Day One hundred and seventy-seven: "Lousy Haircut" from Medium Rarities

Al spent much of the first decade of his recording career singing about old television shows. The preeminent television troubadour devoted a big chunk of the subsequent quarter century singing songs for contemporary television shows. The second half of Medium Rarities is dominated by ditties, often sadistically succinct in nature, that Al made for television in his capacity as a popular and sought-after after voiceover artist, talk show guest, musical guest, guest star, one-man bandleader/co-host and creator, head writer and star of a short-lived but much loved children’s television show. 

It was in that last role, or roles, that Al recorded the thirty second blast of tongue-in-cheek aggression “Lousy Haircut” for his cult classic 1997 television vehicle The Weird Al Show. The “Firestarter” pastiche, put together by guitarist Jim West after CBS nixed Al doing a full-on parody of the electronic smash, functioned as a fake music video within the gleefully absurd universe of The Weird Al Show. 

During their brief mid to late 1990s heyday, Prodigy was known primarily, if not exclusively, for the rage-filled punk rock meets electronic aggression of hits like “Breathe”, “Firestarter” and “Smack My B**** Up” and late frontman Keith Flint’s spectacularly ugly hairstyle: shaved on top with follicular devil horns dyed unnatural colors like lime green and Ronald McDonald orange. 

Keith Flint was famous, or infamous, for being filled with incoherent anger and having an egregiously lousy haircut. Al put these defining traits together and, for the purpose of this spoof at least, decided that Flint wasn’t a big ball of rage AND someone with a lousy haircut but rather someone who was apoplectic down to a molecular level BECAUSE he has such a terrible haircut. 

“Lousy Haircut” came out just a year after the 1996 album Bad Hair Day. During this bold era,  Al wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power and tell pop stars like Coolio and Keith Flint, “You have a silly haircut. The way you style your hair is comical to me.”

“Lousy Haircut” takes aim at Keith Flint’s iconically terrible hairdo but also his group’s hypnotically lazy repetition. “Firestarter” wasn’t a hit despite its lyrics consisting of little more than Keith Flint yelling “I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter!” and then “You’re a firestarter, twisted firestarter!” over and over and over and over again so much as it was a hit because it was so ferociously catchy in its infernal repetition.

Following suit, “Lousy Haircut” consists mostly of Al yelling about having a lousy haircut and being angry about his lousy haircut, and not knowing what to do with his lousy haircut. 

When you do a project as immersive as this column/book you tend to see things through an Al-centric lens. Consequently when I saw that Keith Flint had committed suicide this was the first thing I thought of. I think it’s safe to say, however, that Al making a song poking fun at Flint’s hairstyle in 1997 and him tragically ending his life twenty two years later are wholly unrelated. 

Artists and musicians are a famously sensitive lot. They’re not quite that sensitive, however. 

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