This Year: 1998

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

This might be a cheat, but I don't think so. Mono Puff was a mid-90s side project of They Might Be Giants' John Flansburgh, with a bunch of other people that I'm afraid I don't really remember or know what else they did. (Maybe they were equally famous; maybe it was some kind of supergroup!)

I've already hit TMBG once on this list, so that's them used up. But Mono Puff is a different band, so they can provide my song for 1998 - that's the potentially cheaty part.

Anyway, I'm here to tell you about Extra Krispy.

I'm gonna rock you 

Just one more time

Don't make me rock you again

I love that line - the twist of it, the SJ Perelman-esque yoking of two ideas to go off in a weird direction. And the rest of the song lives up to it, in sound and tone and attitude and lyrics.

What I love about Mono Puff in general, and this song in particular, is that it sounds like a side project - it goes off in odd directions, it has contributions from a bunch of people doing different things musically, it's clearly different from what you'd expect from these guys.

So there's a fuzzy guitar, and a pseudo-soul male voice up front, growling in the background. But the main lyric is in a female voice, above keyboard flourishes and some kind of funky bass line. It's a soul/funk song, I guess - not "white soul," exactly, but a geeky, quirky kind of soul that attacks the "this town is awesome" theme from an unusual direction.

It's like, once you get down in New York City
You'll never go home again
It's like, once you've had Extra Krispy
You'll never go back again

It is a goofy song, full of weird sounds, made by people obviously enjoying themselves and doing this goofy thing exactly the way they wanted to. You can take it seriously, but you don't have to. Extra Krispy won't mind; it's vibing on its own groove either way.

And I salute it for that.