LINCOLN

While we're going to be listening to a lot of They Might Be Giants over the next month, one of the many problems with the (necessary) pacing we have set up is that Day 1 is probably going to be one of the best days we have. This is because Lincoln is one of the most influential albums ever made. I think a lot about a post I saw once that quoted the Ana Ng music video with "holy fuck is all of they might be giants this good? am i missing out?", to which the resounding answer is 1) no and 2) yes.

I mentioned Eastern Mass as the first sentence, and Lincoln, being about the town of Lincoln, MA, makes the necessity of teleporting yourself to the neo-puritanical, non-risk-taking, Matchbox Twenty-creating society of Massachusetts necessary. More generally, Lincoln is about suburban desolation, of the idea of being somewhere that's almost a real place, but the walls seem to be the wrong color and everyone seems to be acting a bit like a character from Deus Ex, all their lines pre-programmed to provide the illusion of humanity.

Lincoln is about being in a place that you do not want to be in, on accident or on purpose, with one notable exception. The definition of "place" here is very nebulous; it can be a literal town, it can be a relationship, it can be a mental state, it can be a job, it can be a family. But it's always a place, and that place has the essence of Lincoln, MA — a place that is uncanny, that is wrong, that does not make sense, and that you feel like you don't fit into.

First, the relationship songs on this album seem to be more interested in the idea of being in a relationship as opposed to being in one; it's all posturing. Ana Ng is a love song about the idea of knowing somebody in an almost stalkery way, similar to some stuff on The Pink Album. It's about loving the idea of falling in love, with a Miss Ng, someone you do not know. I've Got A Match is about a deeply fraught relationship that culminates in child abuse, largely from the perspective child of the child (You think it's always sensitive and good referring to the archetype of parental love). Santa's Beard and You'll Miss Me feel to be about the same set of people to me, with a cucking scenario culminating in a resounding "I'm too good for you and you aren't good enough for me". Finally, They'll Need A Crane is about how the house (the house being the relationship; very Mountain Goats of you) is beyond repair, about how it's all going to fall apart, and yet the narrator still wishes it would remain.

Our songs about literal places are some of the more fascinating bits. Cowtown is quite literally about the town of Lincoln, MA in the most direct sense, with the area being colloquially referred to as such. Cage & Aquarium and Piece Of Dirt are largely about the kind of paranoia people living in suburbs have, assuming that bandits and criminals are everywhere in their secluded part of the world that nobody cares about. Specifically, Cage & Aquarium quite literally reads as being about a gated community to me, with the cage being the gate and the aquarium being the "community" pool.

When you live in a Lincoln, there oftentimes isn't enough stimuli in your enclosure, and you have nowhere to retreat but into yourself. This is where the existential hells of Where Your Eyes Don't Go and Mr. Me arise, where Mr. Me is very distinctly about the narrator referring to himself in a strange, depersonalized fashion. Beyond that, the outside is hostile as well; Purple Toupee is about a narrator who was a punk rocker who's now got a desk job and sucks, and Shoehorn With Teeth is about the very notion of a Lincoln being fundamentally impossible, and the need to maintain that impossible puritanism.

Some edge-case places include Snowball in Hell, a song where the narrator's shitty job where they generate no value is the place they want to run from, and Pencil Rain, which I read as being about a teacher who doesn't want to keep replacing the pencils in their classroom.

The album eventually culminates with Kiss Me, Son Of God, which is the only track about not wanting to be in a Lincoln, but instead one about creating a Lincoln. It's about the type of person who subjects people to suburbia, and why they do it. It's spiteful, it's angry, and it borders on political satire.

Finally, the most fascinating part of Lincoln is the formal experimentation on a record that's distinctly about its characters refusing experimentation and change. The chord changes on Ana Ng, the double clarinets on Cowtown, and the insane breakdown on Snowball in Hell all signal an era of rapid experimentation that I miss in a lot of more modern TMBG.

...In general, this is probably the best They Might Be Giants album. I don't think it's our favorite, but it's probably the best one. It's definitely very personal to us, given that we grew up in a Lincoln, with how ubiquitous these Long Island-like hells seem to be throughout America.