My political opinions don't occupy the left-right political spectrum. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the worldwide proliferation of internet resources, such a narrowly-scoped view of modern politics has become increasingly obsolete and irrelevant. What was once a deeply important question in civics has now evolved to a centralist vs. decentralist issue. My personal beliefs can generally be summated to decentralist, more specifically, anarchism. So, you can imagine my alarm when I subjected myself to witness the music video album from They Might Be Giants' and their bleeding leftist agenda to indoctrinate children. While their videos are educational and visually engaging that nominally inspire children to be creative, it ultimately stifles or limits creativity through imitation and paternalistic liberalism.
The series had a strong start: "Science Is Real" places its viewer in an objective reality where what can be immediately sensed is real and unchangeable. It explains the fundamentals of science, while implicitly explaining the complex dichotomy in life in which we can choose personal pathways, but must adapt to unchangeable circumstances. Elementally, this is an important neutral zone between discussions in civics explained simply enough for toddlers to understand. "My Brother the Ape," and "Meet the Elements" are incredibly inventive songs, fully of irony, and simply explain important scientific truths (notable because it indelibly ignores creationist notions) but unfortunately, songwriter John Flansburgh digresses as time goes along. "Electric Car" is the most egregious of all offenses. Not only is it repetitive, and leads the discussion nowhere, it promotes expensive consumerism. One might argue that it condemns useless gas emissions and destruction of the environment; however, children are hardly divested of the resources to make a lasting difference for environment - I would argue that they never will, regardless of how old they are. It also fails to explain in enough detail the benefits of berating parents into buying one. Reserve to two isolated lines, "On verdant green/no diesel, no steam, no gasoline," "Electric Car" serves no practical use than to subliminally insert leftist capitalistic ventures into children's skulls.
Such repetition stifles creativity in children. Though songs like "Put It to the Test" inspire inquisitiveness, and positively encourages children to treat life like a scientific method, it restrains the breadth of their experimentation with songs like "Here Comes Science," whose order in the tracklist baffles me. It seems to have been a fitting place for the first or last track, but its penultimate placement in painfully self-promoting, as if to assert dominance of a child's learning time. When I heard, I heard nothing but They Might Be Giants implanting their role as babysitter and educator in the household, an educator that insists upon bludgeoning children with dull melodies and disputatious democratism.
Naturally, this is the type of low-budget material Disney has been aching to sell in the shelves in lieu of children's music. Between T-Squad and Kidz Bop Volume 370, Hollywood Records really struggled to connect with contemporary households, eventually settling on the quinoa-inhaling pseudo-hippies to turn over some bills for their uncreative children. Spare me the agony of another "educational" song from They Might be Giants, who hasn't done a good thing since it wrote music for Homestar Runner. With self-promoting narcissism and over political poison, Here Comes Science has not only angered me, but successfully warned me against buying records from from Walt Disney Records post-2000.
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