Wednesday, February 02, 2005

More Kid Rock: Here Come the ABC's

According to rollingstone.com, They Might Be Giants has a new CD/DVD coming out. You know, for kids:

They Might Be Giants head to the land of painting penguins and flying letter V's in two weeks, when they issue the CD/DVD Here Come the ABC's!, the band's second effort aimed squarely at youngsters. Disney Sound/Walt Disney Records will release the follow-up to the band's acclaimed 2002 children's effort, No!, on February 15th. This time around though, the group will add a DVD to the package (in most outlets), showcasing their alphabet songs through a host of animation, illustration and puppetry.

...Flansburgh and TMBG co-founder John Linnell began working on the project a year ago, drafting songs about the alphabet and letter formations in spelling. In creating cuts such as "The Vowel Family" and "E Eats Everything," the band used their own intuition and knowledge in drafting kid-appropriate material.

"We don't do focus groups, and we don't have educational consultants," Flansburgh says. "I'm sure an educator will look at it and say this is a slightly uninformed effort, but it's really as much to entertain kids directly as anything else. When I was in my twenties, I actually worked in educational stuff for kids. The main thing I picked up was that, as an industry, it's incredibly mediocre. People are more afraid of being wrong than they are of being lame."

..."The thing that's nice about doing kid stuff for us is it's completely outside of the rock culture," he says. "I don't feel like They Might Be Giants has ever been relevant or irrelevant. We've always enjoyed the status of your alternative to the general mainstream culture. Whether that's Soundgarden or Rod Stewart, if it's all too much, we're here over on the left waiting for you, and that's a nice place to be."
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These guys are proof that "Overt" does not mean "bad." They are proudly Overt (as you can tell by that last quote), which, really, makes them not so Overt, in a way. I'm sure you understand.

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