All Your Video Game Music Were Belong To Me

One of the things I did while I was on vacation last week was find myself a piano. I used to think practicing was a chore; now I think playing a piano is a treat. You know, like ice cream. ^__^

One of the things I used to do when I was a kid, before YouTube and before Martin Leung made it cool, was play video game music, by ear, on the piano. Those of you who know me know I loved my SNES way way way too much, and beat Chrono Trigger the requisite 11 times. But (sigh) back in 1995 I had no video camera and no internets on which to share my musical genius.

So there I was, at this piano, with my laptop nearby, and I thought "well, it's my turn now."

I did a rough cut of the SMB theme to start, then made some adjustments with my camera and with the audio levels and punched out the following tunes, all from memory, all by ear:

• Legend of Zelda main theme
• Final Fantasy VI Battle Victory
• Bubble Bobble main theme
• Yoshi's Theme (Yoshi's Tetris)
• Costa Del Sol (Final Fantasy VII)
• Celes' Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Locke's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Celes' and Locke's Themes simultaneously (LH/RH)
• Mog's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Kefka's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Faxanadu Overworld Theme (that one is hard, yo)
• Final Fantasy main theme
• Frog's Theme (Chrono Trigger)
• Super Mario Bros 2 End Theme (you know, the one that Brentalfloss sings)
• Super Mario Bros 3 Overworld Theme (A)
• Strago's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Super Mario Bros 3 Overworld Theme (B)

Ah, but here's the sad part. At the end of my hour-long playing marathon, my computer told me that I was running out of memory on my hard drive. (I would have kept going but the video camera actually, itself, stopped. It's a shame, too. There were nine other Final Fantasy VI character themes I could have played.)

So, because it was running out of memory, I dumped everything into Windows Movie Maker and edited it up to perfection.

And then I deleted the original file to save my computer memories.

And then I learned that--even though I had saved the edited movie on WMM--deleting the original file deleted the edited files, too. (The edited files needed to "access the source files" to play, apparently.)

So all I had left to show for my afternoon was the rough cut of SMB, complete with fuzzy audio.

I guess that's okay, though. I'm sure y'all would rather listen to three minutes of music than to an entire hour.

They Might Be Giants, Part III: Video From The Concert!

Yes, the two instruments are accordion and bass drum.

Now you know why all the nerds showed up.

(Also I swear I can hear my voice from about 0:13-0:22. But I could be wrong.)

They Might Be Giants, Part II: John and John and Ira and Sarah

So my friend from undergrad and I were talking, before the concert began (he would have gotten tickets too, but they were all sold out) about TMBG, which we both liked, and This American Life, which we both liked, and how interesting it was that John and John regularly, like, hung out with Ira and Sarah and David and the whole This American Life crew.

"It's weird that they're all friends in real life," he said, "and that they've got the same group of fans."

I disagreed; it made sense that people who liked each other would have creative enterprises which might attract the same audience. Here was what was weirder:

"They all turn fifty years old this year," I told him.

(This, btw, is not completely true. Ira Glass turns 50 on Tuesday. John Linnell will be turning 49 this year, and John Flansburgh will only be turning 48.)

What makes this "weird" is that this is a group of people (the whole TMBG/TAL/David Sedaris/Daily Show crowd) whose fan base is predominantly, though not exclusively, made up of people in their 20s and 30s. So to be all Malcolm Gladwell about it (Gladwell, of course, is also part of this group of real-life friends): what happened in 1959/1960 that caused a particular set of experiences that caused a group of individuals to form creative enterprises which, though unbeknownst to each other, created similar fan bases of people a generation younger; and then, when Glass's intern introduced him to TMBG in 1998, how coincidental was it that Ira, who had not yet heard of John or John, met them and befriended them and helped promote their music? And then John and John in turn helped promote Ira's show? And then John and John met Jon Stewart and helped promote his show?

My friend-from-undergrad and I agreed that it didn't seem fair; that in some imagined apartment in NYC John and John and Ira and Sarah were all pouring drinks for each other and sitting on a couch with their shoes off having a good time and sharing all of these influential ideas with each other. And what was even less fair was that they were our parents' age so they were never, ever, going to think we were cool enough to hang with them.

"Do you think it's the same kind of thing like when we were kids?" I asked him. "Like how we were in junior high and we idolized the high-schoolers? Is that why we like them all so much?"

And then:

"Do you think we can be that cool when we're fifty years old?"

They Might Be Giants, Part I: The Concert

My trip to NYC to see TMBG was one of the most fun things I've done in a long time, in part because I got to ride on a train (which I love) and because I got to spend the pre-concert day wandering around the city with a friend I hadn't seen since undergrad. (We got to eat cream puffs at Beard Papa!)

It was nice to have a change of scene, and NYC is always an interesting place even though it doesn't feel home to me the way DC does. (DC is organized and tidy and small-scale and all of the buildings match and it is full of smart, fun-but-socially-reserved introverts. Thus: obviousness.)

So the concert. First of all I'll get the end of the story out of the way and say that it was so much fun and TMBG was so awesome and I want to go again! Now the story from the beginning:

If you remember, my first thought after "ZOMG I have TMBG tickets" was "oh crap, what can I wear so I don't look like a nerd?" I didn't look like a nerd. I mean, maybe I did look like a nerd, but I didn't look any more like a nerd than anyone else there. For some reason I thought the concert would be a hipster thing, and that I would be out of place in my non-skinny jeans and brown felt beret, but the entire audience was made up of nerds.

How nerdy was it? More than one person brought along their own knitting.

It was worse than nerdy. It was uncomfortably nerdy. It was Comic-Con nerdy. It was "oh no, I wonder if I appear as socially awkward as everyone else in this crowd" nerdy. All four Gregs showed up, in their infinite variations, and one of them tried to hit on me by telling me about how the song "Apartment 4," from TMBG's children's album Here Come The 123s, "blew his mind" because it was so much like his life (the song is about a kid who lives in Apartment 4 and wishes the kid in Apartment 2 would come over and play with him).

Another person had brought over a picture of a llama, in the hopes that he could go up to TMBG after the concert and ask them "will you sign my llama picture?" and then TMBG would be struck by the request and decide the phrase was quirky enough to turn into a song, and then he would have influenced a TMBG song. (Maybe the difference between nerds and other people is that while everyone might have a fantasy like that from time to time, nerds not only create a plan to execute said fantasy but also tell the person standing next to them in line about what they're doing and how they hope it will play out.)

Once the concert itself started, all of the crowd's awkwardness melted away and we became a giant group of sing-along fans. This, after all, was the band who wrote a song with the lyric:

There's only one thing I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well
And that's be you
Be what you're like
Be like yourself.

So there we were, all being ourselves, non-skinny jeans and llama pictures and knitting and all.

It was really fun. The whole concept of giving fans who have memorized an entire album exactly what they want--the opportunity to sing along with the entire album, in sequence--was brilliant. (Yes, I only heard this album for the first time last week--but I was able to memorize most of it in time so I could sing along too.) What was great was that most of the crowd had decent voices and half of us automatically took the harmony parts.

I only have one real regret, and it's this: the venue was set up so that we were all standing in front of the stage, and because of the architecture of the room there was this three-foot-wide load-bearing post in the middle of the space, and so everyone behind a certain point could really only see half of the band at any one time. So I spent most of the concert watching Flans and trying, during the between-songs bits, to push my way up a little closer. It took me three-fourths of the album to get close enough to see both Flans and Linnell and it was suddenly like the whole thing burst into stereo. (This may have had more to do with speaker positioning than anything else.) It was a shame I couldn't have been that close the entire time.

At a certain point I began to wonder exactly how much money the bar was making (or not making) off of this evening, when I realized that--although many people had purchased a drink--this crowd was ridiculously sober. If TMBG had committed to do one show a month at this bar, and the crowd which showed up was made up of nerds who had never jumped on the whole "heavy drinking" bandwagon (it would interfere with the knitting), how could the bar sustain these concerts?

The answer came at precicely 11 p.m., when the show ended and the bouncers told us we had to leave right now. No hanging around to get llama pictures signed, no drinks for the road, we all had to leave. As we were shoved out, we saw a line of people outside the bar, waiting to get in. These people were the kind who wore skinny jeans and tiny skirts and spiky heels and did not bring along their own yarn. The message was clear: after having dealt with the nerds, the bar was now ready to open for real.

So... yeah, it was awesome. Do I want to go back again next month? Absolutely. Do I think I will? Probably not. But it's nice to know that on the last Saturday of every month, a bunch of dorks show up at a bar and sing along with a band that writes songs about geography and history and how the only thing you can ever do in this life is be yourself. ^__^

TMBG And I Are Getting Old And We Still Haven't Walked In The Glow Of Each Other's Majestic Presence

1996

“You have to listen to this song,” my friend said. There were six or seven of us crowded into her parents’ living room, in my small midwestern town, before the day I accidentally spilled Mountain Dew onto their brand-new carpet, before the only boy in the group asked me to prom, before the rest of the group convinced him to try an experiment in which he would see how long he could go without speaking to me before I got angry with him; before I accidentally spilled sparkling white grape juice on my friend’s faux-fur coat and effectively ended my tenure in that particular living room. (The grape juice moment is caught, somewhere, on videotape.)

“You have to listen to this song. There are secret lyrics.”

There were.

Experimental dog
Salivating dog
Good dog.

We were fourteen years old and proud of ourselves for understanding the reference. I think we had just learned about Pavlov in psychology.

2002

I’m being driven across the country from the small midwestern town to the university I attend, three states away, after Thanksgiving break. The driver is a friend of mine whose family lives in a city en route; I am delivered to his home and he delivers me the rest of the way as if I were a parcel on the Pony Express. It’s very late. He puts in a cd: Mink Car. For the first time I hear the song “Older,” which is probably the only way to really hear this song: after midnight, in a car where you haven’t spoken to the other passenger for hours, in hour ten of a fourteen-hour haul. Pitch black outside. Nothing but the two voices:

You’re older than you’ve ever been
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older.

When the CD finishes my friend is too tired to replace it, so we listen to Mink Car twice that night. It also contains the song “(She Thinks She’s) Edith Head,” which I listen to very intently because the lyrics hit a little too close to home (“the accent in her speech/she didn’t have growing up,” etc.).

I’m nineteen years old and, surprisingly, know who Edith Head is, though it’s a bit complicated to explain how I know (it has to do with a Pride and Prejudice-related image search which led to this site which led here). I’d be proud of myself for understanding the reference if the song itself didn’t make me a little uncomfortable.

2005

I see the Homestar Runner “Experimental Film” video for the first time, in a dingy apartment in Minneapolis. For the first time I make the connection between They Might Be Giants, the band; and this song, which is awesome. Every day before I go to my telemarketing job I play this song and rock out.

Oh—and of course I get the reference to Un Chien Andalou. Even though I’ve never actually seen the film. But there’s no one in Minneapolis to tell about it, so it doesn’t matter.

2005 Part Two

On the basis of “Experimental Film,” I decide that TMBG is my favorite band. Even though the only real understanding I have of their oeuvre is this song, plus a few memories of a salivating dog, Edith Head, and getting older. I decide to buy my sister a TMBG album for Christmas because I think that giving other people things that I think are cool is a good idea. On Amazon, the TMBG albums are too expensive (even used) so I compromise by getting John Linnell’s solo project State Songs. My sister loves it.

2005 Part Three

I happen to see a sign for a TMBG free outdoor concert in dingy Minneapolis. The concert, however, happened two days ago. I promise myself that I will go to a TMBG concert someday.

2008

Talking music with a friend; I mention, of course, “Experimental Film.”

“Is “Experimental Film” your favorite TMBG song?” my friend asks.

“Yes,” I say. “What’s yours?”

“Birdhouse.”

“Yeah, that’s a great song,” I agree.

I'm bluffing: I’ve never heard “Birdhouse In Your Soul.” Never knew it existed until that moment. Later that day I google it tentatively, wondering what could be so good that it surpassed “Experimental Film.” I listened to it and understood.

I’m twenty-six at this point and perturbed at the incorrect reference: Jason and the Argonauts were not killed by a faulty lighthouse. Medea guided Jason home safely and no one crashed on the rocks and then Jason married Medea and they had two sons and then Jason started macking on Glauce and so Medea made a magical dress and gave it to Glauce and she put it on and burst into flames ‘cause it was magic and then Medea killed her two children so Jason’s bloodline would end and I’m a dork.

2008 Part Two

Thanks to a combination of YouTube and Seeqpod, I begin to familiarize myself with the entirety of TMBG’s twenty-year career. (Actually, that’s a lie. What I really is listen to “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” “Don’t Let’s Start,” and “I Palindrome I” over and over and over. )

2008 Part Three

Wait: they wrote the theme to The Daily Show???

2008 Part Four

When my sister graduated from college, she got a book titled Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff: After Graduation, which contained such gems of advice as “Give Up Your Political Ideology” and “Get A Haircut.” (The book advised graduates to, quite literally, give up their hobbies, beliefs, and friends in order to start a new life as a working adult; it says that after six months into the job you are allowed to go back to one hobby and call up your college friends to ask how they are doing. It’s an extremely depressing book to give to a new graduate.) The one piece of advice I liked was the one that said “Every time you get a new job or a promotion, buy yourself a present.”

I decided that when I got my new job I would buy myself a copy of TMBG’s Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants. I got my new job. I decided it would be better to build an emergency fund. I never bought the CD.

2009

I made a New Year’s Goal to attend a TMBG concert. They were still, after all, my favorite band—even though I only knew a few of their songs and had never bought any of their CDs.

2009 Part Two

I buy my first TMBG CD. It’s the “greatest hits” album A User’s Guide To They Might Be Giants and it is used, on super-sale in the back bin of Melody Records. I listen to the CD like, a jillion times.

2009 Last Week

I do a quick search to see what TMBG concerts are coming up in the next few months and end up buying tickets for the Flood Concert coming up this Saturday. ^__^

2009 This Morning

Using Seeqpod, I listen to (and record) the Flood album for the first time. I'm twenty-seven and the album is twenty years old exactly.