Last night, The C Is For Crank wrangled her creaky bones out of her rocking chair and shambled down to the Showbox in SoDo to see They Might Be Giants  play their 1990 album "Flood" (Google it, kids) from start to finish. (Note to the non-old: They Might Be Giants is a Very Important Band among Old People. I would call them "seminal," except I hate that word.)

Anyway! The show was epic. Obscure fans-only EP tracks, pogoing, screams of, "I love you, John!" (both TMBG singers are named John) and a GIANT GLITTER AND SMOKE-BLOWING MACHINE (I'm still brushing gold and pink stars and hearts out of my hair).

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20 years later, somewhere between "Theme to Flood" and "Your Racist Friend," I finally got it: TMBG are a kids' band for adults—particularly adults who grew up on Sesame Street, Electric Company, and Reading Rainbow.

Their songs—cartoonish, deceptively simplistic, often indecipherable— simply demand singing along: It's almost physically impossible to listen to songs like "Dead" ("Did a large procession wave their torches as my head fell in the basket/And was everybody dancing on the casket?") without belting out the lyrics.

"Flood" was the first album that made me realize music existed outside the world of commercial  radio. It led me down the road to the Violent Femmes, the Smiths, the Dead Milkmen, and the Butthole Surfers. I'm not a "music person" anymore—my tastes, sadly, ossified sometime around 1995—but I'll always be grateful to TMBG for making me realize that music could be both smart and funny in a year when the charts (and my brain) were dominated by  Milli Vanilli, Skid Row, and Taylor Dayne.