Donald Trump, The Weird Accordion to Al and the Fallacy of Apolitical Entertainment
When you are an independent author Amazon reviews are extraordinarily important. That is particularly true if you publish your book primarily through Jeff Bezos’ multi-billion dollar baby, as I have with The Weird Accordion to Al.
Because I published my book independently, the book hasn’t really been reviewed anywhere outside of Amazon. It’s not like my 2009 debut memoir The Big Rewind, which got a glowing review on the front page of the New York Times entertainment section, or 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, which was published by prestigious Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner, got four stars in Rolling Stone and was named one of its top 20 books of the year.
When potential buyers check out your book on Amazon, reviews are the first thing they’re going to look at. That’s why it was frustrating that for much of the book’s first month there was a steady stream of one star reviews focussing on formatting issues for the kindle version that we’d already fixed.
This image is not so furtively a scathing commentary on the rapacious greed of the record industry and Al’s label in particular.
Once the kindle issues were resolved once and for all the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, even glowing, a whole mess of wonderful five star raves. New reviews are much less frequent on Amazon these days, which is inevitable when a book has been out for a little while, and sales and attention start to cool off. Unfortunately, we’ve started to attract one star pans focussing monomaniacally on what apoplectic reviewers consider the book’s unforgivable flaw: at several points over the course of a nearly 400 page book about a satirist whose most resonant themes include television, greed, consumerism, vulgarity and ego, I speak unkindly about the current president of the United States.
For example, I got a review reading, “I got this book for a little light reading while enjoying time at home to read about Weird Al's songs during the 2020 Coronavirus Stay-At-Home vacation. That seems to be too much to ask though from the author who insists on putting his personal political thoughts into a book about a guy singing a song telling us to "Eat it."
What's the point of writing a book about Weird Al's songs, and then, within the first few pages throw in a bunch of unnecessary rants about the current president? And if you're going to do that why not name him in the book? Instead the author uses a smug, better than the rest of us approach to let us know he's not a fan of Donald Trump. What does this have to do with Weird Al?”
I was genuinely perplexed by this statement because I do not, in fact, discuss Trump in the first few pages of the book, by name or indirectly. It turns out the “bunch of unnecessary rants about the current president” consists entirely of these two paragraphs on the “Midnight Star” entry on page 48:
“I can’t help but look back at 1980s supermarket tabloids with nostalgia. Back then it was easy to delineate between real news found in The New York Times and the lurid fantasies of The National Enquirer. Now everything is hopelessly mixed up and a president incapable of telling the truth uses the words “fake news” to describe any news he doesn’t like, whether it’s authentic or not.
We could laugh about someone believing the nonsense in the tabloids back in 1984. The humor of “Midnight Star” is predicated on the absurdity of anyone thinking anything chronicled in its pages could be real. These days, people seem not only ready to believe implausible, impossible-seeming nonsense, but to act on those beliefs in scary, alarming ways. We used to be able to laugh about fake news and the tabloidization of our culture. Now it’s something we weep about, and laugh about only in the darkest possible sense.”
Another reviewer stopped reading the book at this point, presumably threw it against the wall in disgust, and took to Amazon, Donald Trump’s all-time favorite business, to express his horror and revulsion, writing that the book is “Long-winded, political (literally), and reads like a teenager's attempt at a Political Science/English/Music class assignment. I stopped reading after the tone and content switched from a "Weird" Al fan to that of a left-wing nut with TDS.”
TDS stands for Trump Derangement Syndrome. The idea is that left-wing nuts like myself are driven so crazy by Trump’s mere existence and constant winning that we can’t function in society and will do anything to try to hurt him, as opposed to Trump supporters, who are as unflappable and coldly logical as their hero.
You can always trust the judgment and opinions of people who encounter an idea or opinion they don’t like or agree with, and are so insulted and enraged that they stop reading, but nevertheless feel the need to make like an online MAGA hat-wearing Paul Revere and warn their fellow Trump fans about the unconscionable amount of political discourse in a book about the “Eat It” guy.
To answer the enraged Amazon reviewer, what do politics and the current president have to do with the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic? A lot, actually. Entertainment is inherently political. Hell, LIFE is inherently political, particularly in the age of Trump. To choose to not be political in your writing is itself a political act.
I reference Trump every hundred pages or so in my 400 page, deep dive analysis of Al’s complete discography because he personifies so much of what Al has satirized and spoofed over his career as a vulgar salesman, narcissist and preeminent creature of television and the tabloids.
I wrote about Trump in the “Midnight Star” entry of the book because it’s pertinent to the song and to this particular strain of Al’s music. If anything, it’s even more relevant and resonant now, since getting bad information from disreputable sources rather than reputable newspapers and websites can literally kill you and your family thanks to a pandemic the president (that’s President Trump in case you’re wondering) has hopelessly mishandled.
I could have gone even further, discussing Trump’s cozy relationship with The National Enquirer or the fact that the notorious tabloid paid hush money to two women who had a sexual relationship with Trump, porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal on Trump’s behalf. But I did not write about that because I didn’t want the book to be too political. I tried to only reference Trump if it seemed absolutely essential, and then as briefly and incisively as possible.
In the Weird Accordion to Al, I use Al’s life’s work to write about music, of course, but also to write about pretty much everything: nostalgia, television, commercials, consumerism, technology, movies, tabloids, trash TV and trash culture, food, egotism run amok and my own history with Al and music in general. But I also write about the political elements of Al’s work, the satirical themes and motifs that pervade his music and world.
Back when I was film critic at the A.V Club I used to get the same kind of grousing from commenters complaining about writers injecting politics and their own opinions into reviews as if reviews are anything other than someone’s highly subjective opinion.
Here’s the thing: everything is political. Everything comes from a personal place. So while these angry one-star reviewers might feel triggered by a very small amount of anti-Trump rhetoric in a book they feel should be a Safe Space for Conservatives, I guess I’m just too politically incorrect to care about these snowflakes and their easily bruised feelings.
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
AND of course you can and should buy my new book, The Weird Accordion to Al, here
Y’all can also buy my even newer book Postal here