Ahem. Now that I have bravely traveled BACK THROUGH TIME to put right what once went wrong and hit "Edit" on a post where I once hit "Quote", let's get back to the thread, shall we?
I would probably agree that Particle Man is the worst single but not the worst song overall. The problem with TMBG is decided what counts. Spider? Fingertips? To the Bubblecraft?
This is entirely a valid point. It's an open question what constitutes "good" and "bad" in their discography, and it seems to depend heavily on which album you started listening to. (See the thousands of wildly contradictory reviews of
John Henry and every album after it, for example. I think at this point I've seen reviews for every album between
Apollo 18 and
The Spine, inclusive, proclaiming the album either The Crowning Artistic Masterwork of Their Careers or The Bitter Fruits of TMBG's Final Sell-Out.) It doesn't help that you still have things like "Fingertips" that might not even be songs.
Objectively, I think "Particle Man" is not great music but is fairly fun as novelty tracks go. As TMBG tracks go, I think it's a cute one-off and part of why
Flood is an interesting album. As a summation of TMBG's career, I'd be hard-pressed to find a song that does it more poorly than "Particle Man." Sigh.