[f2u] ana ng

TMBG is talking about antipodes. For any place on the Earth’s surface, the antipode is the spot on the opposite side of the globe, which is therefore the spot geographically the furthest away.

When you’re finding the antipode, you’re flipping both the longitude (east/west) AND the latitude (north/south). So if you’re in the United States, your antipode is probably in the Indian Ocean, near Australia.

However, most people forget about flipping north/south. That’s why there’s a common misconception that if you dig a hole straight down in the USA, you’ll hit China.

TMBG are referring to that common mistake, because this song “was written for” Ana Ng, a fictional person living in China. (In fact, TMBG got the name from the New York phone book!) TMBG is aware of that “mistake”, and have joked that actually Ana Ng lives in Vietnam and the singer lives in Peru, since those antipodes would line up properly.

So where did they come up with the idea of shooting a gun to find an antipode? From this Pogo comic strip:

This phrase continues on the idea of antipodes. If one’s apartment was on the exact opposite area of the globe from another person’s it would appear to be upside down due to the earth’s spherical shape.

The Coriolis Effect states that the direction of the Earth’s rotation affects the direction that air and water rotate. The effect is a pretty strong influence for wind patterns, but it’s far too weak to influence water in a sink.

Water spiraling out of a sink also continues the surreal imagery of a bullet firing through the earth.

Playing a record backwards gives the music an otherworldly, distant sound. Additionally, playing a record backwards makes it unintelligible to the listener, much like Ana’s Chinese tongue would be to most Americans.

There’s a name for it as a recording technique. It’s called backmasking, and it’s the deliberate process of recording a sound or message that was recorded backwards onto a track that is meant to be played forwards.

It’s also another reference to the Coriolis effect, where things are seemingly backwards from his viewpoint on the opposite side of the world.

An allusion to the song Dizzy by Tommy Roe, possibly tying into the spinning of the backwards record and water spiraling out of the sink:

I’m so dizzy, my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool, it never ends.

Ana Ng is a hard name to pronounce. If you’re doing it in the original Cantonese, it would be something like “A-na Dong”. But TMBG heard an Americanized version of the name, which thus sounds like this:

The singer thinks he Ana Ng are soulmates yet they’ve never actually met. For all he knows she’s on the opposite side of the planet (hence the first verse.)

This line suggests the singer has serious doubts about whether or not he and Ana Ng have a future together, i.e. if there actually is a him for her, and that the singer is mostly trying to say what he thinks would be appropriate if that were the case (but without certainty).

Another interpretation is that he may not even know if this person exists. Note that we never get any indication of any interaction between our unreliable narrator and Ana Ng. She may be an embodiment of his desire for love, and his fear that they may never meet, or even exist in the first place, lending a dark(er) meaning to the rest of the chorus.

John really did attend the ‘64 World’s Fair as a child. He recalled mishearing the dolls at the Disney exhibit as singing “small girl after all”, when in fact they were singing the now-iconic “it’s a small world after all”. This sets up the theme that continues through the next few lines of not completely remembering events correctly.

The phrase “it’s a small world” is also used when you meet someone unexpectedly, or when two people discover they both know a third person in different ways. This ties into the overall theme that our narrator is just waiting to meet Ana Ng by coincidence, and that it could happen at any time.

While the narrator mentions there are eighty dolls, the original World’s Fair attraction had 302!

The dolls are also described as “yelling” instead of singing, which gives the whole sequence a nightmarish sense of dread that the narrator has possibly missed his chance to meet Ana Ng (who may or may not have been sitting on that park bench). Our narrator isn’t alone in his fear of “it’s a small world” – many visitors think it is unnervingly creepy.

Dupont, a chemical company, had a pavillion at the 1964 World’s Fair that featured exhibits like this one, “The Wonderful World of Chemistry”.

http://youtu.be/wQCKqDJksuE

In this instance, it could refer not to chemistry as science, but the chemistry between two people who like each other.

This implies a missed connection that the singer thinks must have been significant enough to use Sherlock Holmes-esque observational reasoning to conclude must have happened. This underscores the generally doubtful & pessimistic tone in this song about “true love”.

Going off of the connection between Dupont (a chemical manufacturer) and the concept of “chemistry” in relationships, this also seems to insinuate that the singer & Ana might have had chemistry together, making the missed connection more poignant.

This was also a reference to the fact that both Johns had been to the ‘64 World’s Fair before they knew each other. Perhaps Ana Ng is a metaphor for their unlikelihood of their friendship, and that there’s an alternate reality that they never crossed paths again after the World’s Fair.

Life circumstances keep preventing the singer from finding Ana Ng. He’s at a bus station about to talk to her on the phone, presumably to find out where she is so he can take a bus to her, when the storm disconnects the phone line. The storm causes some faint noise to come through the bus station speakers, which he hallucinates as the vocalizations of his doubts.

A double joke, referring to this song itself:

1. It refers to how Ana Ng and the singer are on opposite sides of the globe. On the album, this line gets delivered through a distorted phone connection by friend-of-the-band Lisa Klapp.
2. Musicians call this part of a song the “bridge”, when the music suddenly progresses into a slightly different chord, only to hop back to the original chord. Hence, any line that they sing during the bridge is a line “on a bridge.”

This line may be an implication that the singer is planning to leave their home, or even their country, to search for Ana “there”.

China is pretty well known for being very humid!

During these lines, the band gets “stuck” on the same notes, just like when an old-fashioned vinyl record gets a broken groove and repeats itself.

This line sums up the whole song. Throughout the story, the narrator struggles with the existence of his soulmate, Ana Ng. At this point in time he understands that there is no way of knowing whether or not she really exists; and in doing so, stumbles upon a fundamental truth of the universe: Often times what humans recognize as truth turn out to be completely wrong (ex. The earth was once accepted as flat until new discoveries proved otherwise).