I LIKE FUN

This is about to get very dark. Please do not read this if you are not in a good mental state.

There are places on the internet where you can go to die. They will actively attempt to sell you suicide methods, they will not just encourage it, but they will refer to it in flippant terms. Catching the bus. Unaliving. They'll post memes about it, like it's a thing to be joked about.

It is the end of a large pipeline; one that begins with self-deprecating humor. The humor gets darker, more intense. The jokes begin to stop reading like "haha I hate myself" and more like cries for help. You begin to see life as a thing to be dealt with, not a thing to live. It's just a joke, though. You swear it's just a joke; you played it all in a major key.

This is the core of the thesis of I Like Fun, an album that juxtaposes its upbeat instrumentation with some of the darkest lyrics that TMBG has ever put out. About half of these songs are about someone who is either going to kill themself or already has. It's the endpoint of treating death as flippant; something that They Might Be Giants itself is occasionally guilty of, given that it is one of their most common themes.

Join Us was about death. Glean was about dying. I Like Fun, then, is about thinking about dying.

Let's Get This Over With begins with a narrator who is already trapped in a cycle of flippant predeterminism. Crawl out of your cave and you can watch your shadow; you're stuck in a loop, rendering yourself useless because you feed yourself the very emotions you want to see. You're doom-scrolling r/2meirl42meirl4meirl at this point. You see a drawing of a girl cutting herself and you think "literally me".

I Left My Body, then, is about the regret you feel when you finally do it. It is a song about killing yourself and experiencing instant regret, trying to ground yourself in the material things you had and what they are worth. This is one of the darkest themes of I Like Fun, that of capital's complicity in suicide.

We're speaking from experience when we talk about these nightmarish forums; we were on them. We thought for a while that it was some kind of freak accident, that it was our fault for being on the internet too much, that it was the fault of those around us. This is not the case. The fact is that it was the intended outcome of our place in kyriarchy as a trans kid. Frankly, it's the intended outcome if you're any form of "undesirable" — g-d forbid I talk about how many people in these spaces were black, or trans, or poor, or homeless.

This complicity is reaffirmed on Lake Monsters, a song about the world you see that's "built for you" falling apart before your very eyes. It is about mysticism, about knowing that the monsters will always be present. It is about not knowing that these monsters will die before you.

Someone stuck in this pit is fully unable to express their emotions genuinely. This Microphone and An Insult To The Fact Checkers are about masking one's emotions entirely, to fall into a pit of unintelligibility and sub-subculture about it. They realize someone is listening when they say things; the microphone is still on.

The scariest part about this state is that there is a thought that you do not want to get better. The Bright Side is a song about feeling like your meds are making you a different person; a thought that we had a lot when we were on Lexapro, which wasn't working. It's about believing that being depressed is somehow more "real", more "grounded" — once again, Lake Monsters. Finally, Last Wave hammers in the resignation of it all, living in terror, dying afraid, naked, alone. Don't ask why, the last wave is rolling by. There is no rhyme or reason to it.

It does not have to happen like this. Let me be very clear about that. But when you're trapped in a world that seems like it's in a major key, it's really hard to ask someone to use a different one.