simply impossible to talk

sensibly about geek culture in 1990 without discussing

this. Computers in 1990 were not cheap. Serious models

cost thousands of dollars, and inexpensive units still cost

several hundred. They were in a price range where they

were consumer goods, yes, but they were still the province

of middle-class families. In 1990, only 15 percent of

Americans regularly used computers, and families with

multiple computers were most definitely the exception.

Access to the Internet, meanwhile, was even more

exclusive. The launch of the first commercial ISP, The

World (based near Boston), preceded Flood by only two

months, and was a clandestine operation, given that the

National Science Foundation, which still administered

the US Internet at that time, didn’t officially allow

F L O O D

•

the public sale of Internet access until 1992. Earlier

online communities like The WELL existed, but were

even more limited in scope and were restricted to

certain geographic areas. For the most part, access to

the Internet relied on affiliation with a university, a

government, or a defense contractor. In practical terms,

this means that while the hobbyist hacker did exist, and

while more and more people were acquiring the tools for

both hacking and creating digital media in general, they

were limited to relatively affluent families, and access to

the larger digital community was even further limited.

C o n ve n t i o n C u l t u re ( T h e Wo rl d Wa s

Tra n s f o r m e d , a C r o w d G a t h e re d R o u n d )

Geek culture existed in the West well before computer

culture, but was radically transformed by it, and this

transformation was in mid-shift at the time of Flood’s

release. Understanding the events requires a glimpse at

geekery in the mid-1980s. At that point, the culture was

focused heavily on the ritual of the convention—day or

weekend-long events in which fans would congregate.

These included both conventions dedicated to single

television series—Star Trek, most infamously—and

general sci-fi cons that might include actors from several

series or franchises alongside authors, big names from

the world of gaming (both computer and role-playing),

and other figures.

These conventions were, to be sure, heterogenous

in their interests. But for obvious financial reasons they

depended on the pragmatic overlap of various interests.

For instance, in 1987 the first Dragon*Con (one of the

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

larger conventions, still held annually in Atlanta) had

both British author Michael Moorcock and the creator

of Dungeons & Dragons Gary Gygax, along with more

obscure writers like Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey.

There is no direct connection among these figures, but

their fanbases had sufficient overlap that the organizers

could safely assume that people who wanted to see one

would be further enticed by the presence of the others.

The effect of this was that there existed a common

and roughly definable set of geek signifiers. The ones

sufficiently weighty and popular to build an entire

multi-day convention around were usually based on pop

culture media like Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Tolkien,

although large general interest conventions and rarer

specialized gatherings celebrated more esoteric fandoms

and also a host of participatory geek interests like corre-

spondence chess, ham radio, and historical reenactment.

This pool of signifiers was broad, but it all fit into a

relatively small number of categories; nearly the entire

list could be categorized either as sci-fi/fantasy media or

technology culture. The fringes of this world overlapped

occasionally with record collectors, sports card buffs,

mail art participants, vintage car enthusiasts, conspiracy

theorists, and gaggles of lonely Mensa members, but the

central orientations of geek identity were clear by this

time. It’s worth noting that the pre-computer version

of geek culture retains its link to economic privilege.

Central to conventions then and now are the dealers’

rooms, where the sale and trade of officially released and

bootlegged/fan-produced merchandise takes place.

Geek engagement overlaps with flooding in a few

ways that generally rely on economic resources. Most

F L O O D

•

notable here is collecting, which signifies a sustained,

progressive, and deep engagement with one item of

choice, be it computer games, comic books, or action

figures. Similarly invested in materiality is the stereo-

typically geek tradition of cosplaying, which involves

both the quite intensive material practice of crafting

one’s costume and also the flood of possible temporary

identities that one might don in the name of dressing up.

In the 1980s, the topics that could be considered

geeky were limited compared to now, and this in turn

limited the ways in which to geek out. For example,

consider that the vast number of craft projects within

modern geek practice—fan-made knitware based on

television shows and the like—were all but unheard of a

quarter-century ago.

This change is both conceptual and historical. Culture’s

understanding of geek identity is now much more open

and diffuse—and, not coincidentally, positive—than it was

before 1990. It acknowledges that the act of constructing

one’s identity from a variety of sources matters more

than the sources themselves, which means that the shared

signifiers of geekdom broadened at some point.

S h a re d S i g n i f i e rs ( T h e S t re a m o f Pe o p l e

G e t s Wi d e r )

To many fans around the time of Flood, They Might Be

Giants’ music wasn’t merely an adolescent soundtrack;

it served moreover as a much-needed shibboleth into a

culture of like-minded peers. Personally, in both of our

adolescent social lives, it was a shared signifier—one of a

few vital texts that, once referenced, acted as a shortcut

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

to kinship with others. Here we’re speaking of those

assessments of taste and knowledge that kick off so many

friendships, dates, and debates: What music do you listen

to? What books do you read? Have you seen Brazil?

So for example, another important common referent

for both of us was Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s

Guide to the Galaxy—and we suspect that a fair number

of readers are nodding with familiarity here. Esquire

magazine reinforces this kinship even while trying

to defend the band against pigeonholing: “a lot of

non-geeks have dismissed TMBG as one of those things

like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” And the book’s

curiously specific image of a “very surprised-looking

whale” floating in empty space is shared, almost certainly

uniquely in printed media, by the cover of the 1992

Apollo 18 album.

(Incidentally, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a

useful referent here for understanding that despite the

ostensibly global nature of the Internet, geek practice

was—and to a degree remains—bound by geography

and dominant culture more broadly. Douglas Adams was

as idiosyncratically British as They Might Be Giants are

American—perhaps even more so, given that he hailed

from the same Cambridge University-based comedic

tradition that yielded geek touchstone Monty Python,

and indeed had writing credits on some of the later

episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. To be far more

succinct than the topic deserves, this is a school of

humor that is based in large part on a continuing excess,

both in the classical British sense of the grotesque

and in the sense of conceptual flooding. For Douglas

Adams, this focused on the absurdities and sadisms of

F L O O D

•

bureaucracy—for instance, inflating the petty cruelty

of displacing homeowners in order to build a highway

into an act of multi-species genocide in which an entire

planet is effectively bulldozed. But it also manifests in a

sort of endless interplay of seemingly arbitrary concepts,

whether in Terry Gilliam’s memorably surreal anima-

tions for Monty Python or in the Infinite Improbability

Drive that powers the protagonists’ ship in Hitchhiker’s—

surely the tidiest imaginable plot device for explaining

the nature of flooding. At any rate, fans’ connection

between They Might Be Giants and the likes of Douglas

Adams was a largely stateside correlation.)

It’s incorrect to view connections between media like

this as somehow inherent. Instead, we might take the

situational commonness of this connection as evidence

of a certain sort of individual and community behavior

in defining aesthetics and subcultural sensibilities. And in

tracing how this behavior came into being between the

mid-1980s and now, we might understand that it took a

specific set of cultural and technological events for these

connections to come into focus.

Even in its early stages, the rise of the personal

computer as a commonplace object had clear impact on

what could be considered “geeky.” To give a somewhat

random history of when topics acquired Usenet

discussion groups (and thus by extension when a critical

mass of computer-enabled people converged on the

subject), Star Trek’s group began in 1986, and Doctor

Who’s in 1987. In the late 1980s sex and the Internet

began intertwining significantly as the alt.sex hierarchy

was established; in terms of subculture and materiality,

the most interesting community in this case is probably

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

alt.sex.bondage, which was whipped up in 1989. And in

the early 1990s groups on things outside the obvious

geek topics began forming—alt.tv.simpsons formed in

1990, alt.gothic in 1991, and, of course, alt.music.tmbg

in 1992.

The dates these groups were established is not,

however, the point when geeky people started noticing

the topics in question. They Might Be Giants, for

instance, were first mentioned on the Internet in 1987

when Peter E. Lee used a lyric from “Youth Culture

Killed My Dog” in his signature to a post on the Kate

Bush-themed newsgroup rec.music.gaffa. That group

itself dates back to 1985, a fact that ought put to rest

any notion that the expansion of “geekiness” followed

an orderly and linear trajectory from Star Trek to more

esoteric topics. All of this meant that the notion of “geek

culture” was shifting rapidly. Whereas in the mid-1980s

geek culture could be generally defined in terms of the

overlapping interests represented at sci-fi conventions,

1990 marks a tipping point where geek culture began

expanding such that two points within it could not

be assumed to have many people in common. In the

mid-1980s it was reasonably assumed that people (in

America at least) who liked Star Trek would also probably

like Doctor Who. No such assumption can be made about

The Simpsons and goth music, nor even, for that matter,

about Star Trek and The Simpsons.

The result was that being geekish now had more

to do with the act of situating oneself among a wide

variety of potentially geeky objects than with the specific

media and signifiers that virtually all the subculture’s

participants were expected to enjoy. It became a case

F L O O D

•

of grabbing on to a few interests in a flood of potential

fetishes, and thus more about the geek as subject than the

fandom as object. And so within the flood, communities

of geeks would gather around a given set of objects, now

with more interaction and autonomy than ever before,

thanks to the early Internet.

The transition of geek culture into something defined

not by a set of core texts but as an aesthetic practice helps

to explain how They Might Be Giants, despite having

essentially no direct connections to any of the mid-1980s

signifiers of geek culture, could release an album that

instantaneously found its niche within that community.

As we’ve suggested, the aesthetic practice in question is

more or less exactly the aesthetic of flooding that we’ve

outlined throughout this book, and in particular its focus

on materiality and media.

Recall the various newsgroups mentioned a moment

ago that illustrated the steady expansion of the “stuff

Internet people like” domain. As we noted, there are no

obvious reasons why someone should like the entire list

(and indeed, liking the entire list is in no way required—

rather it’s that there were substantial overlaps among the

fandoms of various topics on the list). Nevertheless, all of

those subjects are eminently well suited to the aesthetic

of flooding: The Simpsons’ regular use of allusions and

parody; Kate Bush’s densely symbolic aesthetic; goth

music’s over-the-top performativity and its validation of

excessive emotion. Even the bondage scene, as argued by

Margot Weiss in her ethnography Techniques of Pleasure,

is based around a form of interminable consumption and

collection.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

H a ck i n g a s F l o o d i n g ( D o n ’t S p e n d t h e R e s t o f

Yo u r L i f e Wo n d e r i n g )

But perhaps the most basic link between the rising

computer culture and the aesthetic of flooding is flood-

ing’s aforementioned relationship with the notion of

play, and specifically play with technology. Steven Levy’s

partial history of the rise of personal computers to

the mainstream, Hackers, identifies what he calls the

hacker ethic. He describes it first in terms of the MIT

Model Railroad Club in the late 1950s and early 1960s,

out of which emerged a subculture focused on the

new technology of computers. Levy writes with clear

adoration of the railroad model that was their focus

before they discovered computers, and quotes a bit

of poetry one member wrote describing himself as

“Hacking the grungy, hairy, sprawling hacks of youth

uncabled, frying diodes, proud to be Switch-thrower,

Fuze-tester, Maker of Routes, Player with Railroads, and

Advance Chopper to the System.”

Levy goes on to formulate the “hacker ethic”

these model railway enthusiasts developed when they

discovered the TX-0 computer, formulating its first

rule thusly: “Access to computers—and anything which

might teach you something about the way the world

works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to

the Hands-On Imperative!” The sense of giddy excess

in this formulation is palpable. But equally important is

the Hands-On Imperative, which highlights the impor-

tance of personally playing and creating with technology.

The notions of messing around with a system and

creating things within it are, within the hacker ethic,

F L O O D

•

fundamentally intertwined. Limitless and unceasing play

is not only an essential action, it’s a fundamental part of

how things are created. Certainly it was a fundamental

part of how the Johns developed their sound over time

through technological experimentation, and it’s themati-

cally built into the object-centric thingness of their

music that the previous chapter explored.

It is worth stressing the way that the world of

computers as of 1990 was much more suited to the

hacker ethic than the world of today is. Computers and

programming were simpler in 1990, and a lone hacker

(in Levy’s sense of the term) could still conceivably make

a successful piece of software or videogame from the

comfort of her bedroom. The fact that the Internet was

still nascent meant that nobody had a lot of money put

into it yet, and that development and innovation were

still emerging regularly from individual hobby projects.

Indeed, the World Wide Web, which didn’t launch

until 1991, was a side project of Tim Berners-Lee, who

designed the earliest version of it as a solution to the

relatively minor problem of finding documents on an

internal network.

Furthermore, a level of base technological compe-

tence was essential. By 1990 around 80 percent of the

computer market share was occupied by IBM PC clones.

User-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were still

in their infancy—Microsoft Windows was still on its

rarely used 2.0 version until May of 1990, and most

use of the Internet required a text-based command line

interface, often one with a host of arcane commands with

no self-evident relationship to what they actually did. To

use a computer was necessarily to play around with it and

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

figure out how it worked, and there was no upper bound

to how much knowledge and skill one could acquire.

The learning curve sloped relatively smoothly from basic

competence to ambitious programming projects.

On the most basic level, this collective sense of

amateur exploration was reflected in the sorts of things

one did with a computer. Among the most popular

early genres of computer games were puzzle-solving

challenges, whether in an explicit manner, as in Cliff

Johnson’s The Fool’s Errand and 3 in Three or the phenom-

enally successful 1993 release of The 7th Guest, or more

implicitly, as in the adventure game genre popularized

by Sierra and Infocom with titles like King’s Quest and

Zork.

This latter genre is instructive in understanding the

emerging geek sensibility to which Flood so appealed.

Adventure games focus on exploring a large world,

interacting with people within it, collecting objects, and

figuring out how to combine them so as to solve puzzles

and advance the plot. For instance, in King’s Quest V—

released the same year as Flood—you, the player, are

tasked with helping King Graham rescue the royal family

of Daventry from an evil wizard. To pick a representative

puzzle from within the game, at one point you confront

a witch who persists in turning you into a frog, and

defeating her entails giving her an object stolen from a

camp of thieves, which you can only obtain by sneaking

into the camp after hiding behind some rocks, the camp

itself only being findable if you have thoroughly mapped

out a vast desert where wandering for too long without

finding any of its oases proves fatal. Furthermore, the

object you give the witch is not self-evidently suited

F L O O D

•

100

•

to defeating her, and requires you to make the (fatal)

mistake of opening it yourself before you can really

understand its potential utility. If this sounds preposter-

ously frustrating then you are more or less getting the

correct sense of it. (Those familiar with the Hitchhiker’s

Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game might recall

a similar ordeal in obtaining the elusive Babelfish—a

squishy animal you’re supposed to put in your ear.)

And yet King’s Quest V was massively popular,

selling 500,000 copies in its initial release—a number

unmatched by any other PC game until Myst came

along years later. Its bright, friendly visual presentation

appealed to players of all stripes, even as it belied the

game’s darkness and challenge. There are some parallels

with Flood in this respect, and indeed both were cultural

touchstones of 1990—even if the game is considered a

nostalgia piece today. Understanding the popularity of

King’s Quest V means understanding how playing it is

fundamentally similar to the basic act of using an early

1990s computer: lots of exploration, experimentation,

and occasional disastrous failures as one orients oneself

to the obscure rules. And, perhaps more importantly, it

rewards the steady conquering of what initially seems an

unmanageable flood.

This aesthetic wasn’t even limited to computer

users. The year 1990 was the heyday of the Nintendo

Entertainment System (NES), where many games had

a similar aesthetic (indeed, King’s Quest V got a release

on the NES in 1992). That year also saw the US release

of Super Mario Bros. 3, which presented players with

numerous secret passageways and hidden sections of

levels to find, and—perhaps more relevantly—a navigable

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

101

•

world so big that the game, which featured no ability to

save, was enormously difficult to beat in a single play

session without skipping content: it too was an unman-

ageable flood. But even the earliest days of the NES had

a focus on exploration and conquering a vast landscape.

The original Super Mario Bros. had no shortage of secrets

to uncover, and designer Shigeru Miyamoto consciously

designed The Legend of Zelda to provide the player with

a sense of steady development such that an initially vast

and intimidating game world gradually becomes familiar

and thoroughly surmountable. Tellingly, Miyamoto

explicitly related this progression to the process of

childhood development and growing up.

P l ay i n g B e yo n d G o o d a n d E v i l

( Yo u ’ re o n Fi re )

Closely related to the inherent valuation of orienting

oneself within a massive flood of information is the

valuation of excess for its own sake. The Internet quickly

developed an aesthetic of going too far. This manifested

in various forms. At its most basic level, active partici-

pation on Usenet took time: a dedicated poster’s sheer

volume of words written in a day would put either of

this book’s authors to shame. But perhaps more telling

is the phenomenon of the flame war—an argument

characterized by a ludicrous excess of vitriol on all sides.

That heated arguments were the norm online is not

remarkable. That entirely new terminology had to be

invented to describe the excesses of these arguments is.

But the sense of excess also applies to the topics

of discussion. Put simply, an aesthetic of shocking

F L O O D

•

102

•

tastelessness was the norm online. One of the more

infamous early newsgroups, alt.suicide.holiday, provided

often graphic discussion of suicide, the ethics thereof,

and ways of carrying it out. While often characterized

as a vicious bunch of trolls egging vulnerable people on

to taking their own lives, the group is better understood

as a clique united by a love of tasteless shock. Reading

the newsgroup’s oft-sensationalized “methods list” that

discusses various ways of killing oneself, what jumps out

is not the fact that there’s a table of how long the drop

should be when a person of a given weight is hanged, but

the fact that it’s in the same section as a discussion of the

potential use of starting World War III in order to kill

oneself. This example is in no way an aberration either of

the group’s sense of humor or the Internet’s.

It would be a mistake to think that this sense of

playfulness is unique to post-computer geek culture,

however. The earlier sci-fi convention roots of geek

culture were firmly invested in playfulness, audacity, and

the aesthetic of flooding. We’ve already discussed the way

in which collecting does this, but to reduce early geek

culture to commodity fetishism is to do it an injustice.

On a basic level, we should note that the aesthetic charac-

terized by King’s Quest V and other adventure games is

firmly rooted in the tradition of Dungeons & Dragons. One

of the most beloved adventures to be had in Dungeons &

Dragons was the famed Tomb of Horrors module. Tomb of

Horrors featured a dungeon with the distinguishing trait

that it would almost certainly prove fatal for any party

who attempted to conquer it, and, more to the point,

that its various death traps were essentially impossible to

discover through any means other than dying in them.

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

103

•

King’s Quest V is, in this regard, little more than that

approach translated into a computer game.

But even the sci-fi/fantasy media end of geek culture

has a sense of playful excess to it. One of the first aspects

of geek culture to be subjected to academic attention is

the practice of slash fiction, which is a form of fanfiction

featuring often explicit sex between and among male

characters who are not portrayed as homosexual on the

original show—stories where Kirk and Spock get it on,

essentially. Not only does this involve a sort of shocking

excess a bit like that of alt.suicide.holiday, but it’s funda-

mentally a playful approach. Slash fiction writers are

almost universally heterosexual women, and the practice

is in part a self-aware commentary on the marginalized

role of women in often male-dominated sci-fi shows

and a largely loving parody of the way in which female

characters are sexualized in those narratives.

Less perverse, but still enormously playful, is the

practice of “filking”: writing folk-style songs about sci-fi

and fantasy media, often in the form of parodies of

existing songs. So, for instance, Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to

Leave Your Lover” becomes “50 Ways to Kill an Ensign,”

a tribute to Star Trek’s inventive methods for butchering

its bit players. Filking is visibly and audibly a form of

communal play, conducted via “filk circles” in which a

group of people take turns playing compositions for each

other, reveling in the juxtaposed minutiae of the vast

worlds of pop music and exhaustive knowledge of genre

fiction. Even the name comes from a sense of playfulness,

extending from a typo in a 1950s essay by Lee Jacobs

meant to be called “The Influence of Science Fiction on

Modern American Folk Music.”

F L O O D

•

104

•

Having waded through all this, we might be stating

the obvious to call geek culture an easy match for They

Might Be Giants. Simply put, the band found themselves

in the enviable position of making their major-label

debut at the exact cultural moment when a new audience

receptive to their aesthetic was opening up. And while

on the one hand it’s understandable that They Might

Be Giants shy away from the “geek” label, given their

lack of any investment in the stereotypical signifiers of

geek culture, it’s clear that They Might Be Giants were

ideally positioned to provide the soundtrack for a new

generation who came of age on computers, and thus for

whom the aesthetics of hacking excess were ingrained in

the experience of childhood—which is a pretty big deal,

given the band’s music’s duly powerful understanding

of and focus on childhood. Indeed, a kid who was ten

when the Commodore 64 came out—that being the

single best-selling personal computer ever—would have

been eighteen and at the perfect moment to hear (and

spin) They Might Be Giants’ records on college radio in

1990. But this raises its own question: what does it mean

to have a subculture whose foundational texts privilege

something as odd as They Might Be Giants?

•

105

•

Post-Coolness

D e c e n t ra l i z i n g S e x i n Po p ( I C o u l d N e ve r

S l e e p M y Way t o t h e To p )

A big part of They Might Be Giants’ appeal to the

teen and college-age audience they cultivated in the

wake of Flood went beyond a sense of the technological,

the material, and the childlike. Self-identified geeks in

American culture were (and perhaps to some degree

still are) subject to sometimes profound marginality.

They Might Be Giants’ music offers empowerment in

the face of an imposing social hierarchy. Specifically,

Flood evades the stranglehold of “coolness” that a lot of

pop music otherwise reinforces. As we’ll explain, They

Might Be Giants’ aesthetic of flooding bypasses the idea

of the mainstream, a construct that vitally reinforces

the cool-versus-uncool dynamic by which self-identified

geeks in 1990 were routinely targeted for derision. This

was genuinely liberating for a lot of people, even if it

wasn’t part of the band’s plan.

There are many reasons why They Might Be Giants

voice an alternative to traditional coolness, starting with

the fact that the band consists of a guy with large glasses

F L O O D

•

106

•

and an accordion player. In this case, they present an

image to which the alpha-male rock-star archetype is

wholly irrelevant. And for all their flooding, there are a

number of topics they stay visibly far away from: sex, most

obviously. This is important because in the lyrics, music,

and performance of so much other pop, sex commands a

position of unique privilege. Sex is by no means inacces-

sible to the uncool—science fiction cons have long

been hookup hotspots, and one shouldn’t forget the alt.

sex Usenet forums—but for most of the middle-school

minds so primed for They Might Be Giants’ music, sex

is neither an available topic for flooding’s investment-

free playfulness nor is it sufficiently integrated into the

rest of one’s arbitrary experience to empower it within

a paranoid response to the flood. At that age, the topic

of sex instead usually constellates somewhere between

real romantic or physical yearning, anxieties about moral

absoluteness, actual lack of interest, and concern over

how it affects social acceptance—all of which are senti-

ments to which They Might Be Giants’ music is basically

irrelevant. Even to listeners well past their early teens,

the music’s consistent thematics of childhood, pageantry,

technology, and death usher in a headspace incongruous

with arousal: this is not sexy music. (In college, one

author of this book was enjoying some heavy petting

with his girlfriend when her CD changer started playing

Flood. Knowing that the album would kill the mood, he

quickly rose and lunged across the dorm room to press

“stop” on the stereo, slipping on the linoleum floor and

injuring himself badly.)

It wasn’t until their sixth studio album, 1996’s Factory

Showroom, that they wrote “S-E-X-X-Y,” which the band

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

107

•

described as their first “ode to getting it on.” And for all

that the track has a slinky bass groove courtesy of former

Iggy Pop bassist Hal Cragin, it also describes its object

of eroticization as standing on the bed holding a cookie

and wearing a wig—a description that is, to say the least,

not normatively sexy. Inasmuch as sex appeal implicates

coolness and inasmuch as sex is the subtext par excellence

of the pop that inscribes alleged mainstream identity,

“S-E-X-X-Y” tells us loud and clear that standard

coolness is not the band’s wheelhouse.

A B a n d f o r t h e U n c o o l K i d s ( E ve r yo n e ’s

E x c i t e d a n d C o n f u s e d )

As an individual trait, coolness is heavily marked by

personal restraint and aesthetic focus; as an attribute

within a social mass, it is given value by scarcity, and

hence a power to exclude. As Flansburgh tells Spin, “It

isn’t about whether we feel we’re on the inside track or

the outside track. It’s about the horrible feeling you get

from other people telling you you’re on the outside track.”

Addressing the very idea of social hierarchy in the form

of a “scene,” he makes the totalizing claim that “all these

things are meant to make people feel bad. That’s the

problem.”

Flooding, on the other hand, can act as an aesthetic

antidote to the tyranny of exclusion because it’s designed

for a world where excess is a permanent state of being

and restraint is a fundamentally strange concept. In this

way, it’s a misunderstanding to label They Might Be

Giants’ music uncool, because despite being optimal

teenage music, it makes no attempt to exist in the mostly

F L O O D

•

108

•

adolescent economy of cool. The flood doesn’t fail to

restrain itself any more than a nightlight fails to darken

one’s room. Flooding is therefore not so much uncool as

it is post-cool.

Another way of putting this is that there simply isn’t

one “main stream” within the flood. There can’t be. The

excess it offers obviates the need for a mainstream. This

is central to They Might Be Giants as a band in the most

practical sense imaginable: their entire business model

rests on the fact that a viable career can be hammered

out in the supposed margins of the culture.

Tacit in this is an abandonment of at least some

aspects of the “rock star” myth. As Flansburgh wryly

describes the band’s business success, “we’re lucky in that

our muffler’s been dragging at various times, but we’ve

never had to pull off the road.” This is not the sort of rock

music that seeks unfathomable glitz and fortune. Indeed,

the Johns seem to argue that the greatest advantage of

fame is that it functionally enables stars, through the

power of their sociocultural aura, to hold collaborators to

exacting professional, aesthetic, and technical standards.

For instance, in an interview with This American Life,

John Flansburgh defends Van Halen’s infamous “no

brown M&Ms” line in their performance contracts as

a clever way of quickly checking that the rest of the

contract had been followed to the letter, thus ensuring

that Van Halen’s more important technical requirements

were safely met. Upholding standards like this affords an

artist the technical means and the freedom from worry

that together allow for better (and more) art. They

Might Be Giants’ music, then, frames a set of values

that decode the band’s sometime slogan of “Melody,

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

109

•

Fidelity, Quantity” into a three-pronged business plan:

make good music, market it to those who enjoy it in its

uncompromised oddness, and make sure there’s enough

to keep the cycle going.

But rejecting the mainstream as a concept (instead

of the mainstream as a class of people or style) doesn’t

just define the band’s business strategy—it also helps to

define their aesthetic. When the idea of the mainstream

is negated wholesale, the nature of what is desirable and

sought-after changes. Within the flood, desires that were

socially unacceptable—the erotic possibilities of cookies

and wigs (or of Kirk and Spock’s torrid love affairs, to pick

up a thread from the last chapter)—become perfectly

reasonable while still retaining their arbitrariness. This

is why there’s no standard uniform or look for fans at

They Might Be Giants concerts, even among folks who

might count cosplay as a hobby; the music broadly resists

standard anything. And so when, on the other hand, we

encounter supposedly mainstream desires in the duo’s

songs—a slinking Iggy Pop-style bassline—they often

mutate into something strange and alienating.

Flansburgh gets at it when he says, “The idea of

something being beyond category is very inviting,” and

one could easily follow this through to a decidedly

Marxist endpoint. The practical translations of They

Might Be Giants’ post-coolness are only as radical as the

uses that fans put it to, however—and most fans just want

to feel at home in their own skin and share some heady

camaraderie with each other.

This is, of course, part of Flood’s enduring appeal to

geek culture. It gently affirms an ethos that bypasses the

judgmental code underlying teenage popularity. Even

F L O O D

•

110

•

if the album isn’t a weapon of prom-king regicide,

then, it is tremendously powerful nonetheless. To the

bullied uncool, Flood depicts possibility: a potential world

beyond the structures of their social ostracism. To the

curious freethinkers who are happily insulated from

the anxieties of coolness versus geekery, Flood is an

ebullient encapsulation of that already rich inner world,

and also a little reminder that there are others sharing

this headspace (not the least of whom are the Johns

themselves, having been nurtured by the uniqueness of

Lincoln-Sudbury and the post-No Wave art scene). To

the enforcers of hierarchical coolness, Flood is so beyond

the frequency range of their social radar as to be simply

incomprehensible; indifference and confusion in the

face of They Might Be Giants and their fandom may be

understandable, but castigation is basically unthinkable.

This is important because there are lots of ways

besides flooding to address the tensions of coolness and

geek identity through music, and this issue is a big part

of what separates the band from other stereotypically

nerdy acts.

O t h e r S o r t s o f N e rd s ( T h e re H a s B e e n a

S p a c e c ra f t S i g h t e d )

A band like the Minibosses, who do amped-up rock

versions of 1980s videogame music, are attempting

to reclaim “uncool” geek objects and present them as

secretly cool. This claim could even be made for the

whole genre of chiptune, if one is willing to pretend in

this day and age that videogames are still the exclusive

aegis of the unpopular. Even an artist like MC Frontalot,

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

111

•

the progenitor of “nerdcore rap,” is at least partially

working on the logic of making uncool things cool. Yes,

Frontalot’s stage presentation is consciously awkward,

but the entire conceit of his act is pretending that early

computer text adventures are in some way an appropriate

subject for braggadocio rap. All of this is involved in a

project of redemption for the uncool. It’s concerned with

finding ways to make the uncool cool. And, of course, in

doing so, it plays right into the signifiers of cool.

And it’s worth acknowledging that They Might Be

Giants on rare occasions may have gone in for strategies

like this. Consider the band’s “lost years” between their

leaving Elektra in 1997 and the jumpstart they gave their

career with their 2002 excursion into children’s music,

No! American modern rock in the late 1990s coughed up

a hairball of off-kilter records that were branded as geek

rock, but were mostly made for and by sometime stoners

who just happened to wear glasses and major in English.

So went the caravan of Nerf Herder, The Presidents of

the United States of America, and Harvey Danger.

On the surface, marching in step with this parade

made sense for the duo, given that they’d already turned

up the guitars on 1994’s grungy but excellent John Henry.

Their songs had namechecked The Replacements and

XTC, and in concert, Flansburgh occasionally retooled

the line about a Young Fresh Fellows tape in “

Twisting

”

into a nod to other alternative bands of the day (the

Zappa-esque outfit Primus was a favorite). But even

among the college rock milieu, They Might Be Giants

occupied their own space. When the band was playing

as an opening act early in their careers, this made for

outright genre whiplash from night to night—they recall

F L O O D

•

112

•

playing back-to-back warmup gigs for Aimee Mann’s

new wave act Till Tuesday and political funk-metal

group Fishbone. This was the sort of PR identity crisis

that led the duo to insist on playing headlining shows

exclusively—a risky move that paid off in time. (As John

Flansburgh recalls: “If you want to talk about taking

the low road in 1980s and 1990s rock, try telling your

booking agent that you are no longer going to open for

people.”) It also points to the uselessness of comparing

They Might Be Giants to other acts. The Pixies? Hüsker

Dü? Weird Al? Devo? Moxy Früvous? The B-52s? Wall

of Voodoo? Camper Van Beethoven? Tom Lehrer?

Robyn Hitchcock? It never quite works. Stop trying.

The Johns’ particular way of talking both serious and

silly didn’t change too much between those early days

and the turn of the millennium, and so it unsurprisingly

had almost nothing in common with the laid-back pidgin

of prankishness and abjection that the goodtime dudes

of Weezer spoke. It was the Reagan 1980s versus the

Clinton 1990s. It was New York versus the West Coast.

It was strangeness as an unavoidable byproduct of being

human versus goofiness as a strived-for goal.

So when 2001’s Mink Car came out, some heard

resemblance to this fare creeping in at its corners—not

a big surprise, given that it was produced by Beck’s

go-to men the Dust Brothers and featured guest vocals

from Soul Coughing’s Mike Doughty. Pitchfork rips

Mink Car to pieces in a review that, while tedious and

jejune, nevertheless manages to indicate by induction

the importance that many fans place on the band’s

independence from the semiotics of cool. Any hint of

Jackass-style weird-is-awesome sensibility is interpreted

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

113

•

as pandering: “All the charms They Might Be Giants

once seemed to possess have dissipated into a cloud of

embarrassing awkwardness… [Mink Car] treads danger-

ously close to Presidents of the United States of America

territory, substituting brain-twisting pain for oddball

fun.”

On trial here is a perceived incongruity between

the band’s apparently earnest aesthetic investment in

a style associated (by others) with social hierarchy

and their previous seeming obliviousness to cachet—

or indeed outright mockery of it. It comes as no

surprise that Pitchfork review yearns for the stuff of

the band’s debut album, whose song “Youth Culture

Killed My Dog” lampoons the entire commerce of the

mainstream.

One might cleverly posit a return to ideological form

in the band’s 2005 decision to cover Devo’s “Through

Being Cool,” a song whose title really says it all. But

doing so oversimplifies and distracts from the reality

that for audiences, musical meaning is a personal and

social process, informed certainly by music’s structure

and context, but in no way fixed to musicians’ intentions.

Listeners seek out avenues of potential kinship between

music and the modes of being they identity with at

any moment (or at least want to identify with). And so

the issue of whether or not Mink Car bears ideological

missteps is more in its listeners’ ears than in the Johns’

hands. Pondering the band’s role in this situation all too

quickly devolves into the worst sort of pop chestnuts.

What if we’re misinterpreting the artist’s genuine musical

pleasure for an intention to sell out? Do bands owe their

fans anything? If this is the sort of question you find

F L O O D

•

114

•

interesting, we’d like to change your mind by hitting it

with a rock.

The Johns are not the same people as their fans, not that

it particularly matters inasmuch as their recorded music

is concerned. Whatever little tensions one might hear

between artist and audience—remember our discussion

on individuality versus collectivism in “Whistling in the

Dark,” for instance—Flood is an important moment at

which the band’s artistic expression touched a remarkable

breadth of listeners with a wide range of interpretive

meaning and with overwhelming resonance.

We Wa n t a Fa d ( S o m e t h i n g S p e c i a l T h a t

S o m e o n e L e f t B e h i n d )

So it stands to reason that we should pay special

attention to the direct commentary that Flood proffers

on conformity and pleasure. “

We Want a Rock

” is a song

about trends and fads: slap bracelets, Pogs, or, perhaps

most relevantly, Pet Rocks. The premise of the 1975

Pet Rock craze—inasmuch as “

We Want a Rock

” nods

to it—was a kind of pseudo-ironic, self-effacing humor

based on the undesirability and uselessness of a rock. But

crucially, this song calls our attention first to the string,

which gives the rock a purpose: the rock gives us joy

not because it brands us as ironic or cool, but because—

hey!—we can wind this piece of string around it. The

rock’s purpose and desirability may be absurd, but the

presence of the string nevertheless decouples personal

desire itself—and with it, identity—from the social value

(positive or negative) of public consumption. In other

words, the song rejects the cynic’s belief that we only

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

115

•

enjoy stuff because it groups us with or differentiates us

from others in an interpersonal hierarchy.

The song then transposes the argument from rocks to

prosthetic foreheads, suggesting that wearing them on

our real heads gives them meaning, thereby raising the

curious question of what good our heads are for, if not to

be replaced. (John Linnell would revisit this conundrum

in 1994’s “A Self Called Nowhere,” in which he is

“standing in my yard, where they tore down the garage

to make room for the torn-down garage.”)

By not casting the rock and the prosthetic forehead

as useless endpoints, the song disarms them as punch-

lines, thus defusing the joke whose butt must always be

someone. In validating pleasure—even stupid pleasure—

the song casts seemingly faddish participation as

incidentally convivial instead of jockeying. Competition,

irony, mockery, and self-effacement are nowhere to be

found in “

We Want a Rock

.”

The New England contradance style of the music is

specifically made for endless repetition, which acknowl-

edges with pleasantly factual neutrality the cyclical but

nonetheless self-affirming nature of simple, even stupid

pleasures—whether enjoyed alone or in a group. The

sense of desire and fulfillment here is thus still floodish

and quite unlike pop’s standard take on longing. Here it’s

rocks one week, foreheads the next. Arbitrary? Yes. But

so are blue jeans and birthday cake.

The song remains jubilant, then. This goes back

to the way that the string affirms the rock (and hence

“everybody”), denying contempt any place in the social

order through a kind of deferment. Notice how even the

silly circularities in the song are based on alternation: just

F L O O D

•

116

•

as the string goes with the rock, the prosthetic forehead

goes with the real head, the two fads rotate, and the

contradance rocks back and forth between its A and B

sections, each one allowing mention of the fad items and

their uses. The form of the song itself gives all the critique

we need of faddishness: yes, it’s silly—especially given the

role of desire in flooding more broadly. Message under-

stood. Now, where did I put my forehead?

“

We Want a Rock

” acknowledges its tensions

without elaboration, allowing them to juxtapose. Its core

non-judgmentality helps defang the concept of exclu-

sivity from which coolness draws its power, producing an

ode to the joys of the uncool that makes no actual effort

to redeem or defend the uncool. The question of why

someone would like a piece of string and a rock to wind

it around are thoroughly irrelevant to the song.

This even-handed self-critique means that those guys

who want to burn the playhouse down are textually and

musically redundant to a horrifying degree. Notice how

the song doesn’t give them a lyrical or musical deferment

(they’re only ever mentioned in the B section). They

hence offer neither conviviality nor individual pleasure

nor purpose—only judgment. They embody intransi-

gence and overkill. Their plan is to stop the freely

moving cycles of desire, expression, and identity. To

replace the silliness of non-hierarchical socialization

with dogma. To make us the uncool laughingstock of

an utterly humorless joke. We all know a few of these

people. They are the enforcers of cool. And they are

total dicks.

This is an illustration of the way in which They Might

Be Giants are more post-cool than uncool—though, as

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

117

•

we mentioned, post-coolness collaterally empowers the

uncool, which accounts for some of the ways fans use

their music. Rejecting coolness as either a virtue or a

vice effectively washes it clean of its petulant mandate for

relevance—and so, to take the discussion a step further,

cultural status itself can now become a neutral part of the

flood, able to comment and be commented on seemingly

without consequence.

We S a ve d t h e B e s t S o n g f o r L a s t ( H E E YA H ! )

In its overt play of hipster iconography, “Minimum

Wage” is the ideal example here. The song’s sound

palette and several of its instrumental motifs very directly

imitate Frank Sinatra’s 1965 cover of Petula Clark’s

“Downtown,” and the horn jabs throughout the song

are sampled from a Sammy Davis Jr. album that made

conveniently heavy use of stereo imaging, such that

John Flansburgh could easily lift large numbers of its

horn sounds onto his Casio FZ-1. Flansburgh proudly

describes the resulting samples as “voiced very tastefully,”

“very moderate,” and “very unlifted” (hence not-sampled,

and thus authentic). All these phrases play up a sense of

laid-back refinement.

More to the point, of course, is the fact that the

entire song is built out of bits of the Rat Pack, who are

in many lights the very definition of cool. All of which

is spectacularly undercut by the fact that the song’s vocal

track consists of a mildly hysterical shout of “Minimum

Wage!” followed by the crack of a bullwhip. What really

makes it, of course, is the whooped “HEEYAH!”—a

perfectly crafted morsel of excessive cowboy exuberance,

F L O O D

•

118

•

halfway between John Wayne and Howard Dean. Not

only is Flansburgh’s delivery overly enthusiastic, his

preposterous enthusiasm is of course focused on a

completely inappropriate topic. Minimum wage is the

last thing deserving of such ecstatic shouting.

Notably, the Rat Pack elements make their way into

the song gradually. The first second or two provides only

a drum fill and the anacrusis of “Minimum,” and all the

“Downtown” Rat Packery only fades in once Flansburgh

has stretched the word “Wage” to excess. The “cool”

parts of the song, in other words, all come after the

song has already committed itself to going too far. The

result is that the bulk of the song serves as an uneasy

aftermath, unsuccessfully covering for the inappropri-

ateness of Flansburgh’s initial exuberance, and ending

with a comically underwhelming synth “ah.” The effect is

a prolonged moment of uncertain awkwardness, sharply

contrasting the vocal enthusiasm with the relaxed cool.

The song is not “about” this contrast, as such—it is, after

all, difficult for “

Minimum Wage

” be “about” anything—

but it nonetheless offers a fascinating moment of jarring

discomfort between coolness and social excess. Nor is

the song “about” the whip crack, but it’s nonetheless

worth observing that the whooshing air sound of the

whip is, in fact, a wet towel being snapped in the air by

sometime producer Roger Moutenot, whom Flansburgh

describes as “revealing his inner jock with that move”—

an utterance that quietly encodes one of the standard

ways in which geeks and other uncool sorts are punished

by the social mainstream.

Whether yoked by the experience of the dead-end

low-pay job or the sadistic towel-snappers—both

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

119

•

mainstays of teenage America—the vocal star of

“

Minimum Wage

” is repaid for his excessive selfness in

embarrassed retribution, but with minimum investment,

the song shrugging and giving up on him after 45

seconds, as if declaring that he’s just not worth the effort.

This is actually a weird kind of mercy. The noncommittal

stance “

Minimum Wage

” takes toward status reveals that

the apathetic restraint on which cool is predicated turns

out to be a pleasantly flimsy framework for any real sort

of power.

To adolescent geeks in the 1990s, They Might Be

Giants wrote music that, by virtue of being post-cool,

seemed to understand and alleviate the frustrations of

being uncool better than virtually anything else of the

era. And to their credit, though they did not in any way

set out to be the champions of America’s nerds, they

have remained warm towards their audience. Flansburgh,

for instance, proclaims: “I really have come to embrace

the term ‘geeking out.’ It lets people get into their own

very narrow obsessions so much faster and so much

deeper,” tacitly acknowledging the power of fandom and

obsession to help give shape and context to individual

identities.

Which is to say that while there is an odd disjunct

between They Might Be Giants and geek culture, that

disjunct has proven productive. Geek culture may have

misjudged the extent to which They Might Be Giants

were of their tribe, so to speak, but that was the nature of

geek culture in the early 1990s: the tribe was expanding

rapidly. John Linnell notes that “by 1990 or so—and

this probably doesn’t sound good to say, but—we were

less and less like our audience. We still love them, but

F L O O D

•

120

•

that was part of the evolution… they were of a distinctly

different culture.” For all that may be true, the band has

spent, at this point, a quarter-century speaking over that

divide. They ended up speaking to geek culture, and

speaking to it well.

But the degree to which they spoke well over that

divide has, to a real extent, erased the visibility of the

divide. They Might Be Giants were similar enough to the

geek audience they attracted that, in hindsight, they look

like they were always the same thing, even if in truth,

they weren’t and still aren’t.

•

121

•

Epilogue: After the Flood

Wi l l i n g t h e Wo rl d t o C h a n ge ( A s i t H a p p e n s ,

A u C o n t r a i r e )

John Flansburgh claims that he has never seen the

1971 movie They Might Be Giants after which the duo

is dubbed. (A ventriloquist friend actually suggested

“

They Might Be Giants

” to the Johns in late 1982 from

a disused list of potential names he’d drawn up for his

own defunct act.) For what it’s worth, the story of They

Might Be Giants is a pleasantly bonkers case study of the

Situationist dérive: two protagonists explore the dirtiest

corners of New York City until they and the landscape

have utterly transformed one another in simultaneous

paranoia and wonder. The main thing to remember for

our purposes, though, is that the film (written by James

Goldman after his 1961 play) uses the phrase “they might

be giants” in reference to Don Quixote’s compulsive

worry that the deceptively peaceful windmills of central

Spain are in actuality violent beasts to be vanquished.

Compare this with what is perhaps the earliest use of

the phrase in print, Reverend Lewis R. Dunn’s entreaty

from 1872’s The Mission of the Spirit that “Many are

F L O O D

•

122

•

pigmies when they might be giants”—a lament for

humankind’s all-too-untapped potential for spiritual

greatness. Even though the giants whom they might be

are glorious in this case, the Reverend’s use of “might”

bespeaks woeful scorn. On the other hand, for as terrible

as Quixote’s giants are, his “might” hints at a whole

giddy universe where secrets lurk beneath the surface. It’s

what-if instead of if-only.

The actual song “

They Might Be Giants

” is, as we’ve

mentioned, a high-water mark of flooding in a variety of

ways—from its vocal range (the band’s widest yet at two

and a half octaves) to its arrangement (as Flansburgh

tells Throttle, “we just did millions and millions of

overdubs and created this very tracked-out, complicated

arrangement”). The song’s most interesting feature,

however, may be its vault into meta-commentary—and

we’re not just talking about its role as a “theme song”

for the band. Specifically, the song’s relentless insistence

on excess is itself so excessive that it comes across as

desperate. This ends up providing perhaps the most

emotionally unguarded moment on the album, which is

a big deal for a band who avoid autobiography in their

songs.

There’s a line where Flansburgh’s voice starts

softening, exposing by the end something like vulner-

ability: “We can’t be silent, ‘cause they might be giants,

and what are we gonna do unless they are?” The harmony

here breaks up the status-quo key of C major with

dramatic A-flat and B-flat chords, revealing a glimpse

of another way of being (represented by C minor in this

case), which suggests that we’re right to ask what-if. This

isn’t merely another assertion via the band’s name that

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

123

•

there’s more to the world than meets the eye. Instead,

listen for a dire, impassioned pleading. The belief in a

universe of borderless possibility over one of ordered

realism may be an illogical and ultimately aesthetic

preference, but these songs—to say nothing of their

makers and fans—wager so much upon that belief that

they cannot afford to be wrong. At stake here is a whole

worldview wherein meanings can change, identities shift,

books cannot be judged by their covers, and you never

know what you’ll find when you open up Pandora’s box

tomorrow.

Looking at what happened with Flood and its audience

in and after 1990, we might see that its proclamation

of limitlessness managed an astounding feat of self-

fulfilling prophecy. The generation of young people this

album so electrified took to heart the lesson to “be what

you’re like,” finding new ways to rise above outsider

status expressly through geekdom, and not in spite of

it. The exponentially increased cultural values of tech-

savvy, of self-awareness, and of participatory fandom

proved undeniable throughout the 1990s and across

the millennial threshold. And though there are some

downsides to all this, the world is brighter, safer, more

open, and more promising for floodlike minds today

than ever before. Among Flood’s greatest achievements

is its capacity to model, commemorate, and perpetuate

this change of tides for individuals and groups alike. Still

flowing, the album went platinum nineteen years after

its release.

F L O O D

•

124

•

I n D e f e n s e o f I n c o m p l e t e K n o w l e d ge ( W hy

D o n ’t Yo u Wa n t To B e U n d e rs t o o d ? )

When we met John Linnell and John Flansburgh,

they were a little nervous about the existence of this

book. For one thing, their privacy is precious to them,

especially given how much of their time is already spent

parading in front of concert audiences. One might also

suppose that equally threatening as an invasion of

privacy is the possibility of being misinterpreted. But

They Might Be Giants are actually pretty charitable to

new and strange hearings of their songs that go well

beyond what they’d intended. For example, after a fan

explained to the band why he thought the 1992 single

“The Statue Got Me High” was a retelling of Mozart’s

1787 opera Don Giovanni, Linnell was charmed enough

that he started introducing live performances of the

song with the interpretation, adding dryly, “I didn’t

know that when I wrote it.” No, the band is less likely

to take issue with any particular song’s quirky (mis)

interpretation than with more broadly being personally

or artistically misconstrued—a frequent enough occur-

rence that it basically inspired this book. And really,

who can blame someone for not wanting to be

mischaracterized?

At this point in the discussion about Flood, however,

a deeper concern fades into view. If this music is so

invested in the joys of possibility, the pleasures of the

arbitrary, and the political virtues of erasing defini-

tions, then paradoxically, the biggest sin of all may be

to characterize it correctly. Understanding it means

containing it, boxing it in. An ethical core of play and

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

125

•

curiosity in this music means that tying up loose ends

and rendering it somehow knowable is the opposite of a

sympathetic hearing.

In light of this, we offer some comforting words.

First, despite our best efforts, we’re fairly certain that

we’ve failed to explain the album with anything resem-

bling comprehensiveness. There are at least a few ideas

in these pages that are incomplete or even wrong. That

we’ve not written the final word on They Might Be

Giants should help everyone—the band included—to

sleep just a little better.

But more importantly, the human desire to under-

stand and be understood isn’t a longing for the systemic

reduction of the world and of one’s emotions and

behavior. A big part of it is instead a need for common

ground and closeness with others. Especially when it

comes to all things social and musical, people long to

deepen their experiences by sharing them. With that in

mind, it’s most useful to hear Flood’s ethos and history as

we’ve written it here not as a summation, but as a starting

point. If its imperative is one of flux, then every time the

album plays, its depth of possibility ensures that although

listeners can find camaraderie in the music and in those

they share it with, they won’t ever step into the same

flood twice. Music is experiential.

S we p t Away ( A n d N o w t h e S o n g I s O ve r N o w )

As of 2013, They Might Be Giants are still best known

for Flood, which is kind of funny, because their more

devoted fans nearly all name some other record as their

LP of choice (most often Lincoln, though Apollo 18 has

F L O O D

•

126

•

its adherents, and a handful of contrarians insist on the

greatness of John Henry). “Discerning gentlemen!” booms

Linnell when we mention our respective non-Flood

favorites. But still, as Flansburgh says of their 1990 effort,

“the kids seem to like it.” These kids, of course, are all of

us. Then and now.

In the post-2000 nostalgia craze of bands performing

full albums live, They Might Be Giants occasionally

play Flood shows. Along the way they discovered that

the frontloading of hits so common on major-label

albums makes Flood a little anticlimactic in a concert

setting, so they reversed the song order, repurposing

the starkness of “

Road Movie to Berlin

” as an apéritif

to the annunciatory kickoff of “They Might Be

Giants.”

That’s how their Jacksonville show goes in March

2010, when we first decide to write this book. It’s

been nearly 20 years since we were at the CTY nerd

camp, jumping dizzily around an auditorium on the

Dickinson College campus, but even as time guides us

beyond our adolescent insecurities, an abiding pull of

everythingness keeps us coming back to They Might Be

Giants. Thousands upon thousands of other people have

their own variation on this story.

As we stand in the sweaty all-ages crowd at the

Freebird Live, we note how the reordering of Flood’s

songs spawns little curiosities: “

Hot Cha

” leaps out with

a strange viciousness when it’s played right after “Women

and Men”; “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” is suddenly

every bit as much a story of reincarnation as “

Dead

” has

always been; “

Letterbox

” is an underwhelming setup to

“

Minimum Wage

.”

S . A L E X A N D E R R E E D A N D P H I L I P S A N D I F E R

•

127

•

After John Linnell invites us to build a little birdhouse

in our soul (as he has by now done in some two

thousand live performances), we arrive at the moment of

shared understanding that we all paid $25 to experience.

Everyone knows it’s coming, but it somehow leaves

nobody unsurprised. The Johns and their live bandmates

exit the stage, and it’s up to the audience to fill in the

rest.

We sing together and individually, with some notes

right and others out of tune. Maybe we forget a word

here and there, but even as we do so, we relive Flood

both in and beyond its historical moment. Everyone

and everything is brimming. For many of us, the world

is a bit scarier than it was in 1990: there are a lot of

reasons why the ocean levels are rising up. But we

kids have gotten bigger, even if we haven’t fully grown

up, and with a little help we’ve learned that when the

waters climb, we don’t have to fear them or fight them,

but instead they carry us above the worry and the rules

and the awkwardness that only served to wall us in and

block us off from possibility, from ourselves. And for all

that we may understand Flood’s forthright strangeness as

enlivening, sad, and funny, we—who were told to stop

drawing in margins, to stop playing the class clown, to

speak up, run faster, act cooler, stop daydreaming, stop

sulking, stop singing, stop underachieving, stop overa-

chieving, stop flooding—we in this moment know there’s

nothing at all strange about this feeling that the world is

in love. Again.

The authors thank John Flansburgh and John Linnell for

their kind cooperation with this book. For obvious reasons, it

•

129

•

Also available in the series

1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren

Zanes

2. Forever Changes by Andrew

Hultkrans

3. Harvest by Sam Inglis
4. The Kinks Are the Village Green

Preservation Society by Andy
Miller

5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

by John Cavanagh

7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth

Vincentelli

8.   Electric Ladyland by John Perry
9.   Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott
10.   Sign ‘O’ the Times by

Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground and Nico

by Joe Harvard

12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo
13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas

Wolk

14.   Aqualung by Allan Moore
15.   OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
16.   Let It Be by Colin Meloy
17.   Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
18.   Exile on Main Sreet by Bill

Janovitz

19.   Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
20.   Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
21.   Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
22.   Murmur by J. Niimi
23.   Grace by Daphne Brooks
24.   Endtroducing… by Eliot Wilder
25.   Kick Out the Jams by Don

McLeese

26. Low by Hugo Wilcken
27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey

Himes

28. Music from Big Pink by John

Niven

29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by

Kim Cooper

30.   Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy
31.   Doolittle by Ben Sisario
32.   There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles

Marshall Lewis

33.   The Stone Roses by Alex Green
34.   In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar
35.   Highway 61 Revisited by Mark

Polizzotti

36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal
37. The Who Sell Out by John

Dougan

38. Bee Thousand by Marc

Woodworth

F L O O D

•

130

•

39. Daydream Nation by Matthew

Stearns

40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by

Eric Weisbard

42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth

Lundy

43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by

Ric Menck

44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin

Courrier

45. Double Nickels on the Dime by

Michael T. Fournier

46. Aja by Don Breithaupt
47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the

Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz
49. Achtung Baby by Stephen

Catanzarite

50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott

Plagenhoef

51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl

Wilson

53. Swordfishtrombones by David

Smay

54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew

Daniel

55. Horses by Philip Shaw
56. Master of Reality by John

Darnielle

57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris
58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden

Childs

59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron
60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by

Jeffery T. Roesgen

61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob

Proehl

62.   Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
63.   XO by Matthew LeMay
64.   Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier
65.   Radio City by Bruce Eaton
66.   One Step Beyond… by Terry

Edwards

67. Another Green World by Geeta

Dayal

68.   Zaireeka by Mark Richardson
69.   69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol
70.   Facing Future by Dan Kois
71.   It Takes a Nation of Millions to

Hold Us Back by Christopher R.
Weingarten

72.   Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles
73.  Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo
74.   Song Cycle by Richard

Henderson

75.   Kid A by Marvin Lin
76.   Spiderland by Scott Tennent
77.   Tusk by Rob Trucks
78.   Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne

Carr

79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank

Shteamer

80. American Recordings by Tony

Tost

81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell
82. You’re Living All Over Me by

Nick Attfield

83. Marquee Moon by Bryan

Waterman

84. Amazing Grace by Aaron

Cohen

85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton
86. Fear of Music by Jonathan

Lethem

87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by

Darran Anderson

Document Outline