No!

In 2015, Flansburgh and Linnell spoke to Spin about their albums to that point. Here’s what they said about this album:

Linnell:

I learned this anecdotally from a lot of people, that what we were doing, a lot of people thought it was appropriate to play for their kids amongst the things in their record collection. That started pretty early on, even as much as we thought we were investigating the darkest and weirdest territories of adult subjects. It’s funny to me, the thing about “Particle Man” is that we had heard this recording of, like, school children singing, and then you notice there is this line, “Does he feel totally worthless?” and it sounds really jarring coming out of a kid’s mouth.

What you described as the “variety-pack” feel of many TMBG albums was probably good for kids because they get to access all these different kinds of music and instruments in one place.

Linnell:

There’s a thing about doing music for kids, where you are in this extremely privileged position of introducing types of music to kids who have never heard them before. We gave ourselves that freedom on No! just to do like, a total funk track or whatever. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial thing to do. But at the time it also seemed like we were going out on a limb by not doing songs that were in any way remedial. We’re not trying to educate or improve children at all.

Flansburgh:

Kids aren’t really that much better off after hearing our music.