Weird Al is the end-all, be-all best. Sadly, growing up in VT, the concert scene doesn’t get to us much…but I did get to see him in concert once! He came to Memorial Auditorium in Burlington, VT during his Running with Sciccors tour. I went with about 15 of my friends. We are all huge geeks, especially when it comes to Weird Al. BEST CONCERT EVER!
Nah, it was because CBS forced him to shoehorn “educational themes” into it. Al’s original idea of an anything-goes variation of *Pee Wee’s Playhouse[/I[ would have worked better.
Though I can’t believe Al got Bare Naked Ladies on the show – I would’ve thought the censors would’ve niced the band just for the name alone…
I like to think that the meaning of life can be summed this way:
You can be a Coffee Achiever
Or you can sit around the house
and watch ‘Leave it to Beaver’
The future’s up to you
So what you gonna do?
Dare to be stupid
Dare to be stupid
That’s got such . . . meaning, man!
Al threw me into a major fit of laughing the first time I heard his “Hooked on Polkas.” Some friends were giving me a ride from class to my apartment and this came on the tape, and the mix of classic rocks songs to a polka beat left me helpless in the back seat.
I think he should release an album full of his Polka Medlies.
One of my favorite sadistic songs of his is “Trigger Happy”. I have been finding myself growing fond of his lesser known works such as “I Think I’m a Clone Now” and “Midnight Star” (although “Midnight Star” was THE song for me about six years ago). Sometimes his original work is BETTER than his parodies. I always get people (like my cousin) who say, “Weird Al rips off other people. He never writes anything by himself. He has to take the ideas of others.” How ignorant these people are! I mean, c’mon. “Franks 2000 Inch TV”? A classic!
The fact that anyone can propose this topic without a hint of irony is a sad commentary on the depths to which humor has fallen.
Yankovic is merely mildly talented. Allan Sherman was ten times better, Larry Siegel and Frank Jacobs (to whom Yankovic owes everything), even better than that. Hell, the Capitol Steps have whipped Yankovic at his own game.
Yankovic doesn’t even deserve mention next to these people. His work is stupid and puerile and lacks the slightest cleverness, going only for the most tired and obvious variations. He is a lame follower of much greater talents, and, sadly, people think his weak lyrics and dumb concepts are somehow funny, mostly because they’ve never actually heard someone who knows how to do it right.
Oh, blome Chuck. You come and piss on any literary/arts thread that dosen’t meet your own “high standard of art” and it got real old years ago. Just because you published one sci/fi book dosen’t make you the arbiter of all things artistic., even if you are “published”. Big deal, so was Madonna.
The first live concert I went to was a Weird Al concert in the wake of his “3-D” album and I have all his CD’s. I say this not to illustrate what a loser I am, but to lend credence to any comments I make…
Wierd Al is extremely uneven.
There are songs that are truly brilliant. “Christmas at Ground Zero” is a masterful blending of the “happiest time of the year” with the worst moment anyone could dread. “Happy Birthday” is unusually cynical and would be an excellent punk song if the accordian didn’t completely kick it out of that genre. “Buy Me a Condo” is high irony in it’s tale of a rastafarian turning his life 180 degrees into American suburbia. And the parodies where he openly mocks the source material (This Song’s Just Six Words Long, Achy Breaky Song) sharply articulates the masses collective feelings for those songs.
On the other hand, parodies like “I Want a New Duck” and “The White Stuff,” where he does little more than switch out rhyming words with no effort at satire or humor leave a lot to be desired. Even his original compositions that generally more consistent than the parodies can fall flat (Airline Amy, Young Dumb and Ugly). “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” has an excellent title, but he doesn’t take it anywhere.
For better or for worse, he has maintained a steady audience for twenty years… that’s a lot more than can be said for most bands.
Hey you! I agree completely. Some of his songs lay down and die, while others are extremely clever. Someone should come up with a box set and call it “The Better Half of Weird Al.”
And why should being inspired by others count against him? Any writer who’s worth a damn recognizes that he didn’t create the world by himself, but that to reach his lofty heights, stood on the shoulders of far better writers.
“Eat It” for example, is a Mad magazine parody brought to life. Does that make it any less funny? Absolutely not. Al mimics the form perfectly, but he added to it as well with his lyrics and his “White man can’t dance” aping of Michael Jackson.
And “Dare to be Stupid” apes Devo with very little borrowing from them. It takes talent to write and produce a Devo song that parallels, but rarely copies, the original.
Could you have heard “Gangster’s Paradise” and visualize the Amish instead of Boys in the Hood? To take “Ricky” and pop in “I Love Lucy” and create a video that captures the show without sneering at it? Or combine the Brady Bunch lyrics with the Safety Dance?
If it was this easy, wouldn’t there be more people doing it?