They Might Be Giants' Flood by Reed S. Alexander Sandifer Philip

They Might Be Giants' Flood by Reed S. Alexander Sandifer Philip

Author:Reed, S. Alexander, Sandifer, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf


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

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which They Might Be Giants were well suited to speak

to the growing geek audience, let’s look at one of the

most basic shared concerns of geeks and They Might Be

Giants: technology.

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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

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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.



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