Day 40: "Flood" - The Might Be Giants (1990)

There are some combinations that are really hard to make work well together.  Cheese with fish. Sandals with socks.  Ben Elton with entertaining television after 1990.  My personal contribution to this list of unlikely pairings are Music and Zany Comedy.  They're two things which, in my head, just don't seem to work together naturally.  There are some people who do it exceptionally.  I'm not sure this is one of those examples.

Listen to me here

This is another album I owned, first on a copied cassette from a friend, and then on cassette version of the proper album when I inevitably lost the copy, before finally grabbing this version from a CD sale at some point or another.  In what is an unusual twist for me, I'm fairly sure I became aware of They Might Be Giants through commercial radio and TV.  In 1990 we'd just returned to the UK from my Dad's overseas postings, and one of the exciting things for me was access to the radio again.  I know, I'm showing my age, but back in the dark ages when I was a teen, the UK Top 40 Singles charts was actually a weirdly eclectic mix of musical styles, and a pretty decent way of being exposed to new music.

Also in the Top 40 that week;  Primal Scream with "Loaded", The Cure with "Pictures of You", Skid Row, David Bowie, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, Sinead O' Connor and of course, Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat

I remember hearing "Birdhouse in Your Soul" on Top of the Pops and having it stuck in my head all week afterwards.  I've mentioned before how a strong narrative hook in a song can often stick with me, and this weird, whimsical pop song which seemed to be a telling a story lodged itself in my brain.  The following week, I took the monumental step of recording the song off the radio during the top 40 countdown on Sunday night.  A few days later my friend Tim came back to my house in the evening after school and I remember playing it to him because I loved it so much.  Well, when I say I played it to him, what I mean is I played it, rewound it, played it again, and in fact probably played it back to back to back around 7 times before by Dad came up to my room and basically said he didn't care how loud or what music I listened to but if I played that song again this evening he would flip.

It's still a great song, and well worth listening to on repeat.

It wasn't long until Tim owned a cassette copy of "Flood" which I gladly copied off him.  I was slightly dismayed that the rest of the album didn't sound like Birdhouse In Your Soul, but despite the weird lo-fi musical style and the feeling that half the songs on the album are closer in character to musical skits or puns than what I'd consider traditional 'songs', I still listened to it so much that when I relistened to it this lunchtime while playing Destiny 2, I found I could effortlessly dredge the lyrics to all the songs out of whatever part of my brain stores them (and should probably be used for remembering important information instead).

That being said, and acknowledging that TMBG's fandom is both extensive and based in large part on their irreverent and slightly surreal musical stylings, listening back to it today made me start thinking about the intersection between music and comedy.  A lot of the tracks on this album are really just frameworks for puns.  "Minimum Wage" is a 46 second joke which outstays its welcome by about 40 seconds.  When you read the title of the song "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair", chances are you know everything you need to know about it already without having to spend 2 minutes and 23 seconds listening to it.  "Istanbul" seems to be a much loved song from this album, but its still just 150 seconds of two guys singing about how it used to be called Constantinople before the Turks changed it.

Maybe it's something to do with the way our tastes evolve and change over time;  it didn't take a great deal of effort to convince 13 year old me that your quirky and surreal jokey songs were unique and incredible and entertaining.  41 year old me (Jesus christ, can that really be true?  Let's hope not) is less easily convinced.  

And that's not to say I don't think there are people who can't combine music and comedy brilliantly. Tim Minchin's "The Song For Phil Doust" (Warning:  Strong Language) still has me in stitches;  Bill Bailey is equally talented and hilarious.  Flight Of The Conchords are amazing.  But these are all primarily comedians who use music as part of their comedy.  And there are musical parody acts that I also think are very well done.  I enjoy the Richard Cheese albums a great deal, as nothing deflates nineties nu-metal songs quite as amusingly as having them performed by a Vegas lounge singer.

But it probably says a lot that when I finished listening to this album, I ended up listening to a lot of really great Weird Al songs.

So, this one will go back to the pile, a reminder of when it demonstrated to a younger me that music didn't have to be serious, paved the way for me to discover some really talented musical comedy acts, and as a stark reminder that buying an album of the strength of a single song can sometimes backfire.