Hehe. What's funny is I was actually more familiar with Chumbawumba first than TMBG. I used to like this little pirate station that played The Wipers, Dead Moon, I dunno stuff I liked and Tubthumper came on and it was kind of everybody's favorite song. People would call in and request it, more than anything else the station was known for playing. Then it got super popular. The rest of their stuff is really good. Kind of like Blur: Song #2 will always be what they're remembered for but people might not remember them as anything more than a soccer hoodlum anthem band when Armageddon comes and we all have to do our VH1 "I remember the.." stuff..

Unlike a lot of people I did not get into TMBG with Tiny Toon Adventures but rather a show called Viva Variety,

whoops! anyway I picked the album Anarchy, kind of by mistake, but I don't regret it. The end :)

I knew about TMBG for a good long while before Chumbawumba came out. One of my aunts used to have an early album or two of theirs (not my horse aunt, my British aunt; she was a teenager during the late 80s/ early 90s, so it wasn't that weird for her to be rocking out to TMBG), and I bought a couple of their albums myself, some time later.

I was thinking of turning into a card-carrying TMBGs fan, too, but then I had one of those really disturbing self-reflective experiences that changed the entire course of my life. I was living at a prep school at the time, and I ran into a little kid, about five, six years younger than me, over at the dining hall. He was there with his father, one of the professors, and he was telling his dad all about They Might Be Giants, in the sort of effortlessly pretentious, matter-of-fact manner that only a smart-ass eight year-old with liberal prep school parents can manage. "They're the sort of band that isn't just about the music; they're about ART" was what the little scamp said. With heavy emphasis on ART. Then he smacked his lips and nodded solemnly.

After that, I was never able to listen to TMBGs without feeling this horrible, crushing wave of embarrassment and shame.

Yeah. Flood's kind of my NMH In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, or Sinergy's Beware the Heavens. I can recite the whole thing by heart and it reminds me of a certain time and place. If a poetv convention ever happens I'll try to prove these things~! My ex loved them a lot more than I did so we went to a show and for me anyway it was really weird. I was surrounded by people having a great time and I just wanted to leave and play pinball or something. The venue in question was an old ballroom with (intentionally) bouncy floor, so the motion sickness didn't help.. then came out the sock puppets. It was like facepalm city arizona.

Back in high school, a friend of mine who was big into music of all kinds gave me TMBG's self-titled first album and said "Here, I know you. You'll like this."

Turned out, she was right.

It's spelled Choombawoombeh.

Chumbrowumbro?

I like Titus Andronicus as a band but yeah. They're just having fun. Everything before the song begins with Bukowski and such is more their style.

:) TMBG will always remind me of learning She's An Angel on piano, so I could try to ask some gal to prom. I fucked it up and we kind of skipped prom.