The Weird Accordion to Al Book and the Cheap Majesty of Tacky Pop Music
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of the past two weeks gazing with wide-eyed wonder at the pages of your new book, The Weird Accordion to Al. Part of this is attributable, of course, to crazed narcissism. To love your own writing the way I do is perhaps unhealthy bordering on pathological. And, on a practical level, I need my scrappy little labor of love to do well so that I can do things like remain a writer and pay the mortgage.
But the profound pleasure that I take in the Weird Accordion to Al book is also rooted in my deep, longstanding love of pop music. Few things in this sick and sad and beautiful world bring me as much breezy pleasure as a great pop song but pop music does not have to be great to make me happy. It doesn’t even need to be good. Hell, sometimes I adore pop music precisely because it is so hypnotically, fascinatingly, singularly terrible, like the LFO song “Summer Girls” or Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me.”
Over the course of his glorious, improbable miracle of a career, Al has parodied the very best in pop music, your Michael Jacksons and Nirvanas and Madonnas. But he’s also parodied one hit wonders and flukes and, as I write in the book, at least one act that was essentially a low-level criminal operation masquerading as an unstoppable pop duo in the form of Milli Vanilli.
Writing about Al’s entire discography for the book gave me an unbeatable excuse to write about such wonderfully ridiculous human beings as shirtless wonder Gerardo, flat earth proponent B.O.B and silver-haired Soul Patrol leader and American Idol winner Taylor Hicks.
In that respect the book, tonally and thematically, marked a deliberate return to a column that I wrote for the A.V Club in my final years there as head writer called THEN That’s What They Called Music! where I wrote about the various entries in the NOW That’s What I Call Music! Series of pop hits compilations in order.
It was a great column with a terrible name that I have never been able to remember correctly and I spent years writing that fucking column.
THEN That’s What They Called Music! Gave me an opportunity to work through my very complicated love-hate relationship with pop music in general and Black Eyed Peas hit-maker Will.I.Am—who has faded considerably as of late but who had a stranglehold on pop music and the pop charts for a number of years as a rapper, producer, musician and evil mastermind—in particular
It’s no coincidence that Al named one of his polkas after NOW That’s What I Call Music! Whether he’s parodying contemporary hits or mashing them all together into an exuberant polka medley Al has historically been able to both exploit the fizzy, ephemeral, sneaky power of hit music to make us happy and connect us to cherished parts of our past and comment irreverently and insightfully on the ridiculousness and artifice of contemporary music that tops the charts.
As a parodist, polka fiend and master of the pastiche Al comes to pop music from an ironic distance. In the metaphorical supermarket that represents Al’s career and worldview, pop songs by the plastic likes of Tiffany, New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys are just another consumer product to be purchased, mindlessly consumed and quickly forgotten.
There are few better ways to experience new music than a “Weird Al” Yankovic parody or medley, particularly when you age out of being the target demographic for pop music, something that happens around the time most folks are first able to drink legally.
That’s why it’s a bummer Al hasn’t released a record in six years and may never put out another studio album given the changes in the pop music landscape and the death of the industry. I NEED Al to engage with pop music in an intense and hilarious fashion not just for my own sake but for all of the out of touch middle-aged codgers like myself who need Al to filter all of that glorious nonsense through a satirical prism for us.
Dumb pop music is fun to listen to. It’s equally fun to write about and I’d like to think it’s just as much fun to read about as well.
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place and get sweet, exclusive The Weird Accordion to Al merchandise like tee-shirts, posters, mugs and stickers by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace/merch
AND more to the point, but my new book, The Weird Accordion to Al! It is great! https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+weird+accordion+to+al&qid=1580427106&sr=8-1