They Might Be Giants have resurrected their ingenious Dial-A-Song concept by streaming a new song each week of 2015 at www.dialasong.com. MAGNET’s Matthew Fritch reviews them all.
I don’t usually watch the videos that accompany the songs posted on dialasong.com, but for whatever reason my eyes stayed glued to the animation accompanying “Music Jail, Pt. 1 & 2.” The loopy, old-timey/surrealist cartoon (I am sure there are stylistic reference points for it, but I am not familiar with them because I am an adult) fits nicely with the song’s Middle Eastern woodwind-y first half of the song, which plays out like a chase scene. The second half of the song switches into another gear that I won’t describe because it would sound terrible, and it isn’t. I might’ve used the word “ska” in that description.
Maybe this song’s theme has been explored by TMBG elsewhere, perhaps in 2002 documentary Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)–which I haven’t seen–but I think it’s about how being in a band is like being in jail with your bandmate(s). The Johns are now going on 33 years of being cellmates. Sure, each one could go solo (likely with less commercial success), but even then, that’s like transferring to another jail. I remember reading an article on Mudhoney a while ago (possibly in MAGNET), in which one of the bandmembers (possibly Mark Arm) lamented the nature of a career in music, and specifically what happens when it comes to an end: What do you put on a resumé when you’ve spent the last 20 years playing in a rock band?
The music industry is used to that kind of scrutiny. But it’s just as true that most of us are in some type of work jail (the documentary about this is called The Office) and to continue down this road of thought any further will make me George Carlin. I am not George Carlin.
File-A-Song: 8/10
