Finally Getting It

The Saga Begins

I am walking up to the open door of the comic shop on the last day of spring break when I feel the impulse to listen to the music of Weird Al. I have nothing of his saved, so I search him up and settle on his 1999 album Running With Scissors. As good a place as any to start, I put in my ‘Pods and hear the opening words of “American Pie,” Don McLean’s oft-played paean to the American ‘60s. But check the title. It doesn’t register, and it’s quickly apparent we’re not lamenting Altamont. When I tapped his profile, I knew I’d be listening to something non-serious—it’s his whole schtick: taking established material and then reworking the lyrics to humorous effect. But his tone toward Star Wars, specifically The Phantom Menace, was straightforward, respectful even. I listened on while I wandered through aisles of resin statues and massive, two-hundred dollar trades and was taken back to my nascent, short-lived Star Wars fandom. The song ends. No funny stuff, and it sounds the same as the original. While I like the tune, arrangement and instrumentation of “American Pie,” I had come to regard it some time ago as rambly and overwrought, a message for another generation. McLean’s painted thumb on the cover of my dad’s vinyl. And I’m manifestly not a fan of the target material.

But I was surprised and impressed. I even enjoyed it. I mean, the first words of each version are identical, but carry way more weight in the latter. To have been the one to see the play on “Anakin” as well as the rhyming second syllable of “Jedi,” and connect them to such a sacred cow is pretty special, in my opinion. As an aside, Weird Al stated that he scoured the internet, such as it was, while writing “The Saga Begins” for Phantom Menace spoilers and plot points in order to be able to release the song while the film was still in theaters. He may have been treating with two-decade-old source material, but the target subject matter was timelier than anything he’d sent up before.

The track wraps and “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi” comes on. I went with it and got out a couple guffaws while looking through the trades. His Judaic take on Offspring’s try-hard story was hilarious, but I couldn’t tell you of whom he was making fun, if anyone. I mean, the original’s lampoon enough. I’m not all that big a fan, but it does come to mind each time I’ve gotten “ink done,” as it were. And it got me wondering. Is this parody or something more serious? The first was almost an homage—it’s a “Lyrical Adaptation”— and I didn’t detect any ill will in his affected elocution of “Oy gevalt!” in the second. Another parody follows, this one sending up the much played “One Week.” The original went to the top of the charts and stayed for exactly one week, apparently, but had to have still been in the public consciousness when Al released “Jerry Springer” the following summer. The joke in this case, was more on Springer than Ed Robertson and his Barenaked Ladies bandmates. You can hear it. The target material is thoroughly skewered.

I beheld new comics and riffled through boxes of old. I think it was at this point that I decided to play something rather more serious, if memory serves. But not before all of the above had taken me back to my mid-teens and a less-serious time in my life. I left without buying anything. My spring break complete, what I had acquired during this time, was a newfound appreciation for this man’s music. Two weeks out and I still can’t tell you what prompted me to play him.

The three modes he admires the most

Not as sardonic as satire, nor as lacking in goodwill as a lampoon, parodies merely send up source material, utilizing an existing vehicle in order to poke fun. It’s unserious, novelty. Satire, however, is borrowing from one source in order to target something else broader and unrelated. While the former is often goodnatured, laughed off, and a one-off, satire—and it’s older, meaner brother, lampoon (today’s word of the day, I would like to add)—can be biting, indicting, even. After listening to him for two weeks straight and taking in much of his oeuvre, I would say that Weird Al traffics in all three.

It started innocent enough. Weird Al has stated that he began “thinking in those patterns,” of reworking lyrics into something else, when he, “as small child, 8, 9 years old … saw that [he] had rewritten some of the words.” I’m gonna guess it was little more than a mondegreen, those wrongly heard snippets of song lyric that tend to stay even after one reads the liner notes. In Weird, his satirical 2023 biopic, we see young Alfred change the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” to humorous, not-quite-disrespectful effect. He isn’t the only one. Audioslave frontman Chris Cornell misheard something on the radio, which in turn became the phrase “Black Hole Sun.” When I originally heard “Subdivisions by Rush” one dark morning on rock radio, I interpreted the chorus as “become the Picassos.” Not yet a fan, I’d known they were eclectic, and was surely interposing some erudite allusion. I was way off. I’m still impressed that a coworker was able to puzzle out my confused interpretation. And I’ll still sing my own “using love to win the war” when jiving to The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” In the pre-mobile-internet days, I’d write down or otherwise try to memorize something I heard on the radio in order to search it up later. Above all about identifying and finding the song so I could hear it again, matching words from memory to a written record was so spotty that I had little cause to really look into what the singers were actually saying. That I can today Shazam in real time and save to my music library is a privilege whose convenience and efficiency I hope will never diminish. And what about instrumentals? I digress. Singing along with the song that’s playing requires the words, yes, but also that one know them—or not, I guess.

In the music business, covers fall under the “compulsory licensing,” clause which allows for songs to be rerecorded without permission, provided the new take hews close to the artist’s original intent. When once you hear a straightforward cover, you automatically feel this sense of respectful homage. There’s variety, sure, and I can think of only a few outstanding gems that are superior to the original. And while what Al is doing is manifestly not the same as a cover, at the end of the day, it’s almost closer to that than pure parody proper. While Weird Al’s approach, turning the assumed original intent on its head, might fall outside the scope of compulsory licensing, he and his band nonetheless take great pains to recreate the original sound and instrumentation with fidelity. He says that he wants the original artist “in on the joke,” personally reaching out to each to see if they’ll let him rework their material to humorous effect. Most have agreed, some have famously refused, and in some cases he’s done better with his parodies than the original artist. Same goes for the videos. After obtaining Michael Jackson’s blessing to parody both “Beat It” and “Bad,” he was able to work with Michael’s choreographer and given permission to shoot his videos with the same sets for “Eat It” and “Fat,” respectively. Kurt Cobain OK’d “Smells Like Nirvana.” And Al utilized all the same elements from its namesake video—room, dancers, even the actor who portrayed the janitor. He and his crew located the exact spot in the desert where the Red Hot Chili Peppers shot “Give It Away.” And when I read that Mark Knopfler insisted on playing guitar in the “Money for Nothing” parody, my understanding of just what it was Weird Al was doing was overhauled.

His ‘80s MTV ubiquity notwithstanding, my first conscious memory comes from a late-1996 sleepover. My friend’s brother played “Amish Paradise.” I remember getting it. I didn’t know Coolio, though. It was another track off Bad Hair Day, however—“Callin’ in Sick”—that had the greater impact on my adolescent mind. Something about the way Al brashly intones the title, no doubt riffing off Kurt Cobain, that comes to mind each time I’ve called in sick—because it’s the only time I’ve ever heard the phrase sung. “A lot of my humor,” says Al, “comes from glorifying the mundane.” Overall, it wasn’t the silliness of the lyrics (a tapestry made out of navel lint?), but the utter mundanity of the overarching topic that had such staying power. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that a singer could release a track about something so specifically banal. Weird, I know. A popular song about something other than love? It was then that a new, very specific category emerged into which he, and he alone, fit.

It makes me wonder if my friend only had the CD because his mom wouldn’t let him listen to rap. Admittedly, Al’s hot takes tend to sanitize music that conservative parents might look at askance. But I also think that’s part of the joke. His polka medleys, four-ish minute tracks in which he’ll cover a dozen or so songs—many of which have the utmost serious, sincere subject matter, are made fun of only by tempo change and accordion accompaniment.

Another friend had shown me his Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magick. Not wanting to sound uncool or ignorant, I remember responding with “That’s what it’s all about.” Inside, however, I was thinking Dad would never abide this. I never became a fan of them either, to put it politely. This staid view of their music is what ended up endearing Weird Al’s 1993 “Bedrock Anthem” to me, a pastiche of “Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away.” Not just a banger, it’s an utter lampoon of the source material. I mean, if anything, the joke’s on Al, but he’s certainly not making fun of the Flintstones: his song featured in the 1993 live-action film. The only one about Paleolithic technology that I know of.

“I didn’t set out to be a family-friendly recording artist, but that’s sort of the way it happened, and it’s a wonderful thing. When I look out into my concert audience, it’s all generations out there. It’s sort of a family bonding experience.” —Weird Al, from an NPR interview

It makes sense, though. Covering material from throughout the decades, each generation is bound to have a song with which they’re at least familiar.

Interlude

It was early-1996 when my dad provided me with a gift, one of my most-utilized: the notion that songs can be retranslated and made to signify something holy and near-scriptural. We were packing, moving to the neighborhood mentioned above when he showed me his collection of what today would be called yacht, or “dad” rock. Eagles, Doobies, et al. He played Wings’ “Band on the Run,” and explained to me how he’d been worshiping with it since he first heard it, how it was actually about Jesus and his crew rising from the dead. The Eagles’ “Already Gone” came on later in the afternoon. This he’d retranslated as well, about escaping the influence of one’s old nature. Another shining example was Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” which, according to him, treated with the extrabiblical topic of the intrigue behind Lucifer’s fall. (“That had to have been what they were thinking.”) Perhaps not what any of them meant, I like to think they’d at least appreciate a fan’s alternate take. Who knows. I do remember being unable to listen to Coldplay’s “Yellow” when it was big without hearing the suffering Christ, and then reading about how Chris Martin fielded similar interpretation from fans. In his book Ghost Rider, Neil Peart recounts, and casts down, a fan’s theory that one of Rush’s songs was about his relationship with Jesus. I wish I knew which.

I remember once listening with Dad in the car to Don Henley’s “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.” He had reimagined it as the anthem the Bridegroom might sing to the Bride and was seriously rocking out. A man walked by—I’m sure he at least heard the bass—as Dad beamed out the driver’s side window, while giving him two thumbs up. I was mortified, sure, but I also couldn’t imagine there wasn’t some sort of subconscious semantic transference going on. What I mean is, when he was “in the Spirit,” as it were, it seemed as though my father’s capacity for acknowledging another interpretation than his own diminished. Then again, at this age I recognize simply an authentic party spirit that was honest and all-inclusive.

It’s not exactly “mak[ing] up new words to a song that already exists,” to quote Weird, but what I took from this unique lesson from my dad’s curriculum is that art, specifically vocal music, can come to possess another highly idiosyncratic and different character than what the artist originally intended. It reminds me of something I read that Nick Cave once said: “Every love song is a love song to God.” I don’t think my dad could have put it any better.

It’s 2005 or thereabouts. I’ve gotten serious about my music, having grown out of my erstwhile country phase and primarily into rock. A counterpoint, however, to the sonic heaviness, is Enya. Her music has touched on, sounded out, and nearly filled in an oneiric gestalt to which I was still unable to put much in the way of words; her ethereal textures and soundscapes healing something in me. I was working one Saturday and had around that time turned incredibly sensitive and introverted, the aforementioned dreams about the only thing keeping me sane during the years following my parents’ divorce. A customer happens in and starts talking to me while I’m working the children’s section. Straightening shelves, alphabetizing and arranging. Stuffed animals, toys, board books. It might have been around storytime, so, early afternoon. Perhaps nothing wrong with it, or with him, I had nevertheless begun feeling uneasy about the exchange. Out of the blue he asks, “So, what’s in your CD player right now?” I didn’t want to let on what I’d recently found in the Irish siren, so rather than confess to “Paint the Sky with Stars,” in as clear an example of automatic speech as I’ve ever experienced firsthand, I hear myself lie: “Weird Al.” I don’t remember the response.

Biggest Joke on the Internet

2014’s Mandatory Fun marked the end of Al’s recording contract. He’s not quitting, exactly, but it’s likely, he says, that he won’t be releasing another album. His early success, coterminous with the rise of MTV, and later VH1, seems impossible to replicate today. Numerous online comments call for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One insinuated that he should receive the Mark Twain prize and with that I couldn’t agree more. But here’s the thing. I don’t think his intention starting out was to be funny, per se. He’s weird. He’s still weird. That millions of people, myself included, find him so, is great. So why not just award him “The Weirdest”? Plenty of contenders vie for title, from Gwar to Narduwuar, to Primus to whatever this is, his 40-plus year legacy, however, is one-of-a-kind, thoroughly unique. And it is a little ironic, I think, that I’ve acquired an appreciation for him and much of his music during a time in my life where I feel normal—at least more like myself than ever.

Regardless of how he’s remembered, if there were one topic about which he’s sung more than anyone, it’s computers and the internet, specifically Web 2.0. In listening to his discography, I can’t think of another artist or band who has dropped so many references to our digital world. I could see this becoming a significant aspect of his legacy. He gives passing reference or allusion to Dell, IMDb, Snopes, MySpace, Wikipedia, Earthlink, and he’s dedicated whole songs to Craigslist, eBay and computers in general. Throughout this whole experiment, of trying on his music to see if it fits, Ebay has emerged as probably my favorite. I’ve written about it at length, but with the exception of the opening vignette, all the anecdotes in this essay took place while I was living in hoarder houses. The way Al slips in and out of the persona of someone who can’t stop acquiring helps lend some levity to those seasons. I also dig it because admitting I’m a fan of the original (“I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys) feels weirdly embarrassing.

In regard to any future endeavors, he said with the release of his final album that, “The Internet is the new MTV.” It is now a truly different world than when he got his start. With much out there to parody, satirize, lampoon there’s also a seriousness-bordering-on-dread that renders alternate, perhaps weirdly-so, interpretations invaluable. I am so grateful to have learned early on how to change, not necessarily the lyrics themselves, but the events, persons and objects signified by the music I enjoy. I think that’s the biggest draw: Al makes songs mean what he wants them to mean. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

In 2015, a couple of months after my dad passed, Weird Al happened in to the bookstore. Reserved, but nonetheless sporting his signature Hawaiian shirt and long, crinkly hair, I recognized him immediately, though I did double-check. He answered in the affirmative. But as I wasn’t yet a fan, I didn’t have anything else to say. I’ll be seeing him in concert later this year. If I get the opportunity, I’ll ask him if he ever considered covering Enya.