Day One hundred and seventy-nine: "The Brain Song" from Medium Rarities

Nutty Professor Yankovic returns with a cerebral vengeance on the aptly titled “The Brain Song.” The dense educational lecture in wacky comedy song form was originally created as the thrilling, largely animated climax of a 3-D movie entitled Al’s Brain: A 3-D Journey through the Human Brain with “Weird Al” Yankovic that Al wrote, directed and starred in that played first at the Orange County Fair and later at the Washington’s Puyallup Fair in 2009. 

It’s a full-on musical extravaganza that sounds big and expensive, in no small part because Al and his core band are joined by ringers like trumpeter Warren Luening, saxophonist Tom Evans, trombonist Bill Reichenbach, back-up vocalists including Lisa Popeil and even a children’s choir featuring Al’s daughter Nina. 

With the notable exception of “Everything You Know Is Wrong” this might be the closest Al has come to writing and performing a They Might Be Giants song. The two Johns were never afraid to bring the classroom to the concert hall, to Trojan horse neat tidbits of information inside the shiny, happy, irresistible package of a catchy pop song. Like Al’s beloved They Might Be Giants pastiche, “The Brain Song” even features a reference to a disembodied head that manages to be quirky rather than ghoulish. 

There’s a whole subgroup of They Might Be Giants songs I categorize/dismiss as “Scientific” but it’s hard to get more sciencetastic than Al does here. “The Brain” accomplishes the difficult, if not impossible feat of making learning about the various functions of the brain fun instead of eyeball-meltingly tedious. 

Musically as well as well as lyrically “The Brain Song” owes a debt to They Might Be Giants. It’s as intentionally over-stuffed with musical ideas as lyrical ones, a song that takes us on quite the sonic journey in an almost perversely concise amount of time. 

On “Living With a Hernia”, Al takes the seemingly unpalatable raw material of the names of the various forms of hernias and transforms it in into an unlikely but awesome funk chant. On “The Brain Song” he manages a similar feat with the four lobes of the brain: Frontal, Temporal, Parietal and Occipital.

Musicians, particularly rappers, like to talk about breaking things down. On “The Brain Song”, Al really breaks things down, to a literally microscopic level involving the neuron, the funky, funky neuron, axon and dendrites. Just writing these scientific-sounding phrases is giving me mildly traumatic flashbacks to high school biology class and feeling like the stupidest, most oblivious human being in the world because science and math were subjects I found terrifying and incomprehensible. But that’s only because I didn’t have Al as a teacher. 

“The Brain Song” is so dense with information that it almost feels like understanding and processing it, as opposed to just listening to it and letting the tidal wave of information wash over you in a pleasantly disorienting rush, should give you a college credit or two at undiscriminating universities.

On “The Brain Song” Al sets out to do nothing less than explain the inner workings of the human mind. That would be an audacious ambition for an hour-long suite or an opera, let alone for a comedy song that never even approaches the three minute mark. But Al gets it done so quickly that he’s able to devote the final twenty seconds of the “The Brain Song” to its unsubtle but invaluable message: wear a helmet, for the love of God, and then you can protect that beautiful, miraculous, unfathomably complex brain of yours from its most ferocious, unthinking natural predator, the zombie. 

It doesn’t just take a big old brain like Al’s to conceive of a song like this; it takes a sizable psyche to grasp it as well, one bigger and more science-adept, alas, than the one I happen to possess. 

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