UNSUPERVISED

Mono Puff is John Flansburgh's side project, consisting of John Flansburgh, Hal Cragin, and Steve Calhoon. They were active from 1995 to 1998, though they have technically never disbanded. Their music features a strong focus on varied musical styles, experimentation, and collaboration. Their first release was John Flansburgh's Mono Puff, released in March of 1995 through the Hello Recording Club (also called the Hello CD of the Month Club), a subscription based record company that produced about ten exclusive CDs per year. The name "Mono Puff" comes from an experience John Flansburgh had at the John Coltrane Church in San Francisco, California, in which there was a girl with a puff of hair in a perfect circle on her head and so he thought it should be called Mono Puff and so their first full-length record Unsupervised released in June 1996 on Rykodisc which was affiliated with Restless Records which released Mink Car and shuttered basically immediately after 9/11 and upon that record there was a song that was technically a lyrical cover of another song that was never released so it is not technically a cover in any meaningful sense and then he went onto NPR's All Things Considered with the other guys who were also there in the band Mono Puff that John Flansburgh was in which he said he made not because he was unsatisfied with his current thing but he wanted to do another thing which was Mono P

Unsupervised broke us. It broke us hard enough that we had to take an entire break, because we fully did not know how to write this. In order to explain why, I am going to have to explicitly detail the critical analysis framework by which we talk about these albums, all the way back from the beginning.

I'd like to say that our Pink Album writeup was unplanned, really, a brief piece of impromptu work. In order to construct this writeup, we created a Markdown file titled pinkalbum.md and then created second-level headers for each track in the album. We then opened the TMBW page for each track while listening to the track, and took notes on the track — whatever stood out, any lyrical interpretations, whatever. It was always this: interpret as we go, writeup, send it, no time to edit. We have written probably over 25,000 words, maybe over 30,000 words for this project thus far, without severely breaking this constraint.

Later into the project, first starting with Cast Your Pod To The Wind, we began writing before we finished the album, even during it. This is how some of the shorter writeups were made, as well as the live album and some miscalleneous writeups. (McSweeney's was written this way). We didn't take notes, we wrote the actual prose in real time as we listened to the album. We stopped doing this for John Linnell's solo work (and The Mundanes).

We attempted to do this for Unsupervised, and we found ourselves simply unable to. We got to Dr. Klidare, halfway down the tracklist, and we were simply unable to write any notes aside from things like "oh this album is insanely varied", "yeah, it's summer.", and "ska????" — things that do not coalesce into a writeup. We were unable to do things with "themes", with "interpretation", with "dense wordplay".

Unsupervised does not give a flying fuck about the mortal pretense of "themes", it has active disdain for this thing we mere humans call "interpretation", and its "dense wordplay" is largely nowhere to be found. The point of Unsupervised is not to create these things, not to create something to be deconstructed, analyzed, written about. The point of Unsupervised is to be Unsupervised — it's only as I write this that this is a form of wordplay, though I do not believe that it works as well as I think it does. The point of Unsupervised is to be totally rockin'.

During our work day today, we listened to Unsupervised 4 times back to back to back to back. During one of those times, we got up out of our work chair in our vaguely dank basement, and started skanking. You can skank to this album. We didn't know how to skank, we don't know how to skank, but you can skank to this album. It is imminently possible to do so.

What can I even say about this? Where are we. I feel like I Hit My Head. Our analysis framework does not work on this album — it breaks everything we know about They Might Be Giants. Unsupervised makes me feel like it was all for naught. It is an excellent record.