| Monday, March 4, 2002 |
15:05 - Weird Al: Prey of the iPod
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On the way up to the slopes, we listened to my entire Peter Gabriel collection through a Radio Shack tape adapter connected to my iPod; the sound quality was actually quite good, especially compared to my past experiences with tape adapters. And on the way home, we listened to all my Weird Al Yankovic albums, from UHF through Running With Scissors-- the only glitch in the setup being that the tape deck would inexplicably change direction every time it detected more than about two seconds of silence between songs (which, on some albums, means that it goes clack-clack between every two tracks).
But there's another, more subtle downside. With all of an artist's albums available to play in a long, unbroken playlist, the artist's whole oeuvre is laid bare for the eye to scour: not just the good stuff, but the bad stuff as well. I never bothered to take out the "dud" songs from my Weird Al playlist-- it just plays those four or five albums one after another-- and the result is like a concert that's run by a record-label marketdroid, where the dud songs are given equal billing with the headliners.
I don't have any of the "classic" Weird Al albums-- the 80s stuff, done when he looked like he was in his twenties, the era of "Y-O-D-A" and "Fat"-- the songs that people still think of first when they hear the name Weird Al. The albums that I have are his most recent ones, the ones done where he looks like he's in his twenties. The 90s era. The spoofs of songs that I actually recognized as part of pop culture. And, unfortunately, the source of a good number of dud songs.
My brother had a tape of Off the Deep End back in 1992 or so-- it was the age of Wayne's World, of grunge rock, of Desert Storm, of New Kids on the Block, of MC Hammer. It was a rich musical and cultural landscape, back when even the ciphers of pop had personality. (You could always make fun of NKotB, but what fun is it to mock N'Sync? It's like kicking a sand castle.) And so Weird Al's take on the era was a pretty good one: "Smells Like Nirvana" became nicely un-PC to play in Cobain drag after the spoofee killed himself, but Al did it anyway. "Trigger Happy" is deliciously satisfying to play at easily offended gun fanciers. And the rest of the album is equally inspired, too, with spoofs a-plenty ("The White Stuff" and "Can't Watch This" being just as straight-up and workmanlike as the songs they derived from, which I'm sure was part of the point) and classics like "When I was Your Age" and "You Don't Love Me Anymore". It's a good album-- a product of its age, with only a couple of forgettable entries ("Airline Amy" and "I Was Only Kidding" being the kind that just seem to drag interminably).
The next album, however, Alapalooza, signalled a worrying decline. There were some hits-- "Jurassic Park" and "Achy Breaky Song" were rich and tasty earfuls of pop-culture sendup that helped to assuage a high-schooler who had yet even to be assaulted by the Macarena, and "Livin' in the Fridge" was inspired, top-notch work. The songs were big, loud, brash, powerful, energetic-- again, just like the age it came from, when the cultural landscape was becoming more restless and agitated. The President was a permissive Democrat. Movies' special effects (see Jurassic Park and Terminator 2) were true-to-life, blurring the edges of reality. The Simpsons and Beavis & Butt-head had brought sharp, offensive social commentary into prime time and banished the staid prudishness of the Bush era, and Weird Al's satirical music had to expand to fit. But more so than the hits, the "filler" of Alapalooza was what had grown. "Traffic Jam" and "She Never Told Me She Was a Mime" were forgettable, and "Young, Dumb & Ugly" was just bad-- possibly one of Al's worst songs ever, with a weak premise and no melody to speak of. But the album limps to a thumbs-up on the strength of its originals-- "Waffle King" as a "Sledgehammer" style-sendup, and "Frank's 2000-inch TV" a nice silly classic-- and the closer, "Bohemian Polka", a stroke of genius.
But when it comes to Bad Hair Day, oh man-- what a disappointment. This has to have been the low point in Al's career. While the lead-off track, "Amish Paradise", is some of his best work ever, the rest of the album spirals rapidly down into the land of oatmeal, rice, breadcrumbs, and whatever else fills in the cracks when there's not enough prime cuts to go around. Now, "Gump" is brilliant, "Cavity Search" is a cynical, growly glimmer of the pop awareness of his previous albums, and "Since You've Been Gone" has that bizarre doo-wop-chorus-that-gets-away-from-him thing in the middle that's got to be one of the most inspired bits of lunacy I've ever heard out of Al. The harmonized "Loser" segment on "The Alternative Polka" is so very-very tasty. But "Callin' In Sick", "I'm Sick of You", "Syndicated Inc.", "I Remember Larry", and "Phony Calls" are all so worthless that Al should be ashamed of releasing this CD. That's what, twenty minutes of garbage-- uninspired, asymmetrical, open-ended, unbalanced pieces of desperation flailing for a grip on something in pop culture to use as an anchor. It's like Al was trying to reach back to his success of the 80s at the same time as he tried to grasp the unnerving subtleties of the 1996 music scene-- an unfamiliar place where ska and swing jostled for the spotlight, "alternative" had splintered, and "rock" in the traditional sense had dissolved almost completely into gutless R&B or experimental Madonna pop. Small wonder Weird Al had no idea what to make of it all. Even the closer, "The Night Santa Went Crazy", ordinarily something that would absolve the disc of turdiness, is hamstrung by censorship: the track most people have is the one where Santa is merely sent to federal prison, rather than felled by a sniper bullet to the head. A wimpy, halfhearted whimper of an end for an album that didn't have much going for it anyway.
But then something happened in 1999: Running With Scissors. Where the hell did this come from? Here we'd thought Weird Al was dead, gone to that great musical graveyard that had swallowed Tom Petty and Huey Lewis alike, the Pit of 80s Greatness from which no modern artist has escaped. But this album is great. It's fantastic. I'd thought it was really good when I first got it, but I didn't know if that was just because it was new; well, now it's not, and I know for sure: it's what makes up for all the previous albums' mediocrity.
The first thing one notices is that this album quite possibly has more words on it than any other album, by him or by any other artist. Between "Jerry Springer", "The Saga Begins", "Your Horoscope For Today", and "Albuquerque", the traditional CD liner couldn't hold all the lyrics that Al traditionally includes, and he had to cop-out at the end with a smirk ("Maybe we should have used a smaller font or something..."). It's like he went from singing like a Disney heroine to singing like an auctioneer. And that doesn't even address the quality of the tracks, which is unmatched by anything else of his in my possession. "The Saga Begins", of course, is the deserving headliner; but no less noteworthy are "It's All About the Pentiums", "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi", and "Jerry Springer"-- all reflecting the newfound complexity of the musical scene, what with Barenaked Ladies and Eminem shaking up the genre boundaries with forceful statements of purpose that don't leave anybody but the traditionalist pundits confused. "Germs" is something I never thought I'd see-- a Nine Inch Nails parody-- and "Your Horoscope For Today" is USDA Prime Weird Al-- stuffed so full of great gags and musical tricks that I never tire of hearing it and never chest-slap past it when my iPod picks it for me. "The Weird Al Show Theme" is a ton of fun, as is "Truck Drivin' Song" (an instant classic among my social circle), and "Albuquerque" finishes out the album with a style and energy that I didn't think Al had in him anymore, not since "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota". What was it? Was it just shaving his moustache that did the trick? What's his secret? The only forgettable parts of the album are "Grapefruit Diet" (which is actually fairly ambitious, heading back to big-band jazz for its musical substrate) and, surprisingly, "Polka Power"-- his polkas seldom miss. But this one does, I think. Maybe only because I don't know most of the songs in it, but still. Eh.
At any rate, it's now three years later, which means it's about time for a new Weird Al album to appear. I don't know if he can possibly top Running With Scissors, but I'd love to see him try. Even if he fails, it's bound to be a good ride-- because it's now clear that he's nowhere near on his way down. He's only just now hitting his stride.
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