Discussing where, when, and why TMBG songs draw lines between gender categories.
Coming Soon: "Not Only But Especially For The Ladies" and "A Thing Named It"
Many songs written by John Linnell distinguish between women and men seemingly for the convenience of dialogue tagging. Referring to pairs of people as women/man, boy/girl, makes it obvious that there are two different people in a conversation (and imply the nature of their relationship) without having to name them:
- As in Unrelated Thing, "Said the woman to the man";
- As in They'll Need A Crane, "Lad's gal is all he has, gal's gladness hangs upon the love of lad";
- As in Stone Cold Coup D'État, "Son sees the secret signal on his sister's face; Dad smiles at his wife";
- As in New Hampshire, which plays with this by losing track of the number of people in a conversation and leaving one of them quite literally the odd man out—"Woman wonders who's your itchy friend, woman says I though he was with you, woman says I thought he was with you".
In these conversations, personality and communication differences are a source of tension. But that tension is usually very personal, rarely referencing broad ideas about "woman behavior" versus "man behavior".
In fact, women and men in these songs are often equal in number, importance, and experiences. When illustrating an idea, it's often applied to "she" and "he" back-to-back. (And sometimes even "it"... but we'll get back to that later.) The pronouns are almost like bullet points for a series of equivalent examples:
- As in Dog, "He's/She's the kind of dog..."
- As in No Answer, "Though she may wonder; He'll always wonder";
- As in I've Got A Fang, "Girlfriend took me to meet her dad/mom";
- As in Whistling In The Dark, "A woman/man came up to me and said..."
- As in Certain People I Could Name, "Is he/she/it reminding you of anyone we know?"
- As in This Is Only Going To Go One Way, "He knows he's often dreamt of shortening her life, she's felt her hand discreetly moving for the kitchen knife";
- As in Tractor, "Try though she may she'll never peel away your soul; He's met his match in your uncompromising ways";
- As in Withered Hope, where "she" (Withered Hope), "he" (Sad Sack) and "it" (the motorbike) form a loop of unrequited love.
I'm calling this approach "gender as linguistic category" because it makes less use of interprersonal theories of gender (other than maybe equality feminism) than it does of grammatical gender. It's built upon the existence of firm gender categories as structural tool, while being unusually uninvested in social rules or value judgements about the people contained in each category.
In many of these cases, the mirror-image, gender-agnostic quality is strong enough that the pronouns could be flipped without significantly changing the song's meaning or tone. What does it tell us when a character is a man? Well, just that he's not a woman—she's the other one, who's not the man. Little else not explicitly stated need be inferred.
Women & Men is probably John Linnell's most immediately identifiable song "about gender", and it's an excellent example of the things we've discussed above. This song talks about humankind as made up of two even, matched halves. There is nothing the men do without the women, nor vice versa.
The objective-sounding voice of the narrator hides a couple social assumptions about gendered behavior: that men and women pair off based on love, and that those pairs can produce children. Somewhere, deep down, the symmetry of men and women must be based on the symmetry of reproductive sex... but that part happens off in the jungle, making it none of our business and not really the point.
Ultimately, the song isn't trying to be about gender at all: it's about population migration as a humanity-wide phenomenon. The smaller social factors which might shape that process are left out—achieving unusually broad neutrality, but perhaps also glossing over enough to be misleading.
Many songs by John Flansburgh use gender to describe a character's actions, particularly when it comes to romance. "Being a man" is like a job description, with behaviors that have to be learned and practiced:
- As in Narrow Your Eyes, "I don't want to shake your father's hand and act like a man";
- As in Authenticity Trip, "Now I'm in these classes just to be your man";
- As in You'll Miss Me, "It must be raining 'cause a man ain't supposed to cry";
- As in Too Tall Girl, "There's no kind of guidebook or catalog; to get to her a boy's got to calculate";
- As in Extra Savoir-Faire (literally, extra know-how), "I know just what to do when the ladies come 'round; what is left for me to prove?"
These characters don't experience gender nearly as symmetrically. They're more aware of the distinct expectations and social pressures which ask men and women to act, and to treat each other, very differently.
This push/pull can be enjoyable, or it can take on a stressful, Us-vs-Them quality. These characters often cluster in the safety of shared-gender-goal groups in order to seek advice or discuss romantic experiences:
- As in It's Kickin' In, "Let's hear the boyfriends say it";
- As in It's Fun To Steal, "In the ladies' room you're all they're talking about";
- As in Too Tall Girl, where advice for getting to the girl is delivered to a "boy" by a chorus of "men";
- As in Operators Are Standing By, "Making jokes about their old boyfriends (That's enough talking, ladies)";
- As in Take Out The Trash, "Girl, why not take out the trash? I'm not saying all the boys are the same, but some boys are the same".
But notice that I describe these groups as having "shared gender goals", not simply "shared gender". (Is the narrator of Take Out The Trash a woman? We'll get back to that later.)
In these songs, the ideas of "acting like/being a man" and "acting like/being a woman" aren't actually portrayed as exclusive. Most frequently, this shows up when motivated women try out male roles for fun and empowerment:
- As in Out Of Jail, "I could say she's to blame, say she's the man of this cautionary tale";
- As in S-E-X-X-Y, "She wants to be your man, she's got another plan";
- As in I Palindrome I's demo, "She, king of Brooklyn, she";
- As in Damn Good Times, "She acts like David Lee Roth when he turned 21".
I'm calling this approach "gender as social action" because of its unusual awareness of the sociological theory of "doing gender". The expectation that a man prove his manhood by doing "things that men do" requires an odd paradox: admitting that men are capable of doing all sorts of things which don't count as "things men do"!
In other words, gender labels in these songs are used to describe a character's chosen goals, social scene, or self-image, without necessarily prescribing their nature. That awareness of gender flexibility can be a conscious source of anxiety (fear of losing a gender title, of doing it "wrong") or pride (in consciously choosing a new gender title, in doing it "right"). Seeing gender as a job title turns out to be a lot of work!
How Can I Sing Like A Girl is probably John Flansburgh's most immediately identifiable song "about gender", and it is, appropriately, about performance anxiety. This one is a particularly good example because it demonstrates the gender philosophies above outside the world of romance.
An action can be described as done "like a girl" even if that isn't the gender of the person doing it. This isn't a symmetrical equation: the song hangs on the stigma unique to the phrase "like a girl" (compared to "like a boy" or even "like a lady"), and the its meaning would shift majorly if we didn't see the singer as a man.
The question "how can I?" isn't really asking if it's possible to perform against type. Instead, it's asking for advice on learning and improving the skill... and avoiding the negative social consequences of picking a gender-mismatched goal. Ultimately, the narrator's goal is to find community with those who share this gender-goal, and "never be alone": a social solution to a social problem.
These songs are an odd pair to compare—one off a 2000s kids' educational album, the other off a 90s solo album. But both are structured around listing pairs of things, and the way this is handled provides a particularly clear illustration of the "neutral binary category" versus "meaningful interactive role" approaches to gender.
from Even NumbersSkip the first number and the second one's even
Skip the third and the next one's even as well
Skip the next, take the next, skip the next
Take, skip, take
You like French fries
But you don't like French fries
You've got socks on
But you don't have socks on
You're a girl, but you're a boy
Girl, boy, girl
Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, red, green
Red, green, red, green, red
She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me
She loves me not, she
Even Numbers includes "girl/boy" among its examples of equal opposites: even/odd, red/green, take/skip, yes/no.
"You're a girl but you're a boy" expects this equal-oppositeness to be so obvious that the listener understands it's flipping between addressing two different people as "you". But that wouldn't be a given from a more fluid-gender perspective!
Gender isn't completely irrelevant to this song about basic math: the "she" in "she loves me not" is presumably picked because we know that the singer is a "he". But it's still only the symmetry of the pair that matters. It's easy to imagine this song sung by a "she" with the lyric flipped to "he loves me not" with no sense of gender-subversion or shift in meaning.
from Mr. Hughes SaysTell your sister and your brother
Tell the alien and the chimp
Tell the corpse and tell the killer
Tell the pilot and the blimp
Tell the wind and tell the phone
Tell the birds and tell the fly
Tell the streetlights and the car
Tell the stars and tell the sky
Mr. Hughes says, "Live and learn.
Dig and be dug in return."
Tell the boxer and the fist
Tell the logo and the lid
Tell the ladies and the lords
Tell the goats and tell the kid
Tell the stylus and the disc
Tell the dust and tell the breeze
Tell the needles and the wool
Tell the locks and tell the keys
Mr. Hughes Says includes "ladies/lords" and "brother/sister" among its examples of pairs which act on each other, and often require the other party in order to be able to play their role and serve their purpose: pilot/blimp, streetlights/car, boxer/fist, stylus/disc, needles/wool, locks/keys.
It would be strange to describe most of these pairs as "equal" or "opposite". Goat/kid (and possibly alien/chimp, by 2001: A Space Odyssey logic) represent two stages of the same thing, and a killer can easily become the next corpse.
The chorus of "Dig and be dug in return" emphasizes the reciprocal relationships between these pairs. But as "sister/brother" and "goat/kid" remind us, the idea of playing complimentary roles isn't limited to the context of romantic love.