"Weird Al" Yankovic
I was surprised, when I mentioned to various people that I was going to see Weird Al Yankovic at the Overture Center, how enthusiastic everyone was. “Awesome!” “We like Weird Al!” “I hear he puts on a heckuva show.” “I’m envious.” It turns out there are a lot of Weird Al fans, and his July 14 show at Overture Center’s spacious Overture Hall was a sellout.
Weird Al, who has been parodying pop hits since even before 1979’s breakthrough “My Bologna,” is touring with his The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour. Its focus, as Yankovic tells the audience at the start of the concert, is “a bunch of extremely unpopular songs.” He did play less well-known original material, but parodies did not entirely escape the set list. And the purported extreme unpopularity of the songs didn’t prevent the audience from singing along to most of them.
At some point during the period when people listened to music on iPods, someone in my family had some Weird Al deep cuts on a playlist that we used to cue up on long car rides. And like everyone, I’ve heard the big parodies like “Eat It.” But I’d never sat down and really thought about Weird Al’s songs. In the audience at Overture Hall last night, that was inescapable.
First, the guy can really play the accordion. Why not do so more often? He makes the accordion sound like it belongs in a rock song, no mean feat. But there were only a few songs in the middle of the show, like “My Baby’s In Love with Eddie Vedder,” where the big wheezy woodwind took the spotlight.
Two, the band is terrific. The Doors pastiche “Craigslist,” which sounds stylistically like a lost song from that band but with lyrics pulled from Craigslist ads, is amazing. Moreover, Weird Al’s Jim Morrison imitation is spot-on. This isn’t the only song where the band excels, but it’s an obvious one to pull out for gold stars.
But three, I couldn’t help feeling that culturally, we — as a nation — have crossed some kind of line recently. After one mass shooting or another, or after the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, or on January 6, 2021, or during the pandemic, when circumstances forced a re-evaluation of a lot of things. Last night, as I was sitting in the audience with the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and Highland Park all within the last two months, I kept noticing how many times a Weird Al song centers on the extreme anger and resentment of a young man.
Sure, it can be written off as all in good fun when the speaker in “My Baby’s In Love with Eddie Vedder” suggests he’s going to start stalking Alanis Morrissette to get back at his girlfriend for her fangirl crush on the Pearl Jam singer, but it’s a lot harder to dismiss “Melanie,” a song about a guy who’s spying on a woman through her window and wondering why she won’t go out with him. Is it funny that he gave “a Mohawk to [her] cat”? Maybe it was in 1988, when it was released. What about playing it in the same concert with “Close But No Cigar,” a song about a guy who rejects a series of girlfriends for minor infractions like misusing a word?
There are plenty of pop songs about guys doing bad stalky stuff, from The Beatles’ absurdly cheerful “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” to Warren Zevon’s blithe “Excitable Boy.” What gave me pause about Weird Al’s setlist was how frequently these themes came up and in songs that come on at full heavy-metal furor.
Sometimes it is an overwhelming feeling of the narrator of the song feeling left behind — like in “Lame Claim to Fame,” a fun singalong on one level that is perfectly in keeping with Weird Al’s nerdy persona. But in today’s fraught political climate, it starts to feel more ominous. Put it in the same setlist with “Good Old Days,” in which the narrator remembers when “life was so much simpler” (and when he killed the kindly grocer and set fire to his store, as well as I guess torturing his girlfriend and leaving her to die in the desert) and that pattern of resentment becomes more troubling.
Are these songs really a critique of our culture? That case could be made. I don’t know if Yankovic senses that times have changed; after all, these songs were all in the same setlist. But in “Albuquerque” (on one level an absurd story-song in which the narrator is pushed to the brink from his mom force-feeding him sauerkraut, but on another level a song full of anger at all sorts of slights) he paused mid-song to apologize for a line about a hermaphrodite (“It's some big fat hermaphrodite with a Flock-Of-Seagulls haircut and only one nostril”) in what struck me as a very “sorry/not sorry” sort of way.
No matter. By that time I was in no mood to sing along with the genuinely charming “Yoda” (a “Yo-Yo-Yo-Yoda” parody of The Kinks’ “Lola”) that closed the concert. I wanted to feel good. But I couldn’t.
