TMBG - Apollo 18 and John Henry

I was going to write about how TMBG's John Henry is a great album simply because it informs you that there is a famous Belgian painter named James Ensor. How cool is it that they can actually inspire you to pick up the googlemaphone and look up a turn of the century artist? Then i remembered we're having the idiotic statue fight again and that's from Apollo 18. "The statue got me high" is pretty apropos. Maybe i can squash both of them into some sort of box (or possibly bag) of beef.

Believe it or not, the ridiculous string of short musical ideas called "Fingertips" from Apollo 18 is probably the first ever attempt at misusing the "shuffle" function on a cd player. Even more hilarious, they play the whole thing for their Tiny Desk concert (they do, go find it, it's awesome). TMBG are one of those bands that everyone is allowed to like. They are silly, they are thought provoking, and they have no interest in messing with anybody.

Flood, Apollo 18, and John Henry are their 3rd, 4th, and 5th, albums respectively. The Apollo 18 mission was aborted, so TMBG wrote an album called that and became the official musical ambassadors of NASA. That's true. Even weirder, fans were actually pissed off that they hired real musicians to back them up on tour instead of just drum machines and tape recordings.

Not to waste that opportunity, they thought "that reminds me of a man vs. machine story" and made their first album with an actual band. Heads up kids, using a trademarked brand name in the name of your song is not, i repeat, not free speech. That'll cost you money. You can sing it, but you can't print it on the cover or copyright the title. As John and John learned, they have to sue you, they are required to sue you or the trademark defaults to public domain. Yes, even if they don't particularly care about your specific song. "Why must i be sad?" Is constructed from Alice Cooper song titles.

Why is 1994's John Henry so goddamned long? Because vinyl and cassette tapes are gone. CDs have always been able to hold more than an hour of audio data and any space you don't actually use is waste. Part of the reason i like vinyl and cassette is that those media match my ability to sit in a chair. I'm a get up and move around/need an intermission kind of guy.   1995 is my preferred cut off, but the major labels knew the technology cliff was rapidly approaching, and they didn't want to buy flux capacitors to save the train (Back to the Future 3 reference, i'm scraping the bottom of the barrel today).

My point is yeah tear those statues down, and pay a modern day sculptor to replace them with something more relevant. Oh, proper sculpture isn't a relevant art form in the Age of Goriranda? Whose fault is that, Jeff Koonz and your stupid balloon dogs and suspended train installations?

Yeah, that's enough to chew on, please enjoy some erudite sillyness on our country's own national holiday.

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