Music acts whose songs tend to be "quirky" -- not just about love or sex.

Cafe Society
1

Inspired by this thread. Here’s the thread for praising (or at least mentioning) those songwriters and bands who sing songs celebrating the planet Venus, the Battle of Hastings, non-syndicalist anarchists, Nicola Tesla, and the million-other-odd subjects that aren’t simply sex or love.

List them, discuss them, sell other Dopers on their merits…
To start:

The B-52’s: plenty of wacked-out references to astronomy, polymorphous perversity, strobe lights, Idaho, dance steps from the 50s & 60s…

The Decembrists: I’ll let someone else handle the details, since I actually can’t stand them for some strange reason. Lots of olde-English-type subjects, though, drawing from folk tales, mythology, literature, and history – have I got that right?

Gang of Four: art rock/punk with a distinctly Marxist/anarchist slant. Specialties include songs about shopping, conspicuous consumerism, etc.

Talking Heads: David Byrne had his own Eno-influenced take on song-logic and subject matter. Askew songs abound: a psycho killer’s P.O.V. mixed with mockery of Otis Redding; families making TV shows, women disappearing, aimlessness, TV dependency, deflating the animal mystique, dadaist lyrics…

They Might Be Giants: geek/nerd rockers par excellence for Gen-Xers and their kids alike. Specialty topics include scientists and scientific knowledge and Constantinople.

XTC: some relationship songs (albeit from unusual angles or with striking metaphors), and a whole lotta quirky stuff that had Virgin Music execs tearing their hair out. IRL, Andy Partridge’s hobbies include collecting/designing/painting toy soldiers, designing board games, and collecting comic books, and his songs reflect those interests, to name a few.

Muse: my current fave band. Although he’s written his share of songs reflecting on relationships both happy and turbulent, Matt Bellamy is also interested in conspiracy theories of various types (even the David Icke lizard-people stuff), astronomy & space colonization, extraterrestrials, and various progressive political/social justice issues. I’ll go out on a limb and say they’re the only band to have ever combined 60’s space rock, 60’s surf rock, and Ennio Morricone influences in an epic about civil war on Mars (“Knights of Cydonia”).

2

Harvey Danger is the first one that immediately pops into my head. Flagpole Sitta, The Most Thrilling Conversation You’ve Been Waiting For, Radio Silence, Carlotta Valdez, Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo…Hell, all of their songs, pretty much. Sometimes they tell a story, other times they just like to muse on life. Check a few out!

3

Virtually all of Cibo Matto’s songs are about food.

4

Neutral Milk Hotel comes to mind (although he/they do have a song about sex…called “Song Against Sex”). Radiohead. Neko Case only occasionally sings about love, but the songs are not love songs, exactly.

5

Well, Bob Dylan certainly has other axes to grind than sex.

6

Uncle Bonsai: Song topics include cheerleaders on drugs, a man who commits suicide when he finds out that The Love Boat has been cancelled, K-Mart, the desire to have a personal theme song, a baby’s head being hexagonal, family restaurants, the things a woman would do if endowed with a penis, and approximately 18 songs about a guy named Doug.

The Bobs: Synaesthesia, asking a sports star to autograph your dog, the tenuous first steps in a love affair between a UPS driver and a Fotomat clerk.

DaVinci’s Notebook: Must be mentioned here if only for Title of the Song; a brilliant meta-deconstruction of every boy-band song ever written.

Moxy Früvous: Entropy, recliners, dogs sent into space, European royalty working minimum wage jobs in Toronto, music festivals being attacked by camping equipment.

Jonathon Coulton: Haven’t explored his works enough yet, but start with Code Monkey, which is a love song of a sort.

And this seems like a good thread to mention what I consider to be the trifecta of unusually-topicked songs:

Be My Yoko, by The Bobs
Be My Yoko Ono, by Barenaked Ladies
I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono, by Dar Williams

7

"Weird" Al Yankovic: Not just the parodies (though of course their subject matter is often this way too – a parody of “Trapped in the Closet” deals with a couple’s decision to go out to eat, where to go, and what happens when they get there). He also does original songs (some are parodies of other bands’ styles but not specific songs) which are at least as good as and frequently better than the parodies.

On his most recent compilation, “Internet Leaks”, “Skipper Dan” is about a child prodigy actor who ends up working as “a tour guide on the jungle cruise ride”, “CNR” is a paean to Charles Nelson Riley, “Craigslist” is a bunch of vignettes of posts you’d find there, “Ringtone” is about an annoying ringtone.

M.C. Frontalot, the nerdcore rapper (which alone tells you it’s not the standard stuff) has a track about types of bridges, a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, a song about a “Bizarro Genius Baby”, and one about it being so dark that “You are likely to be eaten by a grue”, among others.

I see Robot Arm has beaten me to them, but since I had them typed up already:

Jonathan Coulton, of course. Sure, some of the songs are about love or sex (“First of May”?), but then you’ve got “Mandlebrot Set” (about the eponymous equation and the guy who found it) and “A Talk With George” (an inspiring recounting of the life of George Plimpton) among many others.

Moxy Früvous, a now defunct Canadian band did political stuff like “The Ballad of Marian Früvous” about green living and “The Greatest Man in America” about Rush Limbaugh, and other quirky stuff like “You Will Go to the Moon” about going to the moon and “Johnny Saucep’n” which has an impressively rattled-off list of ingredients.

Seconding Da Vinci’s Notebook and The Bobs.

In the vein of The Bobs, The Arrogant Worms.

And finally Paul & Storm, who were part of Da Vinci’s Notebook and now open for Jonathan Coulton, who do stuff like “Opening Band”, about being the opening band, and an incredible “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”-inspired ballad about a urinal cake’s last stand.

8

Dan Bern (Aliens came and fucked the monkey; Marilyn Monroe didn’t marry Henry Miller; Broken up in Disneyland)

Garfunkle & Oates (AKA Kate Micucci AKA The Gooch AKA Raising Hope babysitter)

Jill Sobule (Karen by Night, Under the Disco Ball, Jet Pack)

The Neilds

Kirby Superstar

Voltaire

Monty Python

Zooey Deschanel (especially in Munchausen by Proxy)

Not a real band but Lisa Kudrow’s songs on Friends

You beat me to it!

9

Yes, they’re my go-to band for quirky subject matter.

Once you get past their earliest stuff, very few of The Kinks’ songs are about love and/or sex. Ray Davies preferred to write about nostalgia, paranoia, the music business, art, English history, and preserving village greens.

I could mention my other favorite songwriter, Terry Scott Taylor (as a solo artist and as principal songwriter for the bands Daniel Amos, the Swirling Eddies, and the Lost Dogs), whose songwriting obsessions include Route 66, Elvis, urban legends, cheesy tourist attractions, death, and Art Carney.

10

Rush. Much of their early music was about science-fiction and fantasy themes, and later music often explored philosophical areas.

11

Random sample from my mp3 player:

Green Day
Matisyahu
Alice in Chains
Protest the Hero

12

First band that came to mind was XTC. Britpop-era Blur fit the bill as well, pretty much inheriting the tradition of the Kinks. Which brings to mind The Jam.

I remember hearing Living Colour’s “Love Rears Its Ugly Head” and realizing that it was probably one of two or three “relationship” songs in their oeuvre.

13

Frank Zappa

Primus

14

Billy Bragg. Henry Rollins. Michelle Shocked.

15

Sparks

16

Dire Straits?

Actually, I tend to be surprised when I find a **Midnight Oil **song that is about love or sex, rather than history or geography or activism or something.

And The Church tend to be more about surrealism…

17

Tom Waits tends to be about - well, God only knows, really. But rarely just love/sex.

18

David Lindley and El-Rayo X

19

The Shins - very few of their songs are love songs, and for me the standout is their song So Says I, which is about civilization’s inability to create Utopia via the ideals of Communism and capitalism.

20

NorthernCalifornia alt-country band Dieselhed (I can’t believe they’ve been broken up for 10 years) have songs about: hash browns, soap carving, taking a fork lift test, their own breakup, being in a remote port-a-potty and hearing gunshots, leaning on a stove and accidentally setting a pizza box on fire … I don’t think they have a single relationship song.

Two of my favorite alt-country acts, the Gourds, and the Felice Brothers, tend towards oddly detailed pictures and Waits-ish storytelling but few love songs.

I’m entirely sure what Andrew Bird is singing about most of the time, but he seems far more interested in science and nature than anything else.