If you should find yourself in North Olmsted, Ohio with a few extra minutes, you can drive past the North Olmsted high school. There, if you know where to look, you’ll find a brown brick, perfectly centered between two windows on the way to the soccer practice field at the back of the school. Because it is brown, this brick blends in nicely with the rest of the orange and tan skin of the school. That layer of burnt umber, oil-based paint was applied to the wall on a humid, scorching afternoon in August 1990. At the tail end of my time working on the North Olmsted Board of Education summer maintenance crew, I decided to leave my mark on the school in which I grew up and started the path to adulthood.

For three years, I worked alongside a group of college guys my age and a group of men in their 40s and 50s (“lifers” as we called them) who were the full-time maintenance men for the school system. Each year, our summers were spent sweating our asses off in the Ohio heat, primarily painting classrooms and the exterior trim of the schools. My friend, Jeff, landed me the job and I convinced him to persuade Mike Clancy, the head of the maintenance department, to hire Steve, too. Like I said, I matured during that period. I learned how to be a better friend, an okay boyfriend (which would provide me with the lessons to be a good husband someday) and a halfway decent painter. Those laborious days were full of Diner-esque conversations; lazy, introspective moments; and a lot of good music playing from my Emerson dual cassette boom box. Although there were many songs I grew to love during that time, many of those tunes hold only nostalgic value to me these days. However, one song remains a favorite basement song and it is one I would include in my personal top ten: They Might Be Giants’ “Ana Ng”. (more…)

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The Magnetic Fields - “I Wish I Had an Evil Twin”

Good Zack: I’m not a fan of The Magnetic Fields in any particular sense, but this is a brilliant, brilliant song. It taps into an almost universal sentiment – each person’s version of a fearless, impulsive self that is free from the self-imposed restraints that govern our behavior. Our own personal Tyler Durden, the version of ourselves that would have spit out that insult, thrown that punch, that would have pounced on the opportunity to cheat (in either sense), and that would have done so with such brazen disregard for the consequences that there probably wouldn’t have been any. Stephin Merritt doesn’t want an evil twin that physically exists, what he wants is to unleash his own id and its blissful indifference to the concepts of empathy. When he murmurs, “all my life, there should have been an evil twin,” he’s not just envisioning a version of himself who can act out his fantasies of conquest and revenge, he’s also yearning for the ability to compartmentalize his guilt and jettison his remorse.

Bad Zack: Oh, please. Let’s recognize this song for what it really is – a paean to cowardice. Stephin Merritt is too weak to face up to the confrontations in his own life, so he sits back and fantasizes about someone else doing his dirty work for him. It’s interesting that an anti-war liberal like Merritt would engage in the same type of hypocrisy he undoubtedly condemns in his political opposites – namely the predilection to cheerfully send others off to fight battles on his behalf, while claiming moral superiority for having remained removed from the fray. (more…)

Get ur geek on, fuckers! (Use of ‘fuckers!’ at the end of brief opening sentence copyright of Jeff Giles Inc. All rights reserved.)

First off, if you’re a fan of They Might Be Giants but have not yet bought their most recent children’s album Here Come the 123s, what the hell ya waitin’ fer? It’s awesome. Seriously, even if you don’t have kids, get it for the two “Seven” songs alone.

History points to Flood, They Might Be Giants’ 1990 major label debut, as their halcyon moment, and while that’s true, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The fact is that many fans were rather upset with the Johns for the slick production they employed on the album, not to mention a sillier lyrical approach. (The band corrected this “mistake” on their next album, 1992’s Apollo 18, and to no one’s surprise, it sold a fraction of the copies that Flood sold.) For many, however, this was their introduction to the band, and the newcomers didn’t mind the new style. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one-two punch than “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and their cover of the Four Lads tune “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” (One-two-three punch if you count “Particle Man.”) “Birdhouse” was the MTV favorite, but the band tried something different with the next single. What would be a funny thing to do with a fiddle-heavy cover of a song from the ‘50s?

The answer: let a couple hip-hop DJs remix it.

Oh, those silly remixers and their dialogue sampling. It’s all Prince Paul’s fault, you know. Once De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising became a hit, everyone started trying to out-skit their peers. Not even Fine Young Cannibals records were exempt from Prince Paul’s silliness. (Check out his mix of “Good Thing,” if you can find it.) And speaking of De La Soul, the signature drum beat from “Me, Myself and I” – which surely has roots in a soul song from the ‘70s that I’m not aware of – makes frequent appearances here, as does Janet Jackson’s “edit” from Shep Pettibone’s mixes of “Miss You Much.” And, is that…Kraftwerk? Yep, “The Robots” is here, too. Does it make sense? Not really, but that’s rather fitting in the TMBG universe, isn’t it? Besides, as odd as this mix is, it’s as good as They Might Be Giants remixes got, as anyone who heard those spacey mixes of “The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” can attest.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, we present the Tiny Toons video for “Istanbul,” which is about as genius a collaboration as you’re likely to find. Man, how did we not see these children’s albums coming from a mile away?

They Might Be Giants – Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (Brownsville Mix)