Kid's got good taste.
(My guess would have been "cantaloupe," which, had it been right, would also have indicated good taste.)
are you sure it wasn't a hint that you should get some new kitchen-ware?
I am proud that my two-year-old daughter knows that Istanbul was Constantinople but now is Istanbul.
She's also learning the states and their capitals, courtesy Animaniacs.
Nice job, you've made your kids lame. I was in favor of assassinating these guys as early as 1989.
Sounds like someone could use a little birdhouse in their soul, Ripper.
4: You'll regret that the moment they actually become giants.
Huh. It was Constantinople until 1930? I thought the change was earlier than that.
That's nobody's business but the Turks. And many Greek territorial revisionists.
Q: Constantinople is a very easy word, but can you spell it?
A: I.T.
(That's probably for the 4 year old.)
They're one of my wife's very favorite bands. (They're one of the only ones we'll make a weekend out of driving to see.)
Now she has to keep an eye out for Ripper's purge...
I agree with Ripper completely about TMBG, but they're 100 times better than Shrek The Musical.
The name was changed (for international postal purposes, Turks had always called it Istanbul) following pogroms, massacres, revolution, invasion, and the forced ethnic cleansing of over a million people. But that's not the important thing. The important thing is that Ogged's kids will grow up to listen to NPR and think that it's music recommendations are "pretty good."
"Railroad crossing, look out for the cars. Can you spell that without any r-s?"
I've said before that "The Chipmunks Sing Katy Perry" was where I drew the line for my own kid. But I much prefer non-Chipmunk Katy Perry to TMBG. "Coming atcha like a Dark Horse."
A million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking real massacres.
The kids like the bra cones that shoot whipped cream.
18: Paleo kids know that whipped cream is poison.
19: They may need some instruction on what's poison.
"A New Paleo Cookbook for Kids Is on Hold After Officials Warn Its Recipes Could Kill Babies"
TMBG is fine for a song or two, but any longer than that and I start to feel like I'm eating an entire meal of Tic Tacs.
I like "Dark Horse" okay, but it's also kind of unsettling: the catchiest part is what seems to be the pre-chorus ("Are you ready for, ready for"), so when the tension of that part releases into something less catchy, I always feel a bit let down.
I just read Wikipedia on the etymology of Istanbul. I thought it was a compacted-over-time version of Constantinople, like how Eboracum became York, maybe with an Arabic article accounting for the initial vowel (as-Stamboul?) but the page says that's an outdated concept and what they have is that it's from Greek εις την Πόλιν, "to the city". I'm really not satisfied with that explanation; it's at best a strange coincidence that it shares so many phonemes with the original name. But it is true that the standard Arabic name is completely different.
The only one of the kids' songs we enjoy is Seven Days of the Week, which tellingly is not a TMBG original. I'm so glad I don't really have to have an opinion of them anymore, now that 1989 is ancient history.
Ogged, how do you feel about your kids becoming the people you wanted to punch when you were younger?
Is 25 "On Mondays, I never go to work"? I truly love that song.
I like TMBG because I am the only one here who is not a psychopath.
Labs, like most things having to do with parenting, it sucks.
I think we managed to get through the girls' preadolescence without any TMBG. I suppose they could still be exposed, but they've moved on to pop radio, at least when I'm not around to stop them.
I came around on their kids' albums because I like the science and math indoctrination. But mostly I'm tepid on the whole topic.
"A New Paleo Cookbook for Kids Is on Hold After Officials Warn Its Recipes Could Kill Babies"
Well of course, you don't eat them live.
I have no strong feelings about TMBG.
So this awesome rendering of TMBG's "Istanbul" which I posted here before is actually on topic.
28, 29, 32,1, 20: Turns out Walt isn't that special except for not being a psychopath.
You people are defective. You probably hate ice cream, too, or Shakespeare. You all be dead soon, as the bile that oozes out of your shrivelled souls consumes your organs from the inside. Except for Cryptic Ned, TJ, and MAE. They will live forever.
Don't be silly, Walt. The bile that oozes out of our souls is made of soul-stuff and can't possibly consumer our organs.
The kid had a relatively brief thing for TMBG but luckily not long enough for it to become annoying.
His current most (mildly, in the scheme of things) annoying musical fad is to blast a cd of Verdi overtures when he is doing the dinner dishes. Of course the one doing the washing up naturally has pick of the music, and rousingness is definitely a feature for the job, but oh my god the relentlessness of it at cd length and in the evening! Possibly preferable to the better half's inexplicable fondness for Oregon's witless noodling in the same circumstances. Or just perhaps people with chronic acute nerve pain are kind of touchy in the evenings!
The kid has recently discovered his first rock and roll enthusiasm in Rachid Taha, as I found out the other morning when I got in the car at 545 to go to the gym. It was a little loud.
I think the time is right for you kid to get into KING CRIMSON. Allow me to recommend the 1973–74 lineup in particular.
I liked the image of the ooze as a discerning consumer of organs - starting with the delicate thymus, moving on to nice mousse of liver, ending with a robust kidney fry up!
Except for Cryptic Ned, TJ, and MAE. They will live forever.
Shit, I'm not contributing anywhere near enough to my 401k.
Thanks! Brief explore via soundcloud sounds promising!
But speaking of living forever, how can anybody who comments here not like The Mesopotamians?
I think the time is right for you kid to get into KING CRIMSON.
What, is Fripp changing the lineup again?
I have nothing against TMBG's edutainment, but it does always make me think of "Professor Faggot Q. Boredom's Lame-U-Cational Cocksuckery" from that piece in The Onion.
I don't think you can make that joke today.
You can repeat it, apparently.
49: No, the joke wouldn't work today, thanks to this blog's heroic efforts to salvage cocksuckery from its former status as a term of derision.
I like TMBG fine, and Your Racist Friend is a very useful song, but real music lovers listen to the Four Lads version of Istanbul (Not Constantinople).
Richard Thompson's "Alexander Graham Bell" is arguably TMBG-like, and I enjoy it a great deal. Better bass solo than you'd get with TMBG courtesy of bass whiz Danny Thompson.
47: He did just tour with a new lineup (with three drummers, including former Mr. Mister drummer Pat Mastelotto and former Revolting Cocks, Pigface, Ministry, KMFDM, etc. drummer Bill Rieflin), but I didn't see it and I don't know what's in store for them.
Come on, dq, the only right way to listen to Rachid Taha is loud. Great driving music! (Right now I'm mostly torturing the kids with The Incredible String Band rather than letting them choose music. Selah is obsessed with Cousin Caterpillar and just wants to listen to it on repeat all the time.)
I enjoy being a parent and a respectable attorney, but I think my real calling was to be the drunk stoner uncle who introduces Ogged's kids to the first four Sabbath albums and helps them forget this lameness.
About a year ago, my kid, pantless, sat down at the keyboard banging out some tune, then did a death metal growl and maniacal laugh. I have no idea where he picked that up, but I said, ok, if that's how you like it--so now when his mom's not around, we put on death metal, which he calls "monster music."
My younger daughter will occasionally ask me to put on some Black Tusk so we can slam around the living room. It's totes adorns.
I agree! It was just a bit of a shock. I've been under the yoke of a couple of filing deadlines plus office moving so not around the house much and missed his falling for distorted guitar riffs. But excellent to see adolescence proceeding so well!
57: Ogged is succumbing to Halfordismo more quickly than most.
XelA likes jazz. Or seems to. Count Basie, Davis, etc if it has a strong beat. He got up and started spontaneously jumping to the drum intro to Gone.
He likes funk, too. Although, to be fair, a lot of the time he just says 'Nooo!' to everything I want to listen to.
Although, to be fair, a lot of the time he just says 'Nooo!' to everything I want to listen to.
Everyone's a critic these days.
TMBG was my favorite band as an adolescent, and we parted ways in my adulthood. I'm looking forward to enjoying them with Φ.
The 33 1/3 book about Flood has a really good point about the difference between contemporary nerd culture (a somewhat stable, if far-reaching, set of signifiers, e.g. ComicCon) and the nerd culture that TMBG sprang from and which existed around them (an excess of signification). Positions them as a transitional element, since they became one of the signifiers.
"Flood encapsulates in 43 minutes and 14 seconds a moment when geekdom demanded recognition not as a set of interests, but as a way of thinking."
Did no one link this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFWRXMr5fKU
What I usually think of instead of the TMBG song.
66 gets it right. This animosity toward TMBG is shocking to me. I doubt 5% of it would exist had they not transformed into kids' musicians.
69: No, plenty of people hated TMBG before they did kid's music. There's definitely something brazenly dorky about them that trips people's should-wires.
I'm one of those, obviously. But it's not the dorkiness. Rock and roll, or even pop, or disco, or dance, or punk, or hardcore, or metal, or jazz, or classical, or whatever, pick your poison, should be about inclusive catharsis. There's plenty of room for dorkiness in that -- rock and roll teen culture has always been about dorks rocking out, which is great, and there's plenty of room for that in non-rock music genres too. But the TMBG thing was about playing it safe and lame and twee, IMO, if there's dork catharsis in there it's because it's music that makes it OK to be safe and lame, not because it's a cathartic escape. Which is ... lame. That's my theory for today anyway. Mostly I just find their music annoying, I mean they're OK as a 1 song joke band but Jesus Fuck why are people taking this group seriously.
Next up, T"R"O explains why you shouldn't like The Magnetic Fields.
Growling costumed over-compensating men make serious music.
I liked TMBG before I had a kid. Being a parent changes everything! Those who have never had children could not possibly understand the pain of listening of "Here Come the ABC's" in a car, 100 times over.
Growling OR screeching are both OK, JPS.
Wait I forgot, it's their fans who are overcompensating.
TMBG is one of many things that I feel a strong antipathy toward in part, I think, because I encountered overwhelmingly intense fans of it long before I encountered the thing itself. See also The Princess Bride.
Although I kind of feel the same way about The Lord of the Rings even though I read it before I encountered any such fans.
I believe all three of my kids still like TMBG to some degree and one is going to go see them on tour next month. But I raised them very poorly.
Because of this thread now I'm listening to "Birdhouse In Your Soul". I feel safe in saying that if you don't like this song you're dead inside.
I can assure you all that no song is bearable on a loop for five hours. Especially Gangnam Style. How am I even still alive?
But Shrek the Musical is the worst.
I am sweetness
I am bratty
I'm a princess
I'm a fatty
I'm a mess of contradictions in a dress
I am sassy
I am sappy
When I'm with you, I am happy
It's going to be so great when the cleansing rain of fire destroys everything I aesthetically dislike.
Wow, Shrek the Musical sounds unbearable. I just did my part for Halfordismo by taking the girls to a friend's taxidermy art opening. There was a sort of Uncanny Valley-adjacent thing where Selah loved the animals doing animal things but was "scared" of the goat sitting in a chair reading a book and told the artist the goat (or making the goat?) was "not nice!"
Kids should be listening to Bo Diddley and covers of Bo Diddley songs. Speaking of which. I can see why a parent might not be excited about more pussy than Frank Sinatra but what kid isn't going to get off on The Hawk's screaming?
I wish my kid listened to TMBG instead of Chu Chu TV.
The best TMBG song is "Women and Men". Because I'm a feminist. And because colonialism.
81: I am now listening to same out of solidarity; I love that song. I love most of all that the associated video was their attempt at a general release video to the mass audience.
Now I'm thinking seriously about being one of their weird eyeball-picture signboard-wearing mob for halloween.
OT: You leave a place, come back twice in 25 years, and all of a sudden everybody is different. I can't tell if they are different people or just the same people but older.
Couldn't you, like, talk to them or something?
I can't tell if they are different people or just the same people but older.
Every so often a mouseover just floats along, on the breeze. (Good luck, Mobes. Talk about sports, is my advice.)
Moby talks to people in bars and stuff, though, so he's clearly not like me in this respect.
I'm afraid of talking to somebody who I know without knowing I know them.
Also, Budweiser is making me really burpy.
I liked it better when it was all about the people who would be considered terrorists if they weren't white and the British weren't such assholes.
TMBG was my favorite band as an adolescent, and we parted ways in my adulthood
Likewise, although "early adolescence" and "middle adolescence" might be more accurate. Their Boston show on the Flood tour was the first rock concert I ever went to. Because it was Boston and 1990 there was a mosh pit, and people tried to crowd surf. "Hey, don't do the pass-the-dude stuff," they protested mildly and, lo, people stopped.
I'm the only person wearing khakis for miles.
91 could be the start of a new Ishiguro novel, maybe, if it were written in somewhat statelier prose.
The Anglos, Saxons, and Jutes sucked at phone design, possibly because the Norman Conquest impeded their research.
The early smartphone industry was therefore dominated by Hispanics, which is why it's primarily based in California to this day.
You haters. One of the best sitcoms ever used a TMBG song for its opening credits, and since that sitcom had the good sense to give Bryan Cranston a leading role, that's good enough for me.
And to those of you who seem to think listening to TMBG should be reckoned an act of parental martyrdom (o yes, you wear a crown of thorns), I invite you to suffer through a Raffi album.
104: No, that's exactly Ishiguro-level prose! There is no way there's another genuinely gifted writer with a clunkier prose style. Is there? Isolated sentences may be statelier than Moby's.
Ripper, I have always quietly been grateful to you for taking this staunch anti-TMBG line in public. It may not rise to the level of punk rock, but it is cathartic, and I could never openly put myself right in the "I'll aesthetically take the side of my sociopathic ex and not all my nice, decent friends" camp. (Thank god that, as usual, lourdes k. also broke with the stereotype and wasn't into them.)
104, 111.1: I don't know who that is, but whatever. I found people I know.
If you are not willing to be the parents who take the necessary measures to forestall Raffi et al, and therefore suffer the lumps of everyone thinking you are controlling monsters, at some point my sympathies will be ... tempered.
Also, teach your kids some damn table manners! And French!
Ripper...grateful to you for taking this staunch anti-TMBG line in public
Ok, this has gone too far. This blog has a history; we call it The Fucking Archives; let us respect it.
You leave for a few years, you forfeit your status as premiere holder-of-whatever-position on the blog. Sorry, but them's the rules.
That's not cathartic, ogged. That's a mere belch.
If you are not willing to be the parents who take the necessary measures to forestall Raffi et al,
Raffi is insufferable, sure.
But as a parent, I guess I am just too damn lazy to take the necessary measures to forestall anything that is not: 1). illegal under federal or state law; 2). banned, or subject to a recommended ban, by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Canadian Paediatric Society, or other similar, and reputable, pediatric societies; 3). racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, or just plain mean-minded; or 4). heartily endorsed by the Southern Baptist Convention.
Because, I'm sorry, but there are only so many hours in a day. And there really is a whole of highly objectionable stuff out there that parents need to guard against. And that sort of vigilance takes energy, and it takes time. And then there's the time and energy spent fretting over that very vigilance (am I overreacting? helicopter-parenting? creating the conditions for a Michael J. Fox [liberal parents raise backlash Reaganite son] situation?)
Raffi, while insufferable, does not meet any of my four criteria, and is just not worrisome enough to warrant an expenditure of my parental time and energy.
Re: 72
I, for one, hate* the Magnetic Fields.
* hyperbole, but I really dislike everything I've heard.
I don't think I'd ever heard TMBG until this post. The linked song is delightful, but the idea of a whole career's worth of songs just like it makes me shudder.
Thing is, you go into Raffi knowing that its going to be bad, so if you buy a Raffi album for your kids, you get what you signed up for. With TMBG, if you've heard Birdhouse in Your Soul and Istanbul and Constantinople, and there is this ray of hope that maybe there is childrens music that doesn't suck. But lo, it does suck. They have this horrible song called Fake-Believe and another awful one called I Forgot What D is For and they are both just as stupid as one might imagine.
My brother-in-law was pretty strict in limiting his kids availability of music to Motown, and I think he was on to something.
"Baby Beluga" is pretty much responsible for all the world's whaling, because revenge. On the other hand, my kids missed the TMBG thing, and so my few encounters with their music were the non-kids-music stuff.
111.1: My "stately" might be the polite version of your "clunky". Something like "slow to get to the point, and not at all conversational--kind of stiff, in fact". I was going directly from reading the first chapter of his new book to looking at Moby's comment and the prose is pretty different.
This seems like the right thread to note that Helpy-Chalk sent us a CD when Hawaii was born, and nearly six years later we still use it each night to signal "get into bed now and stop talking."
118 absolutely resonates with me. At most I was occasionally up to passively seeding material I hoped they might like because I liked it.
Speaking of kids and music, my nephew (2.5yo) somewhere picked up the chorus to Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It". He'll be playing blocks and just start singing, "Puh-puh-puh push it. Push it real good." It's fucking hilarious, but we're all under strict orders (from my mom) not to laugh. "Because we can't send him off to preschool talking about pushing it."
Here's where he learned it. That commercial cracks me up. I think it's weird that I had to watch a commercial in order to be able to watch a commercial.
You don't have to forestall Raffi, surely - you would have to actively introduce Raffi? If the child is old enough to find Raffi (or anything else I don't want to hear) by themselves, it is old enough to do it in a different room or put headphones on.
People let children dictate things too much. Whoever's driving gets to choose what's on. Hence, what is on in our car is/was highly fucking unlikely to be stupid kid 'music'.
I can't tolerate noise though. My kids aren't allowed any noise coming out of DSs/ipods/tablets/etc. I think this is good - they would never play a fucking game on their phone with audible beeps ON THE BUS like some arsehole was the other day.
Rant over.
My kids listen to wildly inappropriate music. But mostly because they ride in a car with me. Whatcha gonna do? [shrug]