Day One hundred and eighty-eight: "Happy Birthday (New Version)" from Medium Rarities
Someone really should tell Al he has a Grammy on his head. It’s a little embarrassing.
A re-recording of an album cut from the Another One Rides the Bus EP/“Weird Al Yankovic feels like a fairly inauspicious way to close out both Medium Rarities and a project as auspicious as Al’s fifteen-disc career-spanning opus Squeezebox. But Al is a methodical man so there is a cracked logic to his master plan.
Medium Rarities ends with a self-conscious return to the beginning that extends beyond the obscurities collection and box set to the outside world, where Al’s hottest, most high-profile and lucrative track right now is the album version of “My Bologna” thanks to its placement in the much buzzed-about third season of Stranger Things, a pop culture phenomenon powerful enough to raise New Coke from the dead like some manner of television necromancer, and its soundtrack. After receiving the princely sum of five hundred dollars for “My Bologna” from the cheapskates over at Capitol (who maybe could have afforded a little more considering their acts include, I dunno, THE BEATLES), Al had to buy back the song at a loss for his self-titled debut but he’s undoubtedly turned a tidy profit on his investment by this point.
The end of Medium Rarities finds Al paying irreverent tribute to some of his favorite punks and the raucous, rebellious, irresistible musical era that gave the world The Ramones’ landmark 1976’s debut album and “Beat on the Brat” as well as Tonio K’s cracked 1978 masterpiece Life in the Foodchain and its giddily apocalyptic dance on the edge of oblivion single “The Funky Western Civilization”, the warped foundation upon which Al’s “Happy Birthday” was constructed.
“Happy Birthday” was the first of Al’s holiday songs, blood-splattered, corpse-strewn, sometimes post-apocalyptic ditties that depict Christmas, birthdays and the lesser known, possibly regional holiday of Weasel Stomping Day less in the traditional sense, as times of pleasure and celebration where kids load up on cake and ice cream and soda pop and grown-ups on champagne and reefer sticks than as walking nightmares where life’s unrelenting cruelty, insanity and violence is at its most glaring and destructive.
“Happy Birthday” was also the first of Al’s pastiches to be officially released. Before Al could out-Devo Devo on “Dare to Be Stupid” or do They Might Be Giants as well as the Johns themselves on “Everything You Know Is Wrong” Al began a remarkable career of tributes and pastiches by doing his own version of The Funky Western Civilization, one that switched up the steps and introduced birthday cake and candles and broccoli and beer to the bitterly ironic quasi-celebration.
In the liner notes for Medium Rarities, Al says he was moved to re-record “Happy Birthday” for the soundtrack to the Ken Marino-directed sleeper hit How To Be a Latin Lover because he always regretted how quickly and cheaply his debut album had been recorded.
But it’s exactly that rushed, low-budget, raw quality that makes “Weird Al” Yankovic so singular, compelling and full of scruffy, underdog charm. And its precisely that sonic rawness that makes “Happy Birthday” sound so punk. If any song in Al’s discography benefits from sounding rushed and raw it’s “Happy Birthday.”
Al’s cover of "Beat on the Brat” added the accordion that alone kept the Ramones’ original from becoming a chart-topping smash. For the re-recorded, movie-quality “Happy Birthday” Al went in the opposite direction, removing the accordion that is ever-present on “Weird Al” Yankovic, no doubt out of a conviction that doing so would allow his “Happy Birthday” to finally overtake the Hill Sisters’ “Happy Birthday To You” in popularity.
I don’t think he succeeded. Exposure in a hit movie is always nice but the Hill sisters’ ubiquitous standard is one of the most famous and successful songs of all time: Al’s “Happy Birthday” isn’t even one of the more famous or successful songs on Al’s scrappy debut.
It seems poetically apt that this multi-year, one hundred and eighty eight part labor of love would close on a birthday song, however bitterly and violently ironic. Because what is the Weird Accordion to Al if not a celebration of a great American, the full extent of whose contributions to American music and pop culture are only now being recognized four decades after he released a nervy little parody of the Knack’s “My Sharona?”
Like so much of Al’s career, the Knack spoof that began Al’s career as a recording artist has boomeranged through time unexpectedly but miraculously, becoming more popular, culturally relevant and iconic forty years after its introduction as an inexpensive novelty goof from a frizzy-haired accordion-playing genius oddball barely out of his teens than it was at the time of its initial release.
Against impossible odds, Al has endured. Al is eternal. The Funny Five champion was supposed to maybe have a silly song that did okay as a fluke. Instead he’s had a career for the ages. Al doesn’t just sing about pop culture; when he steps onstage these days he is pop culture incarnate, four decades of living musical history that overlaps with the greatest artists of the day, the Madonnas and Nirvanas and Michael Jacksons.
Like birthdays, Al is perennial and cause for celebration. He’s not going anywhere. Neither is his music.
Al doesn’t sing “Happy Birthday” so much as he sneers it, really tearing into imagery that wouldn’t feel out of place on a self-released single from a homemade L.A punk band in the 1970s, full of environmental devastation, poverty, violence and the angry promise of nuclear war. It’s one of Al’s loudest, fastest, punkest songs, at once a howl of despair for a world that doesn’t deserve to survive and a tongue-in-cheek embrace of our inevitable doom.
It’s a song that anticipates armageddon with a smile, that raises a toast to our personal and collective destruction. The voracious darkness found in songs like “Happy Birthday” is no small part of what makes Al such a source of joy and light for so many people. Al is sober and self-disciplined and rated G onstage and off but there’s a heart of darkness, a persistent, perverse ghoulishness that undercuts the All-American wholesomeness.
Al is weird, is what he is, with a uniquely powerful hold on our memories and our childhoods, and that is wonderful, then, now and always.
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OR more sensibly, celebrate the end of The Weird Accordion. to Al by pre-ordering the book with cool bonuses and whatnot over at https://make-the-weird-accordion-to-al-book-a-ridiculous-r.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders There literally is no better or more appropriate day to make that happen