The Big Squeeze: Day Sixty-Nine: "I Can't Watch This" from Off The Deep End

The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with two big objectives in mind. First and foremost, I want to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero. Even more importantly, I want to promote the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of 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 over 27 new illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and over 120 new pages covering The Compleat Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 tour that gave the extended version of the book its name. 

Author’s Commentary: If I was smart, I would ignore the smattering of negative reviews The Weird Accordion to Al book has attracted on Amazon the same way I do the pans on Goodreads, a toxic site I do not read, because nothing good could possibly come of it. 

Instead I obsess about this handful of anonymous haters in a way that is unhealthy and counter-productive. I’ve already gone back and removed every unflattering reference to Donald Trump from current editions of the book because his presence was singled out as a fatal flaw in seemingly every negative review. 

I’ve thought about making other small alterations as well in anticipation of other negative reviews. For example, I’ve gotten a handful of reviews complaining that they did not know what to expect from the book but were surprised by the tone and content of my book, and not in a good way. 

It never hurts to say who you are, what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. So I wonder if it might be worthwhile to include a few paragraphs at the very beginning of the book laying out who I am, why I wrote the book and what it contains. 

I would start, for example, by explaining that I have been writing about popular culture professional for close to a quarter of a century, including 18 years as a writer for The A.V Club, most as its head writer. In that time I also wrote six books, including Weird Al: The Book, which Al personally chose me to to write back in the early teens. 

Then I would explain that The Weird Accordion to Al is not a behind the scenes look at Al’s career but rather a loving appreciation of Al’s catalog in which I draw upon my decades as a pop culture writer to mount the strongest, most entertaining possible argument for Al as an important American satirist with a unique and extraordinary career.  

I’m probably not going to tweak the book like that, because at a certain point you need to let go, but if I did I would most assuredly not bring up the solid decade that I have spent writing empathetically about Insane Clown Posse. 

I could be wrong, but I suspect that being a high-profile Juggalo and passionate supporter of a group derided as the worst of all time would not improve my credibility in the eyes of “Weird Al” Yankovic fans and could actively hurt it. I’m not sure it’s a coincidence than in the decade that I’ve been praising Insane Clown Posse, reputable publications and websites have largely stopped paying me to publicly express my opinion on their behalf.

I made a few mentions to Insane Clown Posse in the column but was sure to cut out almost every one in the final book. 

I did not, for example, mention, in the “I Can’t Watch This” entry that whenever I hear “Can’t Touch This” I am instantly and powerfully transported back to Cave-In-Rock Illinois, some time in the early teens, when I had the surreal joy of seeing MC Hammer, once the most popular rapper alive, perform “U Can’t Touch This” during an afternoon performance at the Gathering of the Juggalos that legitimately was one of the best sets I have ever seen, at the Gathering or elsewhere. 

I consequently associate this transcendently silly song with two of my favorite books: You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me and Weird Accordion to Al. I am proud as hell of You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me and encourage everyone to read it, as long as it does not cause you to think less of me. 

Of course, being super cool, I could care less about what people think of me and my writing, with the very minor caveat that I care way too much, and in a way that borders on pathological.

Original Weird Accordion to Al article: 

With the possible exception of food, which, rumor has it, is the only thing he eats, few subjects have bewitched Al like bad television. You know, like that show Bewitched. Boy, did that suck. We’ve explored the intersection of Al and TV extensively here, without, curiously enough, doing more than mention MTV’s “AL-TV” specials from the 1980s. Eh, that’s for the inevitable The Weird Accordion to Al book. 

We’ve touched upon the many different roles television plays in Al’s music. We’ve revisited songs about weirdoes who love TV (“Cable TV”, “Isle Thing”, “Here’s Johnny”), a rare cover of a cult children’s show (“George of the Jungle”), a harrowing account of a man who humiliates himself and his family by losing on a popular game show (“I Lost on Jeopardy”), and various songs that recount the premises of popular TV shows, like “Money For Nothing/Beverley Hillbillies”  and even a song that both recounts the premise of a popular TV show and centers on someone with an irrationally intense hatred of said TV show in “The Brady Bunch.”

So when Al decided to revisit the apparently bottomless well of comedy that is television for the “U Can’t Touch This” parody “I Can’t Watch This” he did not have novelty or freshness on his side, but he did have an almost irritatingly catchy bit of pop-rap built on the hypnotic baseline of Rick James’ “Superfreak” as the musical backbone of his latest attack on the rampaging idiocies of the vast wasteland that is television. 

This is one of Al’s first rap parodies. He benefits from being able to step inside the comically baggy gypsy pants of a rapper with a flow whose difficulty level never got past “beginner.” Hammer is about as genial as rappers get. The song is as much a time capsule of the era that created it as a well-worn copy of TV Guide from the era. 

The TV-hater singing the song rails good-naturedly against the yuppie whine-fest that was Thirtysomething, Arsenio Hall’s mindless enthusiasm and talk shows that are “rude, crude and vile” and inspire him to want to keep flipping on the dial. 

Some of the TV detritus that Al bemoans on the song have dated in fascinating, tragic and unexpected ways. As I write this, the widely beloved Showtime Twin Peaks revival is one of the hottest and most talked about shows on television. So it’s very strange to hear “Heckling TV Critic Al” Yankovic of a quarter century ago grumble that he “can’t stand Twin Peaks” and wishes they’d “lynch” those “donut-eating freaks.”

Al briefly morphs into “Open Mic Al” when he turns his attention to another bizarrely deathless TV institution that’s somehow still with us, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and quips,“I can't believe my eyes/When I see the kind of stuff that wins first prize/Somebody's poor old mom/Falls down off the roof, lands right on the lawn/Face first on a rake/I hear they've got it on the seventeenth take.”

Al was ahead of the curve in letting us know that the “reality” of television is more accurately a carefully contrived fiction. 

The televised film criticism duo of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel are both blessed and cursed with the halo of early, dramatic deaths. Ebert in particular became an inspirational, even heroic figure after Cancer robbed him of his big, booming, beautiful voice and laugh but his mind and writing evolved in wondrous and surprising ways. 

Ebert is a hero of mine but in 1992 he was a cheap pop culture reference with a cheesy but enduring trademark musicians couldn’t help but invoke while dissing him. So it is not at all surprising that, among his other complaints about the deplorable nature of television, the singer here complains that those “Siskel and Ebert bums” “oughtta go home and sit on their thumbs.” 

Considering the exhaustive emphasis I’ve placed here on commercials and commercialism and consumerism in Al’s work, it’s not surprising that my favorite part of the song is a sonic collage of commercials from around this era. There’s an almost Negativland-for-Beginners quality to the rapid-fire assemblage of assaultive commercial pleas. 

This commercial medley—which mashes together “classic” soundbites like Kelly LeBrock’s “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” and some old geezer’s cry of “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!”— instantly brought back a flood of memories and images: It’s as if Al is giving a solo not to a musician but to the entire commercial industry 

“I Can’t Watch This” is about the innate disposability of television. Yet a quarter of a century later we’re still talking about the donut-eating freaks of Twin Peaks, we’re forever mourning those Siskel and Ebert bums and some of us are apparently still watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, since it’s still around. Most importantly, we’re still listening to, and occasionally even reading about “Weird Al” Yankovic, who seems destined to outlive all of the pop culture detritus he’s lovingly spoofed, even when they prove weirdly enduring boomerangs like Twin Peak, which streaked across pop culture like a comet , only to reappear a quarter century later, apparently no worse for wear. 

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Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

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