S P I D E R
People eat an average of eight blog posts about songs called 'Spider' per year. This one is by They Might Be Giants.
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Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen!
S P I D E R
He is our hero!
S P I D E R
Get rid of —
S P I D E R
Step on spider!
S P I D E R
We love you, spider.
Aww, I promise not to kill you.
S P I D E R
🕷️🕷️🕷️
Track number seven on Apollo 18, of which you just read 99% of the lyrics, is a song called Spider. It is a veritable They Might Be Giants smorgasbord of sampling and runs under one minute. No question, this song is a banger. It’s quick, odd, and offbeat. A quintessential bit of proof that TMBG set off as a band to be interesting and new because that’s exactly how I’d describe this song.
I used to find this song to be very funny. My best friend and I would quote the lines from it endlessly and how can you not? It’s highly quotable.
Back in the early days of my TMBG listening, when I first got this album, Spider always gave me a sort of super-hero meets Godzilla movie vibe. I imagined an individual called Spider who is sort of this anti-hero that some people loved and revered but others hated. Maybe because I was reading so much Spider-Man that hearing this song just took me in that direction immediately.
One day, a switch flipped in my mind—or in my ears. This probably coincides with my years spent coming to rescue my children from a spider found in the house. Maybe one had raced across a bedroom floor to hide under one of their beds. It was my sworn fatherly duty (a job that I did not request nor had any say in) to go “get” that spider.
Out of my four kids, on any given day, I could have been asked to squish, or flush, or capture and release the wayward arachnid. My very unscientific survey (me remembering previous interactions with people in my life) indicate that 1 out of 10 people consider themselves a friend to the spider. The other 9 would just as well see spiders on a pike outside every home as a warning for what awaits them if they crawl inside.
Today, when I listen to Spider, I hear it as different people reacting to seeing a spider. Someone wants to step on it, some see it as a hero. The spider then promises not to kill them. I could be totally off and in most cases, John Linnell and John Flansburgh usually reveal that any given song is void of deep meaning and was really just what you see right on the surface. But I think what I’m hearing IS the thing right on the surface. Just assembled in a very unusually fun way.
This is also a whacky song to hear live. Just a ton of fun. So I thought, I’d share this favorite live version from their compilation album Severe Tire Damage for you to check out as well.
After listening to this song so many times in a row this past week, I think my experience with it is fully cemented. In the end, Spider is exactly what it appears to be: an interesting, chaotic burst of TMBG energy. Maybe you hear it as a monster movie, a household horror story, or just a collage of reactions to seeing a spider. The real beauty of They Might Be Giants is that it can be all of those things at once.
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My wife and I sing this one (and many other TMBG tunes, most of Fingertips for example) to each other on the regular. It's a for sure favorite. Fun piece and I think you are right about the meaning of the song. That's how I thought of it.
There was a hero in the pulp magazines of the 1930s called The Spider. A detective-adventurer kind of like The Shadow, I suppose. (I've never read any of the stories. I have only heard about it.) I don't think the character graduated to radio dramas or movie serials like some other pulp fiction characters, but I like to think of this as the theme song for such a production.