100 Episodes of ‘60 Songs’: A They Might Be Giants Celebration

Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 final episodes (and a brand-new book!) to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 100 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering They Might Be Giants. Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.

A brief list of bands and artists with whom I became obsessed somewhere between the ages of 0 and 12 years old—so between 1978 and 1990—includes, but is of course not limited to, the Cars, Talking Heads, Prince, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Stray Cats, anybody on the Ghostbusters soundtrack, the Police, the Bangles, the Fat Boys, Cheap Trick, Tears for Fears, Terence Trent D’Arby, Tone Loc, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and Bon Jovi. Also Weird Al. And Cinderella. This music in this era is 90 percent of my identity, and most of the other 10 percent is, like, Mega Man 2. But I wouldn’t have articulated it that way at the time; I couldn’t articulate anything at the time, other than in Mega Man 2, you should fight Metal Man first. I didn’t realize until I was 12 or so how absurdly dominant music already was and would always be in my life. I didn’t realize that I was looking for just one band that would permanently become 90 percent of my identity. I didn’t realize I was looking for that band until I found it or, really, it found me.

My name is Rob Harvilla, this is the 100th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, and my reward to myself for making it this far is that this week, we are talking about “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants, from their 1990 album, Flood. Yes, this one’s for me. The previous 99 episodes weren’t for me at all, of course. Just this one.

Hey, I just figured out how to do an advanced search in Google Drive. It’s pretty cool, it’s pretty hard to do, it’s too technical to explain here, but that’s why I can tell you that They Might Be Giants keep coming up on this show, at random, including in the episodes for Beck, Cake, Pavement, Counting Crows, and Sheryl Crow. They are the specter haunting this humble podcast; they are the specter haunting me. They Might Be Giants are straight up my favorite band of all time. It feels good to say that out loud. They are the band I have spent the most time listening to, the band I have most successfully inflicted upon my children, the band I have seen live most often. I’m guessing 15 to 20 times, I’ve seen They Might Be Giants live, which is not a bonkers, all-time-superfan number of shows, 15 to 20, but anybody who gets me to leave the house on 20 separate occasions for any reason, that’s super impressive. This is it, dudes. This is the band. This is the band that made me. This is the first song I ever heard by the band that made me.

Songs That Explain the ’90s, the Book

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And when I first told you the story about the first song I ever heard by the band that made me—I first told you this like two years ago in the Cake episode; I looked it up, using the advanced search—I wasn’t joking, but I thought I was maybe exaggerating for comic and also dramatic effect. But no, I’ve decided I wasn’t exaggerating at all. There is my life before “Particle Man” and after. There is me before “Particle Man” and after. My Cool Uncle Nick looked at me one day—I’m 12 or 13 years old, I’m still trembling from all that terrible bedtime last-song-on-side-B action—and he said, Robby, I think you need to hear this song, and then he played me the song on his own stereo—which was arranged more horizontally than vertically; the components, the record player, and the tape deck and such weren’t stacked on top of one another—and then I heard “Particle Man” for the first time and became myself. It’s not an exaggeration.

Listen, I know polka. Do you know polka? You know Joe Beno? You know Frankie Yankovic? You know the “Beer Barrel Polka”? You know the “Hide and Seek Polka”? You know “Hupaj Siupaj” by the Polka Brothers? You know “Who Stole the Kishka”? Ooh, that’s a good one, “Who Stole the Kishka.” Hit it, Midwestern polka king Frankie Yankovic!

I know “Who Stole the Kishka.” (I know the song “Who Stole the Kishka.” I don’t actually know who stole the kishka, nor do I know what a kishka is, exactly.) I know polkas. I know all those polkas and many additional polkas also. And that’s thanks to my grandpa. Grandpa taught me about polkas, and he also taught me about various grandpa-friendly, semi-problematic comic strips like Beetle Bailey and Andy Capp and Peanuts, and he also taught me about the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, and he also taught me to play chess, now that I’m thinking about it. And here now in “Particle Man,” we have this staggering, bubbly, irreverent but also weirdly philosophical and erudite collision of Grandpa, of Grandpa’s various passions and idiosyncrasies, distilled into a pop song that lasts one minute and 55 seconds and is somehow simultaneously both the uncoolest and coolest thing I ever heard in my whole life. The flagrant uncoolness is what makes it so cool. The coolness via flagrant uncoolness is what speaks to me and speaks through me and consumes me and becomes me. Universe Man is God. I’m pretty sure about that.

And I owe it all to Cool Uncle Nick for playing me “Particle Man.” I also have a Cool Aunt Julie, who has objected to how often I mention Cool Uncle Nick without also mentioning her, and so let me tell you that my Cool Aunt Julie won some kind of call-in MTV contest in the mid to late ’80s. She won a CD player and a whole bunch of CDs—I’m fairly certain it’s the first CD player I’d ever seen in my life; that was super cool. And then one time as a preteen, I was rifling through Cool Aunt Julie’s record collection and I was like, Ooh, the Exploited, that sounds cool! And Cool Aunt Julie was like, No, no, Robby, put that down. You cannot listen to the Exploited, no. And that struck me as uncool at the time, but really that was extra cool of Cool Aunt Julie.

However, after seeing how strongly, how viscerally I responded to “Particle Man,” it was Cool Uncle Nick who made me a homemade, painstakingly dubbed-together VHS tape of various They Might Be Giants videos and MTV interviews and live performances, and I’d sit there with my younger brother, and we’d watch that VHS tape on a loop for hours, and that’s how I got a sense of who and what I was dealing with here.

John Linnell and John Flansburgh meet as smarty-pants teenagers in Lincoln, Massachusetts; they fart around together musically a little bit, graduate from high school, go to different colleges, and then reconnect in Brooklyn, New York. They live in the same building in Fort Greene in the early to mid-’80s, long before Fort Greene was a hip or desirable place to live. They form a duo. They call this duo They Might Be Giants, after a 1971 movie that I am truly embarrassed to tell you I still haven’t seen. What kind of fan of this band am I, anyways?

I got no idea what’s the deal with that movie. Sorry. I’m too busy listening to polkas to ever watch that movie. Young John and John hit the subway and hit the Manhattan art-rock scene in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. Tiny, hip little clubs in the cartoonishly gritty, urban-wasteland, nihilistic, post-punk, mid–no wave, scabrous-beyond-imagining, “You ever seen The Warriors?” Manhattan of the mid-’80s. The long-running 33 1/3 book series, those rad little books each about a classic album, there’s a great 33 1/3 book about Flood, written by S. Alexander Reed and Phillip Sandifer, and they talk to Flansburgh about the early years, and he says, “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 committedly bohemian, living alternative lifestyles. They’d had sexual experiences that we had not even thought about. They 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 hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.