They Might Be Giants - Flood

Music You Might Want to Consider - F

If you haven’t heard of They Might Be Giants, you probably didn’t go to college in the 90s, or didn’t have young children who watched Tiny Toon Adventures. Heck, if you don’t know them for their earlier music, you may have heard their children’s songs that they have been cranking out for the last decade or so.

TMBG are one of those cult bands that deserved to be huge, but I’m not sure that if being huge would have done them any favors. They are weird enough to be cool, but not so weird that people are turned off by their eclectic sensibilities. If college radio became sentient, it would become They Might Be Giants.

I will spare a track by track review of Flood, because you can find that elsewhere. Instead, I’ll share a story about the one time I was able to see They Might Be Giants play live.

It was while I was in college. (of course it was) Our College Activities Board seemed to be batting 1000 during my freshman year; they not only booked George Carlin, but they booked Belly in the fall, They Might Be Giants in the winter, and The Gin Blossoms in the spring. All great shows¹.

But my favorite one² was the They Might Be Giants concert. It was fun, it was loud, and it also cost me my favorite hat.

Because, for some reason, when a band plays a concert in a college gymnasium, drunken frat boys seem to think they have to start a mosh pit. Enya could have been playing a set, and the frat boys would start slamming into each other out of pure instinct.

So these guys decided that they had to mosh during songs as heavy as “Birdhouse in your Soul” and “Particle Man”. And even though I was not a willing participant, my hat, a cabbie style hat that I had bought at a Hot Topic when I was in high school, was torn from my head, and disappeared into a sea of my fellow college classmates, never to be seen again.

So whenever I listen to Flood, I think about that stupid hat. And perhaps, when you listen to Flood, you’ll think of my stupid hat too.

1. I can only assume that The Gin Blossoms was good; I didn’t go, because I was too snooty to admit that I kind of dug them, since none of my friends seemed to. Peer pressure kept me from seeing The Gin Blossoms.

2. I’m not counting Carlin, because he was a comedian, and a legend that stands on his own. I’ll take the fact that I saw George Carlin live as a badge of honor to my grave.