But it's time to get down to business, students. It's time we tackled some Weird Al original songs.
First thing we discuss after going over the syllabus is that half of Al's songs are not parodies. Every other song on every album is a song he wrote the music for. These are, usually, "style parodies," written to sound like a particular band or maybe just to fit into a genre.
Let's begin.
Would you care for a song about an internal organ, written in the style of the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys? Of course you would. ("Pancreas," 2006)
How about a song written only in palindromes? ("Bob," 2003)
Al admits that "One More Minute" (1985) is about a real breakup--I don't know what it says about me as a person that I think that makes it funnier.
"Truck Drivin' Song" (1999) may not even be the best original song on Running with Scissors, but it's the only Weird Al song (I can think of) that features steel guitar.
Finally, if I had to pick a favorite Weird Al song, this is it: the "Generic Blues." (1989)
1. Bear with me on this train of thought: I've mentioned a webcomic I read sometimes, Diesel Sweeties. One of the major characters of Diesel Sweeties is Red Robot (his mission is, in his words, to "crush all hu-mans"). The writer of Diesel Sweeties is now selling a Red Robot book, and in conjunction with the book, a Red Robot stuffed toy. And that Red Robot stuffed toy is handmade by ladies in Bangladesh hired through a fair trade organization (which pays them 25% more than Bangladesh's minimum wage and allows them to find wage-paying work without leaving their homes for slums in cities). Which is pretty cool.
3. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that many of you won't like this one. (I told Nancy about it earlier today and she flipped out a little bit.) I'm not sure I like it. All I know is that it's strangely fascinating, and I looked at several pages of it before I could tear myself away. Why?
The deal is, people send in photos that feature a man and also a baby. Then the dudes at ManBabies use photoshop to switch the heads of the man and the baby. Ta-da! It's creepy!
Three categories here: Guitar Hero, How I Met Your Mother, and Weird Al.
I've downloaded several songs that I enjoy playing on Guitar Hero, the most recent of which are Wolfmother's "Woman"
Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla"
and the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane." (Sorry, there was nothing they would let me embed that wasn't a live show accompanied by an orchestra, footage from Guitar Hero, or a small child playing bass over a cassette tape.)
That last one doubles as a How I Met Your Mother song--there's an episode where Barney has a mix CD, and as he explains, his mix CD philosophy is not that it should rise and fall. It should be "all rise!" I found a playlist of this CD through an old link to the CBS website, which is how I knew that "Rock You Like a Hurricane" was on there. The only song they play on the show is Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name." (Ditto on the embedding problem, except replace "small child with a bass over a cassette tape" with "clips from NCIS for some reason.")
Because when you hear those first few lines? How can you not get pumped?!
In a different, and possibly the greatest ever, episode of HIMYM ("Slap Bet"), it is discovered that Robin was a teen singing sensation in her native Canada. I had to download the song from the fantastic music video:
Finally, Weird Al has a new single out (well, fairly new to me--I forgot to check his website for quite a while). Like his best songs, it gets ever funnier as it goes along.
A&E will be premiering its Weird Al Biography special on October 11 at 10 PM Eastern.
Awesome! This should be a good replacement for that VH1 Behind the Music from 1999 or so that still ends with mild sadness that he's single. Because now he's got him a wife and a bebbe and everything.
Now I just have to con someone with cable into letting me watch it. Yay!
and Ozzy Osbourne (if you're anything like me, you're going to notice HOW MUCH BETTER Weird Al has aged than Ozzy has. Wow. Testament to clean living, right there.)
And you've watched the "White and Nerdy" video, right? Well, watching it four or seven more times will be good for you.
"Your Lambeau Field pictures were awfully neat-o, Rachel," I can hear you saying (you sound like The Beaver today, for some reason) "but why did you go to Green Bay?"
Only, gentle readers, for one of the best reasons EVER!
WEIRD AL!
Yes, that's right. My gentleman caller escorted me to the Oneida Casino in Green Bay so we could take in a concert of that excellent showman, "Weird Al" Yankovic.
(Side note: the casino gave us each a $5 gambling voucher. When we went up to the cash place [I'm not very casino-savvy], we discovered that this meant they just handed us a $5 bill. Neal and I each played $2 worth of slot machines, and I won $2, meaning that together we came out $8 ahead. That's a victory, baby!)
As usual, Weird Al put on a great show. Some of my personal favorite highlights were:
. . . the medley, which is always great. This time, there was only one song in there that was completely new to me (only because he hasn't released it at all, of course), but it was hilarious enough that I'm not complaining. You know that song "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)"? No? Well, there is one. (Don't worry, it's as unintentionally humorous as you're hoping.) For the appropriately curious, Al's version starts at the 3:20 mark in this 10-minute long clip (which is only one glorious half of the medley).
(In Green Bay, the version of "Headline News" he follows with was about Paris Hilton, not Britney Spears.)
. . . "You're Pitiful." Not only is the song really funny to begin with, he performed a many-layered version of it. (I'm pretty sure I made a really, really weak pun right there.) The video clip below doesn't have the whole song, but it does catch the part that most catered to those of us who knew the backstory on the song.
(I hope you could read that first shirt [bizarrely, pirated concert footage on YouTube doesn't have the best picture quality]; if not, it's "Atlantic Records Sucks." It got a big crowd reaction, I tell you what.)
. . . the encore. Now, I got pretty scared about an hour and fifteen minutes into the concert. Why? Because Al's keyboardist, Ruben Valtierra, came out in his Emperor Palpatine robes. "Oh no!" I thought, "is Al sick? Does his voice hurt, so he's wrapping up the show early? Does he hate Green Bay? Why is this happening? Why, God, why?" Or something to that effect.
You see, at my previous four Weird Al concerts, his two Star Wars songs ("The Saga Begins" and "Yoda") served as his encore. They always closed the show for good. But then I realized that Al hadn't even sung "White and Nerdy" yet, and clearly, even if he was going to shorten the show for some apocalyptic reason, he would have kept in his latest, most successful song.
So then, after the Star Wars songs had been done and the concert continued on its merry way, the question in the back of my mind was, what would the encore be?
Now to set up the joke. (Man, this is really involved.) So, during Al's numerous costume changes, he shows clips from all kinds of stuff--his cameo in The Naked Gun, "educational" film strips from The Weird Al Show, etc.
One of the bits he showed started at about the one minute mark (and ends at about the two) of his AlTV "interview" with Michael Stipe:
I was fairly delighted at this, because that was the AlTV I watched over and over and over and over, and I really liked that song. Not two weeks ago was I singing it to myself in the shower, in fact. (He also showed the "truck backing up" part, which is irrelevant. But still funny.)
So, after he had fake-closed the show with "Fat" (as usual) he comes back out and does this shtick:
I had heard of this joke before; in the example I had heard of, Al had pretended he was going to sing a particular song the crowd really wanted to hear, but then he launched into his all-time so-awful-it-comes-back-around-to-kind-of-awesome non-hit "Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung," and I briefly thought (before he busted into "Cell Phones") that that's what he was going to play. I was excited at this prospect. However, I had only remembered the setup--buildup for a lame song--without remembering the payoff. You see, dear friends, the example I had read about of him doing this? Was at a concert he played in Albuquerque. So the song the crowd had wanted to hear? Was "Albuquerque."
Never had I truly believed I would ever be so lucky as to hear Weird Al play "Albuquerque" in concert. But I was! I totally was!
The newest Teen Girl Squad over at homestarrunner.com contains a Weird Al reference. The first person to spot it (and leave me a comment about it--here's hoping people are still reading this blog after my summer hiatus) wins a virtual cookie!
Rachel: I am very enthusiastic. I am such a nerd that I love reading, school, and was once on Jeopardy!. I am a Fightin' Texas Aggie. Many of the actions of historical figures make me laugh. "Weird Al" Yankovic is my hero.
Neal: In addition to being an Eagle Scout and a real-life Kentucky Colonel, Neal graduated from the University of Tennessee after reading a lot about history. Now, he is studying even more history at the University of Wisconsin.
We met at the University of Wisconsin and then a couple of years later we got married in Wisconsin. Adventurous!
