When we spoke with John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants in 2011, he told us: "I think everybody in the world has had an experience kind of like that. It's really about the problem of just getting through the world and understanding how prejudice exists in the world. You can't confront every person who's making an ass of themselves. But there are times when you want to. So it's really about a subtler idea than over-the-top expressions of race hate. It's more just about the culture."
Flansburgh wasn't actually at a party when the events in the song happened. He explains: "I think anybody has had that - you go somewhere, you go to a dinner party, you go to a regular party, you go hang out with distant relatives, whatever, you're going to experience people making casual weird comments, unexamined comments that you wish they would examine. That's now the world we live in. And I think in a way the song's kind of just venting."
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