TISM - Style

Style

TISM are distinguished from other 'joke' or 'gimmick bands', by, among other things, their musical style. The band has rarely in any seriousness stated actual influences on the type of music they play, except that The Residents were a band which TISM 'did' notice and 'possibly' took some influence from. Though a clear link can be drawn from The Residents' The Third Reich 'n' Roll video, in which the band wore Ku Klux Klan uniforms made of newspaper: TISM did exactly this at their first gig. Another link may be drawn to early TISM tracks "The Ballad Of The Semitic Nazi" or "I'm Gonna Treat Ya To A Neitschze Double Feature" (sic) which use a similar naming convention to The Residents. Other bands which may have influenced TISM are difficult to pinpoint.

The band has been criticised as unoriginal for continually opting for standard pop song structures. One reason for this is clarified in their book, The TISM Guide To Little Aesthetics, in the following paragraphs, when asked why their ideas are post-modern but their music is not:

"Give me a pop-song, mate. Give me a fucking pop-song. Not only is it more fun, it's pretty fuckin' hard to write as well. You can bung in as many out-of-tune oboes as you want, but putting chords together so they sound pleasant isn't as simple as it might appear. It mightn't be the Sistine Chapel, but what is? Ollie fucking Olsen with his stupid feedback and cough mixture? The Jesus and Mary Chain, with their stupid feedback, and their stupid stage show with 800 powerful stupid lights and enough stupid dry ice to enhance their stupid stupidity up its own bullshit crappy teenage pretentious one dimensional dick witted puissant artistic enigma?

So ... what have you listened to for a good time that isn't, after all, a 'traditional' song? Still playing the Mike Oldfield records, huh? Still whipping Yessongs on for a good time? Wanna count on one hand how many people have fun at a Sonic Youth gig? I'm not supporting The Choirboys, old man, I'm just saying that the day some jumped-up over-paid self-important post-modernist cocksucker puts his foot upon his Fairlight computer in the middle of his 47 minute opus "The Silent Forgiveness Of The Pig-God" and belts out the chords to "Johnny B. Goode" is the day I'll join you at the footlights of post-modernism.

Besides which, pop songs sell more."

As with most bands, recurring themes are present throughout TISM's extensive output, the most common being death, violence, fame and prominent figures, drugs, including alcohol, and the AFL. Many of TISM's lyrics are tinged in fatalism, mocking both the superficial and the sublime side of the human condition and the desire for people to be loved and respected (even just in the titles of such songs as "If You're Not Famous At Fourteen, You're Finished", "If You're Ugly, Forget It" and "Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me").