Posting a lot about music this weekend
Aug. 29th, 2004 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI'm belatedly listening to They Might Be Giants' 2002 rarities collection They Got Lost. TMBG Unlimited subscribers probably obtained most of this stuff a long time ago; I'd heard much of it on Dial-A-Song at some point. Nice to have it all in one place.
The real gems here are "On The Drag" and "Mosh Momken Abadan" (a stompy instrumental that is apparently a familiar Iranian tune), and two of John Linnell's greatest acts of lyrics-writing ever, "Rest Awhile" and "Certain People I Could Name." This last is flabbergastingly brilliant, in the ambiguous, unreliable-narrator manner that is TMBG's native territory.
I can't decide whether he actually has certain people in mind, or if the song is just about how easy it is to make damning insinuations about people based on comparison of little mannerisms (I suspect the latter, but also think many listeners would read the song on the other level and eagerly perform the implied projection). Or both.
I've been seeing a lot of this lately in political contexts, and it kind of bugs me even when the target is someone I despise (e.g. some blog comments I read a while back in which somebody went on and on about the sinister implications of the way Dick Cheney holds his lips), because it's so inherently unanswerable and suggestion so powerful. It reminds me of the late Gharlane of Eddore's insistence that a fleeting facial expression Bill Clinton once made on a raw satellite feed was incontrovertible evidence that he'd had Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's plane sabotaged. Maybe it's just that I'm personally very bad at getting emotional information from subtle facial expressions, so it's hard for me to believe that others can do this reliably by watching video, or argue with them when they do.
The real gems here are "On The Drag" and "Mosh Momken Abadan" (a stompy instrumental that is apparently a familiar Iranian tune), and two of John Linnell's greatest acts of lyrics-writing ever, "Rest Awhile" and "Certain People I Could Name." This last is flabbergastingly brilliant, in the ambiguous, unreliable-narrator manner that is TMBG's native territory.
I can't decide whether he actually has certain people in mind, or if the song is just about how easy it is to make damning insinuations about people based on comparison of little mannerisms (I suspect the latter, but also think many listeners would read the song on the other level and eagerly perform the implied projection). Or both.
I've been seeing a lot of this lately in political contexts, and it kind of bugs me even when the target is someone I despise (e.g. some blog comments I read a while back in which somebody went on and on about the sinister implications of the way Dick Cheney holds his lips), because it's so inherently unanswerable and suggestion so powerful. It reminds me of the late Gharlane of Eddore's insistence that a fleeting facial expression Bill Clinton once made on a raw satellite feed was incontrovertible evidence that he'd had Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's plane sabotaged. Maybe it's just that I'm personally very bad at getting emotional information from subtle facial expressions, so it's hard for me to believe that others can do this reliably by watching video, or argue with them when they do.
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Date: 2004-08-29 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-30 06:51 am (UTC)