FLOOD

It's a brand new record for 1990!

What can I say about Flood that hasn't already been said about Flood? The album itself is largely about saying everything, all at once, rapid-fire, in a perpetual flooding of ideas. In general, analysis on the meta-level (i.e. TMBG's music is about TMBG's music) tends to work very well here, and Flood embodies that to a (non-miscellaneous) T. The very point of Flood is to be everything, all the time, everywhere, in a display of comical and egregious excess.

The very point of Flood is to be a lot. The release of the album was accompanied with a promotional video that said, more or less, that there needed to be more songs on albums, and that's why there's 19 songs on this one. Flood plays a game with its listener, one of perpetual non-resolution, of setting things up and not knocking them down. It's like watching The Matrix Reloaded without watching Revolutions — it leaves you wanting more, even though you already had everything. The 33 1/3 on this album, by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer, coins this excess as flooding.

The problem, then, is that Flood exists largely without rhyme or reason; it is a thing that is intentionally about the excess and overstimulation that can be developed in modern society. It resists interpretation; a lot of the songs are about what they're about. The Johns have gone on record that people over-interpret Particle Man, especially.

So, let's take a look at something else.

PlayTime (1967, dir. Jacques Tati) is a movie about the building.

Namely, PlayTime consists of six, lightly connected segments, all of which center around the bumbling Monsieur Hulot (who is an inspiration for Mr. Bean). The film is set in a modern Paris, distinctly more modern than '67, and things are coated in endless levels of plastic artifice. It's designed to be serious, it's designed to be consumerist, but it's nothing but play. Brooms have headlights now. Roundabouts have 18 lanes. Offices have entirely glass walls. The doorman holds a handle to a door that doesn't exist. A new, totally silent drape runner! Wait, wrong thing.

Given all that, what is PlayTime about? You could make a lot of grandiose statements about how it's about the artifice of capital, how it's about modern architecture and the uncanny valley, whatever. You could do that, or you could realize that PlayTime is what it is; a documentary about a world that does not exist. It fully teleports you into an alternate dimension which exists almost like a play set, where things don't make that much sense and seem to be designed by someone who kind of understands what's going on in the world, but not really. It feels like a child's passion project.

This is what Birdhouse In Your Soul shows us; it shows that the action of flooding, of excessive, manic, sparse ideas, is a fundamentally childish thing. The blue canary protects you from the dark. It isn't anything else; it's not a metaphor for safety, it's not a new building. You're a kid. It's the blue canary in the outlet by the light switch, and it watches over you.

Flood, then, is about wanting something more; more than Minimum Wage, more people (Women & Men), more samples in the song (Hearing Aid), more... anything in your life because you're miserably depressed (Dead). It's about wanting more They Might Be Giants music on the track They Might Be Giants. It's about more, more, more, even when you already have everything, trying to find stability to tie everything down around (We Want A Rock).

It's a fundamentally childish desire, but it sure is more mature than putting it behind an ironic facade. Flood is exactly what it is; it's as material as it can be. Every song is more or less literally about what it's about, and the process that got it there. It's admirable for how simple it is, even though its influence has more or less made its contents almost like breathing air to fans of the band.