Anti-Climacus

Dispatches from the Front Lines of Attempting to Maintain a Guitar-Based Pop Music Industry, a periodic series:



They Might Be Giants wsg Jonathan Coulton

Look: in a healthy, functioning indie guitar-based music scene, there has to be space for a band like They Might Be Giants--weird, more self-consciously nerdy than everyone else, fun. We should love and appreciate them as earlier generations appreciated... They Might Be Giants... or our hipper-than-thou forbears insisted that Randy Newman was actually really good, when taken in small doses. "Small doses" is the key phrase--I'm not TMBG aficionado, though I know four or five of their songs and can recognize others ("oh, right, they wrote a song about James K. Polk. I knew that.")--but just shy of two hours of nasal vocals, joke-songs, and what I can only describe as the largest number of guitar solos I've ever seen outside of a Phish concert does begin to wear after awhile (the two extended breaks for a puppet show seemed to indicate even the band acknowledged this). And their most significant redeeming feature, for me, is that not all their songs are intended as jokes. See, for example, "Birdhouse in Your Soul."

See, by way of generational contrast, Jonathan Coulton. He writes and sings significantly more accessible material--by-the-numbers guitar pop--and maintains a strictly postmodern banter onstage. But it's hard not to notice the Nice Guy™shtick: most of his songs are kind of mean, in which Coulton or his protagonist evinces contempt for the people he's singing about, or anyone who is not him ("Good Morning Tucson" was the most notable offender--all these stupid terrible people putting me on tv). If this is the future of indie comic pop, maybe it deserves to die.