The Big Squeeze Day Thirty One: "Slime Creatures From Outer Space" from Dare To Be Stupid
Rare candid shot of Al from the era
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic with two big objectives in mind: to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero AND to promote the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and is way tighter and less self-indulgent than the column that inspired it. And has more and different stuff, like a chapter on the Wendy Carlos album.
Author’s Commentary: The smattering of negative reviews of The Weird Accordion to Al on Amazon tend to focus on either the formatting of the kindle version, which I am pleased to say was fixed long ago and the two or three times that I mentioned Donald Trump negatively over the course of a nearly four hundred page book.
But one gentleman reviewer was filled with rage at the book and its author not for political reasons or technical glitches but rather because he felt like I spent the entire book explaining the jokes behind the songs rather than giving the kind of behind-the-scenes info he thought were promised by the title The Weird Accordion to Al.
He doesn’t seem to have realized that I chose the title The Weird Accordion to Al because I found the wordplay amusing, not because I conceived of the book as a guide to the complete discography of “Weird Al” Yankovic from Al’s perspective. In that respect, the subtitle “Every "Weird Al" Yankovic Album Obsessively Analyzed by the Co-Author of Weird Al: The Book (Nathan Rabin with Al Yankovic)” provides a much better indication of the book’s tone, content and perspective.
The book is full of obsessive analysis of Al’s work from the co-author of Weird Al: The Book but this enraged online reviewer found some of my analysis lacking. He was enraged, for example, that I wrote that the 1950s science fiction homage “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” had an unmistakable B-52s feel when it was, in fact, rooted in the melody of Thomas Dolby’s “Hyperactive.”
It turns out we’re both right! “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” does share an aesthetic and a funky retro vibe with the B-52s early work and songs like “Rock Lobster” but its melody and its sound does, in fact, owe a lot to “Hyperactive.”
Not all of Al’s pastiches are the same. There’s a huge difference between something like “Dare To Be Stupid” or “Everything You Know Is Wrong”, which can only be understood and appreciated as loving tributes to Devo and They Might Be Giants and something like “Weasel Stomping Day”, which is based musically on “Trim Up the Tree” from How the Grinch Stole Christmas but that I suspect very few Al fans would single out as an homage to the songrcraft of “Trim Up the Tree” composer Albert Hague.
With Al there are Pastiches and then there are pastiches. To me, “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” falls into the pastiche category but feel free to judge for yourself by listening to these tracks back to back. It might change the way you see the song but hopefully not to the point that you’ll then take to Amazon to complain and to punish me for not getting everything 100 percent correct.
I would like to take a moment to thank “Weird Al” Yankovic for being interesting enough to sustain a project this insanely obsessive and comprehensive. At this point I’ve written thirty two columns running about forty thousand words in total and I would have absolute nothing left to say with most artists at this stage. Yet Al’s oeuvre, especially in the 1980s, when he was doing some of his best and most important work, is a gift that keeps on giving, and while I may be feeling a little fatigued, that has more to do with the demands of writing and running this website than it does about Al’s albums.
I’m also grateful that Al is a deliberate and meticulous artist who continuously revisits the same themes and motifs. So when he released a song called “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” it could be understood within the context of Al’s longstanding obsession with trash culture, particularly gory and silly and blood-engorged genre movies from the 50s and 60s, as well as his love for the simpatico sensibilities of the B-52s.
Al paid homage to Fred Schneider and the gang most reverently and directly on “Mr. Popeil” from In 3-D but the band’s proudly trashy spirit also informs that album’s “Nature Trail To Hell” and In 3-D’s “Slime Creatures From Outer Space.” The songs are so simpatico in spirit that “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” feels like a spiritual sequel to “Nature Trail To Hell”, or at least a follow-up.
Al’s mind was on the pop charts, but as betrayed by the fact that two singles from Dare To Be Stupid doubled as singles from soundtrack albums—“This Is The Life” from Johnny Dangerously and the title track, from The Transformers: The Movie—Al’s mind was also very much on movies.
He had perfected the art of making funny little movies for MTV in the form of music videos and was dabbling in longer-form narrative filmmaking in the form of the mockumentary The Complete Al, which was released the same year as Dare To Be Stupid. UHF—a movie about TV, appropriately enough—lurked somewhere on the horizon but the movie-mad Al was making little movies in purely audio forms in the form of “Nature Trail To Hell” and “Slime Creatures From Outer Space.”
Over an insistent drum beat and sci-fi spooky (is there any either kind?) theremin from Al, the song's narrator shares how “things just haven’t been the same since the flying saucers came!” Needless to say, things have taken a decided turn for the worse. A series of atom bombs failed to ward them off (generally a bad sign) and instead of being the “We come in peace” kind of friendly, E.T-lovable aliens they were instead, according to a chagrined Al, “ugly they were mean, biggest heads I’d ever seen, they made everybody scream and shout/First they leveled Tokyo, then New York was next to go.”
Our singer is understandably peeved. “Boy I really wish they’d cut it out!” he insists, in a slightly understated if understandable fit of pique. Al has always been good at drawing vivid pictures with words and the crazily over-the-top science fiction invasion epic he whips up here demands to be projected on a fifty foot drive-in screen in the 1950s, preferably in 3-D if not full-on Cinerama.
But it’s also a song that finds a campy, delirious joy in the prospect of apocalyptic destruction, a surprisingly persistent theme in Al’s oeuvre. Al and his collaborators compose an all too vivid world full of giant-headed monsters with “death-ray eyes” they use to “blow you up real good.”
If “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” is cinematic, it also calls to mind another similarly delirious exercise in day-glow pop-art parody: Tim Burton’s Topps-derived science fiction goof Mars Attacks! I was lukewarm on the film when I first saw it. I think I expected it to be funnier but I’ve come to appreciate it more with each passing year and “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” captures what’s so funny and weird and brazenly, boldly, satirically American about the big-budget science fiction comedy.
There an intergalactic disgrace!
Humanity seems doomed, to be perfectly honest, what with these evil monsters reproducing in the sewers and whatnot, but the singer still manages to keep a sense of priorities. He’s miffed at the evil space aliens because, in his words, “They’re not very nice to the human race” and “sure could use some manicures” but also because their penchant for blasting everything they encounter could seriously mess up his apartment and he “just shampooed the rug.”
It can be tough navigating your way through some manner of space alien apocalypse but our boy is doing his best, even as he never stop impugning the character of these malevolent space monsters. “They’ll rip your head off just for fun/They’ll paralyze your mind/they’re wearing out their welcome/I don’t I like their kind” he croons with sly comic understatement.
“They’re an intergalactic disgrace!” Al concludes before more explicitly channeling Fred Schneider’s sing-song talk-yell to inquire, “Where did they come from?”, “What do they want from us?” and “Why don’t they leave me alone?”
The theremin goes a long way towards establishing a campy 1950s science fiction atmosphere but the production is full of loving little touches, like distorted back-up vocals that sound like space aliens, or at least someone with a really strong space alien accent.
“Slime Creatures From Outer Space” is yet another upbeat sounding song about something terrible happening. It’s fascinating for how snugly it fits into Al’s work and sensibility but it’s a lot of fun in its own right, in addition to foreshadowing Al’s eventual evolution from making little movies for MTV and his albums to making the kind of movies audiences have to pay money to see.
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And you can buy the Weird Accordion to Al, my massive new book about the complete discography of “Weird Al” Yankovic here
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