Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

Really tough competition this year but for the 27th year in a row, it's this song:

And Flying Up The Modern Rock Charts On Its Way To Peaking at No.11… it's They Might Be Giants and their almost immortal “Ana Ng”, which means it’s welcome to an episode of The DJ Professor Dan Takes Points Off For Utterly Unreasonable Reasons Show!

In 2002, They Might Be Giants released a Greatest Hits package, titled “Dial-A-Song.” You know why it was titled “Dial-A-Song” right? Because they offered a “Dial-A-Song” phone service, and every day between 1983 and 2006 they would write a new song and record it on their answering machine. A lot of people are obsessed with They Might Be Giants, and with publicity stunts/conceptual art projects like that, you can very much understand why.

Anyway, the compilation contained liner notes. Or more accurately an essay. Or even more accurately, a book. Written by – ironically given the name of today’s song - Sarah Vowell, who claimed – and I am paraphrasing here from memory because I can't find my copy, I probably sold it – that They Might Be Giants were a new kind of band. A band that you might actually want to be friends with. A band that, and I’m pretty sure I’m quoting this correctly, “knows stuff.”

Now, “Ana Ng” was apparently written because John (not to be mistaken for John… they are both called John) was looking for song ideas in the New York Telephone directory - as you do - and found entire pages filled with the name Ng. He needed to know how to pronounce it, so he called one of them up, a Doctor, Doctor Ng whose answering machine said:

“They call me Dr Ng. Good morning. How are you? I’m Doctor Ng. I’m interested in things. I’m not a real doctor, but I am a real Ng, I am an actual Ng, oh sorry that’s a different song.”

Now Ng is a Vietnamese name, and here’s where I have a problem.

“My apartment looks upside down from there, water spirals the wrong way out the sink”

Can you see the problem? John is clearly under the impression that Vietnam is in the Southern Hemisphere!!

Now usually I’d let this slide, but They Might Be Giants are, to probably incorrectly quote Sarah Vowell once again, a band who “knows stuff.” That’s their thing! They know for example that:

“The sun is mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.”

Although that song was a cover.

They also know that:

“Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople, been a long time gone, Constantinople, now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night”

Although come to think of it, that was a cover as well.

The point is that They Might Be Giants, the band that knows stuff, don’t know everything, and for that I’m docking a point.

“Ana Ng” is a 9

wait a second, I thought this was cancelled. I specifically asked for this to be cancelled!!!

I was doomed before birth to be a music guy. My dad, a Bruce Springsteen worshipper, and my mom, who treats the discography of Joni Mitchell as gospel, had their first date at a 10,000 Maniacs club show (before they got big!), and when they got married a little under a year after "Orange Crush" had its run on top of the Alternative Charts, the only music they allowed to be played at the cocktail hour was R.E.M.

As a result of all this, R.E.M. is one of those bands, like Nirvana, where to me they don't even feel like a group of people making music but instead a fact of life, a force of nature. I probably heard "It's the End of The World (And I Feel Fine)" and "Losing My Religion" a thousand times each before I turned 12 years old, and at no point did I even consider disliking either song. As I got older and more into music, I went back into the band's discography and was delighted to find that it still held up; "Radio Free Europe" remains one of my favorite R.E.M. songs to this day. (I could continue just listing out R.E.M. songs that I like but we'd be here all day).

I wonder if hearing a lot of "Orange Crush" on the radio is what my parents into such fans? I'll have to ask them. The song never got as much radio play when I was growing up as many of the other songs from the band, but I always thought fondly of it. I think now listening to it that the production is a bit thin, but basically everything else about it works incredibly well. I'm with Tom, this isn't a top tier R.E.M. song, but if it came on at the cocktail hour of a wedding for some very cool friends of mine, I would be absolutely delighted. 8

Just one week after Tom Talks U2 2 Us, Tom is Talkin' R.E.M. Re: Us!

R.E.M. is a band I like, but that I know I'd love if I finally did that deep dive into their earlier stuff (which I'll probably do at work today). I was 1 when Losing My Religion came out, so that's the band I knew R.E.M. as. They were already elder statesmen as I became a music fan. Anytime Scott and Scott played clips of their older songs on the podcast I loved how it sounded, that jangly guitar shaped the style of so many bands I love. Beyond that, I know the singles.

And to be clear, those singles still paint the picture of a legendary band. Losing My Religion is still great, Nightswimming is one of my favorite songs ever. And listening to Orange Crush, even if people don't consider it a top tier R.E.M. song it's still really good. It's brimming with a nervous energy that hits hard, it's filled with hooks, and Michael Stipe has always been a great frontman in the way he delivers a performance. You can see how they were about to become massive stars. 8/10.

Finally, ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’ has some competition for Tom’s least favourite #1.

(Spoiler for four years from now) It's a 1.

Chat Pile are a BAND

Someone who creates a public image of relentless positivity is shitty to their employees in private?

While this allegation carries a lot of weight, that is in no way suggesting that it is in any way unhealthy or unattractive.

This is as good a description of the birth and early growth of R.E.M. as I have read, and I should know because I was a student at UGA at the time.  Not only that, but my older brother was a booking agent at the Paragon Agency in Macon, a co-worker of Ian Copeland.  My brother remembers two high school kids being around and playing in a band with Copeland.

There were soooooo many great bands playing in Athens in those days, and lots of great acts also came through town.I did a lot of pogoing back then (the only dance I was ever coordinated enough to manage).

I first saw R.E.M. at the Memorial Hall show where they opened for The Brains.  It was probably their 3rd public gig.  The Brains were a big deal because Rolling Stone magazine had just named their song "Money Changes Everything" as one of the best songs of the year.  I remember The Brains as being very new wave, and probably more along the lines of The Cars than The Ramones.  Anyway, they seemed very keyboard based and were detached and ironic.  Some unknown local band opened for them and those guys were NOT detached and ironic--they rocked the old building to its foundations.  They were an absolute blast and blew The Brains off the stage (sorry for the imagery of that phrase).

Mr. B is right.  R.E.M. played endless gigs in front of anyone (or no one) who would listen and really did pioneer a club circuit which many other bands would make use of.  They worked their asses off and became better and better, which did put them a bit at odds with the more laid-back vibe of the arty Athens scene.  (I think of this as their Beatles in Hamburg phase.)  I cannot count the number of times I saw them in those days, often at Tyrone's, the 40 Watt, and at 688, but also at a few of those out-of-town clubs they played.

I actually spoke to them right after the Memorial Hall show and told them they were great.  Their response:  we're drunk!  I called my booking-agent brother the next day to tell him I had seen the future of rock-n-roll and he better get to Athens to sign this band.  Over the next couple of months, he acquired a couple of cassette tapes of them (probably from Ian Copeland), and when we figured out that I was talking about that band he said, meh, they need more guitars.  (He was booking southern rock acts for Paragon, so I guess that's understandable.)  I got him to give me those early demo cassettes, which became my most prized possessions.  It's been too long, so I don't remember which early tunes were on those tapes, but I'm fairly certain some of Chronic Town and maybe a bit of Murmur were included.  The two songs I do remember were only released much later as oddities:  "Permanent Vacation" and "Narrator (Jacques Cousteau Show)".  Sadly, those tapes were stolen from me when I was living in London in 1984.

As for "Orange Crush," it's far from my favorite R.E.M. song, and I'd probably list it as a middle-tier tune.  That said, it's still R.E.M., which pretty much means it's great.