S. Alexander Reed > Quotes

“Linnell: 'Some records that come out today only have ten songs, or less.'

Flansburgh: 'This makes us angry.'

Linnell: 'But instead of cursing the darkness, John and I have decided to do something about it. We've put out a record with nineteen songs on it.'

Flansburgh: 'And that's why our record is better.'

Behind this jokes lurks a telling possibility. If nonsense, variability, and excess are the hallmarks of 'cornucopia,' then the songwriting practices of clarity, focus, and restraint are the stuff of famine - certainly boring, and quite possibly stupid.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Flood

“Müller’s poem concerns an old street musician who, as a wraith of the beleaguered narrator’s bleak future, forever plays the same tune alone at the edge of a village, undying in an unchanging winter. In the context of Müller and Schubert’s full cycle, “Der Leiermann” occupies the crushing moment at which death itself is revealed to be an insufficient escape from the narrator’s terrible disillusionment, and where he instead resigns to fade into a numb, undreaming circularity. Both Schubert’s and Covenant’s settings of the poem are appropriately spare in their melody, but the harmony, rhythm, and timbral palette in Covenant’s recording mismatches the stagnation in the text awkwardly.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music

“Traditional rock music favors a working-class body with callused hands and a whisky-rough voice, and by denying this particular brand of physicality the body of electronic music was easily heard as lazy, weak, undisciplined, and effete. The criticism in the 1980s and 1990s that electronic musicians were fake or talentless, then, is a response to a perceived threat against a specific bodily identity as encoded in sound—an identity within a narrow range of class, gender, sexual orientation, and race. As”
― S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music

“A big part of what separates childhood from adulthood is discernment - the apprehension of the world's dizziness, the channeling of its everythingness into sensible categories. This goes for intake and output alike, with a large part of growing up being an education in behavioral propriety and conversational relevance. The sort of transmodality by which a person becomes a bag of groceries (as in "Dead") makes much less sense to a well-adjusted, reasoning adult than to a child, who has encountered few models that explain either where people ultimately go or where grocery bags really come from.

This plays into why the band's music always strikes adult reviewers as quirky, but can seem unremarkably factual to young kids...

...They Might Be Giants provide a particularly safe sort of rebelliousness - one that is more invested in negating boundaries than breaking through them. It allows for individuality without getting dangerous. And, if we're being honest, this is part of what makes it ideal music for the middle school 'gifted' set, a group of variously outcast kids who, nevertheless, don't actually want to piss off their parents.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Flood

“The reason for this extended look at Covenant’s song is that it typifies a postmillennial approach to the sublime in industrial music. The sublime exposes the limits of one’s perception by markedly exceeding them. Classically, the human response to the sublime is a blend of awe and terror. The discussion here isn’t whether listening to this music actually produces sublime experiences; such encounters likely depend more on the listener than on the music. Instead, the point here is that the sublime as a topic is an important one to industrial music; as an act of revealing heretofore unknown limits by exceeding them, we might understand it as dérive, or even as shock, and certainly as part of the industrial legacy.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music