reads like a response to the prompt "tell me you got a 34 on the ACT and still think about it 20 years later without telling me you got a 34 on the ACT and still think about it 20 years later" ( )

I've been curious about Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series, a group of short monographs each about a single album, so I looked through the catalog to find one based on an album I'd actually heard. The only one was Flood by They Might Be Giants (I don't listen to a lot of music), so I pretty much had to read it, though as a nice bonus, it's cowritten by Phil Sandifer, whose work I'm familiar with from the infamous Doctor Who blog TARDIS Eruditorum.

It's decent. It's ostensibly about Flood, but the writers take the long way around, and it covers a lot of TMBG's pre-Flood biography, and a little bit of what came afterwards too, in addition to promulgating a general aesthetic theory for TMBG: that of "flooding," of finding joy in creative excess. Reed and Sandifer set up the book with a central question of, "Why do so many geeks love They Might Be Giants when it doesn't involve stereotypical geek signifiers, i.e, there aren't any songs about Star Wars?" and they pose "flooding" as the answer. But although it's a good question (I am a geek who really likes TMBG, even though I only got into them in 2009 with their children's album Here Comes Science) and a good answer, I'm not sure they convincingly link the two: I agree that they "flood," but why is that innately geeky, and why is it uniquely TMBG?

I learned a lot, though; there are bunches of cool tidbits, and Sandifer and Reed even interviewed TMBG (a.k.a. "the Johns") over dinner, though there are fewer insights from that than you might expect. I suspect I would get even more out of it once I've heard more of their work, especially their early stuff (right now my collection of their albums consists of Flood [1990], Here Comes Science [2009], Nanobots [2013], and the 52+ tracks they've released through Dial-A-Song [2015]). Between the biographical material and the (dull, alas) digressions about King's Quest, there's not quite as much about the actual music as you'd expect, but when it's there, it's good, insightful criticism; I like the way they trace the idea of flooding through lyrics, composition, arrangements, and topics. Sandifer is more restrained here than he often is on his blog; I don't know if it's because of having a co-author, an editor who's not himself, or a word limit, but it works to his advantage to be forced to pare down to what really matters.

33⅓ itself is a neat concept; I hope that, someday, another one is released about an album I actually know something about. (The list on Wikipedia indicates I'm not getting my wish this year or next, though.)

Part of the Bloomsbury Academics 33 1/3 series of books about famous musical recordings, this book analyses my 6th favorite album of all time, They Might Be Giants' Flood. Pop scholarship at it's best, the book explores the 20-song album and the themes that carry through them such as childhood, technology, and geek culture. The latter is interesting in that John Flansbergh and John Linnell themselves do not identify as geeks, as a short biographical interlude makes clear, yet their paths lead them to the perfect point in 1990 when their creative output would resonate with geek culture (and with wider audiences as well). The authors also develop a theory of "flooding" as a form of "creative excess" manifest in TMBG's work. It's a remarkable little book and makes my want to look into more works in the 33 1/3 series.
Favorite Passages:

"What's going on here is playfulness. Flood embodies the idea that creativity is an open-ended result of asking "what if," and not the single-minded pursuit of a pre-imagined ideal. The band's music rejoices in a continual sense of play, altering and subverting the expected order of things, .... Because They Might Be Giants' music is (almost) never in service of a joke, the silliness of song like "Particle Man" is exploratory, not goal-driven. Musical, lyrical, and visual ideas then exist for their own sake." - p. xiii

"Central to understanding the appeal of the album is the aesthetic of flooding. We're coining this term to mean, on its most reductive level, an aesthetic of creative excess. Flooding isn't merely a case of a lot, but of too much. It hyperstimulation is exuberant, but in a way that goes both beyond delight and overripeness." - p. 40 ( )