MINK CAR

Mink Car caused 9/11.

Okay, it's not that bad. But crucially, regardless of whether you think it's on purpose or not, Mink Car is bad. It is not a good album, and I really do not believe it's a good experience to listen to. It slogs, it has a lot of dubious artistic decisions, and a lot of tracks feel really one-note or uninteresting. A lot of the tracks I severely dislike (Mr. Xcitement and Wicked Little Critta, to name a few) are absent from the European tracklist, which Will Toledo swears by, but in general something about this album seems off.

In my Long Tall Weekend writeup, I wrote a bit about how TMBG functionally completed the arc of a rock band with that album. I neglected to mention one thing; rock bands have to sell out. They have to get to a point where their success can be bought out, largely as a survival tactic to weather the oncoming storm. Many bands lose their entire base at this phase, reaching a point where their fans draw a line in the sand between their "good stuff" and the rest.

To many, this line is John Henry, an album that I think is phenomenal. To me, the line in the sand is Mink Car. Welcome to the second era of They Might Be Giants. I won't call it a sellout era, but it's either that or a pastiche of one. The difference, to me, is that TMBG bounces back, and we'll get to that later.

Tracks on Mink Car are generally one-note lyrically, and often tend to shunt the verboseness of They Might Be Giants prior in favor of simplistic, direct messaging a la Your Racist Friend. Bangs is a track about bangs. Mr. Xcitement is a track about... Mr. Xcitement, I guess. Another First Kiss is almost a parody of pop songs. I've Got A Fang... is about having a fang.

It is in this way that Mink Car is the dual of Flood. Flood is an album which almost begs you to interpret it, weaving incredibly clever lines and wordplay throughout its runtime. It, however, resists interpretation, with all the tracks being about nothing more than what they're about. Mink Car, on the other hand, does not invite interpretation; its tracks often are just about what they're about on the bare surface. When you attempt to interpret it, you gradually go insane.

I wish Cyclops Rock had "Nixon" instead of "Chucky" in its lyrics. Can I just say that? Flansburgh removed "Nixon" from the lyrics to avoid "making a political statement", which seems very strange given TMBG's origins and their incredibly hostile first album. Mink Car feels like what Factory Showroom said it was, with none of the tongue-in-cheekness of it. I do believe John this time. I'm sorry.

It's only when I got to Mink Car, the track, that I began to piece together some of the meaning of this album. You get hit by a mink car, and you become 24-karat dead; flooded in wealth, your soul removed from your body. It's in this way that you can begin to piece together the argument that Mink Car, the album, is almost bad on purpose; it's a pastiche of what could happen, should the aforementioned sellout era occur. Further bolstering the read is Working Undercover For The Man, in which there's an argument that the album itself is a midnight raid on unsuspecting fans.

I don't know, man. I thought Drink! was good, I thought Man, It's So Loud In Here was fun. Whether or not you want to read this as a metatextual subversion or as a bad album is up to you. Personally? I think it's fine for good bands to have bad albums. Mink Car is impossible; it doesn't sound like anything before it, and nothing will ever sound like it again. It is as it is. I'm definitely less harsh on it than I have been, but I'm still going to be harsh.