Friday Night Videos

"Weird Al" Yankovic is back with a new song. He's been mostly quiet on the new music front for a decade now, which is kinda hard to fathom considering how reliable his output has been since releasing "My Bologna" back in 1979. Fittingly, "Polkamania!" is one of his pop hit/polka mashups that have become highlights of his albums starting with "Polkas on 45" on In 3-D from 1984. I'm hardly an authority on all things Al, but I do believe this is the first time one of his polka medleys has come out as a single. If you're not familiar with the formula, Al takes a verse from a popular song then sets it to a polka arrangement--it's not unlike what Postmodern Jukebox does, albeit without the polka. The accompanying video itself is a masterpiece of surreal dada excess. Muppet Al dancing with muppet yetis is an image I'll not soon forget.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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Friday Night Videos

I know most Weird Al Yankovic fans go nuts over "The Night Santa Went Crazy," but for my money nothing will ever touch his insanely cheerful holiday ode to nuclear annihilation, "Christmas at Ground Zero."

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Jill Sobule.

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Friday Night Videos

Less than 24 hours following the third and final presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, "Weird Al" Yankovic not only produces a parody song about it titled "Bad Hombres/Nasty Women," but he produces a full-blown video to accompany it. The man is a maniac. Thank goodness he only uses his powers for good.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Moody Blues.

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Friday Night Videos

In observance of "Weird Al" Yankovic's most excellent Mandatory Tour (which I review here) today I feature one of the best songs off his latest album, Mandatory Fun. Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" had a catchy R&B vibe going that I loved (which makes sense, since he lifted it from the great Marvin Gaye), but the misogynistic lyrics--not to mention video--made my skin crawl. To say that Weird Al became my savior with "Word Crimes" is a little overboard, but it's not coincidence he hit the top 40 with the parody. It's an incredibly clever grammar lesson, touching on many of my personal peeves. I rank it right up there with "Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me" as message music for our modern times.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Whitehorse.

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Mandatory Fun

I became a "Weird Al" Yankovic fan in junior high--pretty much the same as every other Weird Al fan. "Eat It" had just come out, and the very concept of a song parody was novel to us--much less his scene-by-scene remake of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video. Classmates--and I'm talking the cool kids, not just the geeky types like me--were transcribing the lyrics from the radio and passing them around in class. Follow that up with "I Lost on Jeopardy" and I was hooked. I tracked down his debut album and did a killer record mime to "Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung" that even won me a trophy in speech and drama competition. Then came Dare to be Stupid and Polka Party and Even Worse. When I got to college I hit that stage where I thought I'd outgrown him, but then Yankovic unleashed "Smells Like Nirvana" I just about injured myself laughing so hard.

Which is a long way of saying it's inexplicable that I hadn't actually seen him in concert until last night in San Antonio's Majestic Theatre. We gave Bug tickets for his birthday back in the spring, as my son--an aspiring class clown--professes that Weird Al is his hero. He's 9 years old, which is pretty much a great age to get hooked on parody. Having been a fan for decades, I thought I knew what to expect. Boy, was I wrong. Weird Al is wildly entertaining in person. His videos and television and movie appearances are amusing, but don't convey his showmanship and sense of timing. The Wife, who likes some of his parodies but is hardly a fan, laughed nearly continuously from start to finish in spite of herself. A friend visiting from Australia (who had only passing familiarity with him) went along as we had an extra ticket, and afterward admitted she hadn't expected to enjoy herself but was, in the end, blown away.

I'm not going into a exhaustive set list here, but there are some highlights I have to share. Yankovic started the concert over in the adjacent Empire Theatre, singing "Tacky" to an empty house. As we watched on the big screen, Weird Al proceeded to dance his way outside and romp down the street in an approximation of his "Tacky" video, getting hilarious double-takes and shouts of excitement from unsuspecting folks he passed on the street. Then he entered the Majestic and romped down the center aisle, and the packed house went nuts. He went into one of his patented polka medleys, "NOW That's What I Call Polka!" and while these are a silly staple on his albums, it reached an unexpected level of hilarity with the original artists' videos playing on the screen behind him.

The point where it really and truly dawned on me how special this show was came during his performance of "Wanna B Ur Lovr." This isn't one of my favorites. Yes, I can see the amusing nature of the tone-deaf would-be Cassanova lines, but otherwise it does nothing for me. I normally skip over it when I'm listening to his Poodle Hat album. But live... holy cow! He wears a suit decked out in flames with a fedora, and proceeds to grind and slink his way into the audience with such narcissistic machismo that I actually started crying I was laughing so hard. Seriously, it was one of the higher points in a show filled with many high points.

I want to point out here something that is normally overlooked by people--including myself--discussing Weird Al, and that is his attention to musicianship. His band has been together for decades, and they're tight. I mean, really tight. They were a well-oiled machine, and the ease with which they slipped between musical genres doesn't come through on studio albums, but was obvious live. It's not just a funny band, it's a good band, period. Nowhere is this more evident than during the acoustic set in the middle of the show, itself a parody of the old VH1 "Unplugged" series. They even open with Eric Clapton's infamous slow, bluesy version of "Layla," only Weird Al substitutes the lyrics to "Eat It." It shouldn't have worked, but it does. They continue with unpluggified versions of "I Lost on Jeopardy" and "Like a Surgeon" and it's kind of amazing how they make all these parody songs work even though they no longer sound musically at all like the songs they originally parodied. And then there's the legendary "Yoda" chant, a tiny, simplified fraction of which can be experienced here. Again, that doesn't do it justice. Even though the chant is composed in large part by fragments and snippets of other songs, choruses and onomatopoeia, the complexity and harmony and dissonance and unison delivery was a thing to behold--even if it was baffling and incomprehensible. I'm sure there are Weird Al superfans out there who've memorized it all, but the original composition and arrangement of such a Frankenstein's monster of an a capella piece takes a certain kind of insane genius I don't think the world has seen before outside of Frank Zappa. And I don't think Zappa himself ever pulled off something quite like this.

The new songs stood up well to the classics. The video clips he ran between costume changes were funny and kept the show moving at a nice clip. Afterwards I realized there was almost none of the normal on-stage chit-chat you usually get with live concerts, but then again Weird Al's been doing this a long time. His show was tightly choreographed and had very little flab. He was there to entertain, and in that he succeeded.

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Friday Night Videos

"Weird Al" Yankovic has a new album out, which is reason for celebration. Of all the tracks, "Word Crimes" has got to be my favorite, but while the animated video is clever, it's can't quite match the shameless lunacy of "Tacky."

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Hall & Oates.

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Friday Night Videos

Because middle school and elementary school have substantially different start times, this year I find myself driving Monkey Girl in the mornings (since middle school is on my way to work) while The Wife takes Fairy Girl and Bug to elementary. The one-on-one time with Monkey Girl is interesting. Sometimes we discuss news stories we hear on NPR. Sometimes we discuss daily events in our lives. Sometimes she just tunes me out and reads. But today we had a genuine bonding experience. I played her "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Smells Like Nirvana" and she found it absolutely hilarious. Not Kure Kure Takora hilarious, mind you, but then again, what is?



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Eddie Money.

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Friday Night Videos

This is the genius of "Weird" Al Yankovic. It's like he has been spying on me for the past decade, and stealing all my best rants. The Snopes urban legend debunking? Yeah, that's me. I'm so merciless with people who forward that kind of crap without taking 10 seconds to check if it's legit or not (hint, a scathing "reply all" with links debunking the B.S. works great) that happily a bunch of people now go out of their way to not email me. Which makes me very happy indeed. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this is, without a doubt, my favorite Weird Al song of all time. Yeah, ranking higher than even "White & Nerdy" and "Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung." And doggone it, the wordplay and animation in the video is inspired as well. Enjoy, and remember, "Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me" is not just a catchy song, it's a call to action.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Nick Gilder.

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