"Particle Man" | |
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Song by They Might Be Giants from the album Flood | |
Released | 1990 |
Genre | Alternative polka |
Length | 1:59 |
Label | Elektra |
Writer | They Might Be Giants |
Producer | They Might Be Giants |
"Particle Man" is a song by alternative rock band They Might Be Giants. The song is the seventh track on the band's 1990 release, Flood. It has become one of their most popular songs, despite never being released as a single.
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The song describes four different beings, each referred to as a “man”: Particle Man, a microscopic being whose attributes are deemed “not important” by the song; Triangle Man, a belligerent entity who hates Particle Man, fights with him, and wins; Universe Man, a kinder being the size of the universe, with a watch to go with it (“He’s got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand”); and Person Man, a degraded being who lives in a garbage can, who is also hated by Triangle Man and is defeated by him in a fight. The song declares Person Man to be a "degraded man". Band member John Flansburgh described it as “just a song about characters in the most obvious sense” and said it does not represent real people.[1]
Both "Particle Man" and another They Might Be Giants song, "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", were made into music videos featured on the Warner Bros. animated series Tiny Toon Adventures. In this one, Plucky Duck portrayed Particle Man and Person Man (who was portrayed in the video as Particle Man’s secret identity), and the rest were featured as massive wrestlers. It features a cameo by The Crusher from the Looney Tunes short Bunny Hugged.
In the Marvel Comics series X-Factor (volume 1), writer Peter David referenced “Particle Man” as the source song for a fictional parody by “Weird Al” Yankovic about the character Multiple Man; only a partial verse was presented, referencing the Multiple Man’s ability to create duplicates of himself.
The song was also an inspiration of sorts to author Terry Pratchett. One of his recurring Discworld characters, Foul Ole Ron, frequently mutters “millennium hand and shrimp”; this was a result of Pratchett feeding various texts to a text-generation computer program, and this phrase was a result of merging this song’s lyrics (which mention “millennium hand”) with a Chinese takeaway menu.[2] Another Pratchett character, Azrael, who appears in the Discworld novel Reaper Man, is the size of a universe and has a clock with a minute hand, a millennium hand and an eon hand.
The song was later used, in part, for advertisements for Geometry Wars: Galaxies, in reference to the nature of Geometry Wars, leaving Person Man out of the song.
In the making of the Electronic Arts videogame Spore, a prototype game was created that “simulates gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud” which they later released to the public under the name ParticleMan.[3]
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