Were They Might Be Giants revolutionaries?
Were They Might Be Giants actually kind of revolutionary?
This is something I’ve been thinking about lately: They Might Be Giants have always struck me as much more musically and lyrically radical than their presentation would suggest.
On the surface, they can sound almost aggressively harmless: goofy, nerdy, understated, lo-fi-ish, melodic, and often deliberately silly. There’s no obvious rock-star posturing, no grandiose sense of importance, and very little of the “we are changing the world” attitude that usually accompanies the word revolutionary. A lot of their songs sound like little jokes, observations, children's songs, absurdist sketches, or deliberately trivial pieces of pop music.
But that's almost the point.
Their songwriting has this very strange combination of rationality, absurdity, sarcasm, deadpan humor, and genuine musical craft. They can take something completely ridiculous and present it with the seriousness of a scientific observation — or take something mundane and make it sound bizarre simply by looking at it from an unexpected angle.
Songs like Particle Man, Istanbul (Not Constantinople), Birdhouse in Your Soul, Don't Let's Start, Ana Ng, She's an Angel, The Statue Got Me High, etc. don't necessarily sound revolutionary in the traditional sense. But they seem to have helped establish a vocabulary for a kind of alternative songwriting where being clever, weird, funny, emotionally detached, and poppy could all coexist.
And I wonder if their influence becomes more obvious when you compare them to a lot of post-2000 indie music.
A huge amount of modern indie has that somewhat towned-down, understated, self-aware, sardonic quality. The vocals are often deliberately un-grand, the arrangements can be simple or slightly twee, the lyrics can be observational or ironic, and there's often a kind of “I'm making a song about this ridiculous little thing because why not?” attitude.
Obviously, TMBG didn't invent irony, nerdiness, lo-fi music, quirky songwriting, or indie pop. And there are plenty of other artists who were doing similar things before them. But they seem like an unusually early and concentrated example of something that later became much more normal in alternative/indie music: the idea that you don't have to be cool, macho, tortured, profound, or conventionally “rock” to make sophisticated music.
What's especially interesting to me is that their silliness doesn't necessarily make the music less sophisticated. In some ways, the silliness gives them more freedom. They can jump between genres, structures, lyrical perspectives, and subjects without having to maintain a serious artistic persona.
So I'm wondering: were They Might Be Giants actually more musically/culturally revolutionary than they get credit for?
Not “revolutionary” in the political sense, obviously, but revolutionary in the sense that they helped normalize a particular kind of intellectual, absurdist, sarcastic, deliberately uncool, pop-oriented indie songwriting.
Or am I retroactively giving them too much credit because their style happens to resemble a lot of indie music that came later?
I'm especially curious how people who listened to them in the '80s and '90s perceived them at the time. Did they feel genuinely weird and groundbreaking then, or did they mostly just seem like a particularly funny/quirky alternative band?