As this suggests, our book for the 33 1/3 series on They Might Be Giants' 1990 landmark Flood is now available for purchase. The Kindle edition looks to be, for some reason, held back until November 28th. Nobody tells me anything about these things or why. Further frustrating is that in the UK, print isn't available until January, although, oddly, you seem to be getting the Kindle edition in two weeks. There are no doubt sound reasons for this as well.
But enough about the details. Let's talk about this book. And then after I talk about it, I'll give two copies away.
Flood is, without being particularly autobiographical at all and with half of it written by someone else, probably the most personal book I've ever written. They Might Be Giants formed an absolutely massive part of my childhood cultural landscape, effectively plugging the gap between my flaming out of interest in Doctor Who come 1996 and the early stages of adulthood represented by college. They were the soundtrack to my middle and high school years.
Much of this had to do with their peculiar status as the quasi-official band of a summer camp for "gifted and talented" students that I went to. The camp, called CTY, was a three-week session in which you took a condensed eight-hour-a-day course, punctuated by a smattering of mandatory fun including a trio of weekly dances. Within these dances there was a canon of songs that absolutely had to be played somewhere in the event, culminating in the final song for every dance, Don McLean's "American Pie," a fact about which there is a ten thousand word essay just begging to be written.
CTY is an impossibly large experience for me. It marked the first time in which I was in any sort of social setting in which I was normal. Frighteningly so, at times. This necessitated a rather massive paradigm shift. And my experience was hardly unusual - indeed, Alex attended a few years before I did. The camp was also deeply leftist in terms of the leanings of its student population - there was a widespread protest against an administrative decision to forbid cross-dressing in 1997 - and an aggressively horizon-expanding experience. It is a carnivalesque experience for anyone whose usual social interactions are defined by the ever-present threat of bullying. That the age range in which one attends - 12-16 - coincides with puberty and interest in sex further adds to the strange and heady mix.
Returning to the dances, then, it is notable that They Might Be Giants had two songs in the canon: "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)." No other band had two slots like that. No other band ever could. So let's freeze the image there. In a context in which hundreds of nerds encounter widespread social acceptance for the first time, overlapping with sexual awakening, come weekly dances - a particularly fast pace of them. They carry with them all the attendant social and romantic pressures of an ordinary high school dance, only at higher speed and intensity. And the album most directly associated with this intoxicating cultural cocktail of hormones and revised social order is They Might Be Giants' Flood.
Which brings us to the topic of the book: why?
The question, as asked, is not really one about me, simply because my experience is so utterly standard, nor even one about the limited world of CTY. There's a whole generation of geeks for whom Flood is, in effect, their version of The Queen is Dead. And this is true despite the fact that the album has no references to anything overtly a part of geek culture, the band largely dislikes the suggestion that they're icons of "nerd rock," and the band's background comes out of the postpunk New York "no wave" scene.
Our suggestion is that the album title is revealing here - that part of the band's appeal is their embrace of an aesthetic of flooding - of utter, unabashed excess. Those who recall the coverage of the 90s in TARDIS Eruditorum will note an entire section in the book about hedonism and paranoia that is familiar, right down to using The X-Files as a central text. But our suggestion is that by embracing the aesthetic of flooding at the precise moment that they did They Might Be Giants inadvertently aligned perfectly with a rising geek culture.
Which is to say that this is a book of interest to lots of you. It's a book about a particular 90s pop album, yes, but it's also a book about the rise of geek culture in the 90s and what that meant.
As befits its focus, the book's style is willfully discursive. It meanders through a massive number of topics, and Alex and I both took a perverse delight in squeezing in as many as possible. Hence the tone of our video promoting the book, which, in turn, brings us to our two book giveaway. First, the video, which I will note is very silly.
Second, a free piece of trivia, which is that in editing the video down we cut the following items: new wave, no wave, ocean waves, Super Mario Bros, Kings Quest V, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Now, then. To win a copy of the book from my nice little pile of complimentary copies, you simply have to do the following: pick one of the topics promised (including the six cut ones above) and guess in comments what it is we say about it in the context of Flood.
Two copies will be awarded. The first for the most impressively accurate guess. Impressiveness will in part be judged by being non-obvious. Guessing that we talk about fondue forks in the context of "Hot Cha" will earn you few points, while guessing that we talk about them as part of a larger argument about the influence of 70s Swiss erotica on the band... will still earn you few points because you'll be completely wrong, but is at least a noble effort.
Which brings us to the second copy, which will be given to the most entertainingly wrong guess. As befits discussion of They Might Be Giants, entertainment is not defined primarily by an attempt to be funny, but by an idiosyncratic seriousness. Which is to say, deliberately outlandish suggestions are not a ticket to success.
The contest remains open until Tuesday, and will be judged by my esteemed co-author, Mr. Alexander Reed.
Finally, a plea. If you like my work or are interested in this book, buy it and buy it early. These days books live and die by their initial sales. Beyond that, this is my first professionally published book, and sales on it will directly impact the ease with which I can sell future books to publishers.
Also, if you enjoy it, please, please, please review it on Amazon. The 33 1/3 series has a chronic problem where it gets bad reviews from people who expect books to be little more than extended Rolling Stone articles as opposed to the populist scholarship that they are. Please, help counterbalance that. (And if you liked A Golden Thread, that could really use some reviews too.)
Thanks, as always. I'll be launching yet another book in just a few more weeks - I'm typesetting it this week, and the cover is already basically done.