The Big Squeeze: Day Thirty-Eight: "Addicted to Spuds"

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 wanted to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero. Even more importantly, I wanted 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: Very early in the process of transforming the messy raw material of the Weird Accordion to Al column into the glistening literary gold of the Weird Accordion to Al book I made a realization: my illustrator Felipe Sobreiro was a goddamn genius whose brilliant artwork would make the book literally twice as good. 

You do not tell geniuses what to do. You can give them guidance and direction, of course, but at a certain point they’re going to do what they do, and because they are geniuses, it will be brilliant. 

I had a list of songs I wanted Felipe to illustrate but it quickly became apparent that Felipe had his own idea of what the book should look and feel like and I almost invariably deferred to his vision when it came to illustrations. 

I tossed out my list of songs I wanted Felipe to illustrate and trusted his instincts. The only song I insisted that Felipe cover was “Addicted to Spuds.” I specifically wanted him to bring the lyric “Some tater tots would blow your mind” to life through his art and I’m glad that I did because it is legitimately one of my favorite drawings in the book and one of my favorite illustrations ever. 

Thank you, Felipe for indulging me. I could not be happier with the results. 

Original Weird Accordion to Al article: 

The formulaic nature of Al’s music has been both a strength and a weakness, a crutch, and one of the main reasons for Al’s astonishing popularity and longevity. In the mid 1980s, for example, no one was more likely to transform a ubiquitous pop song about love or sex or rock and roll into a song about food than Al. Consequently, no one did it better. 

The “Addicted To Love” parody “Addicted To Spuds” follows a blueprint that had served Al well. He took one of those monster radio smashes that everyone knows, and everyone recognizes. Then he switched a few letters around. Voila!: a song about drug addiction as a sweaty, coke-addled metaphor for overpowering lust delivered with icy sophistication by a debonair English playboy becomes an equally obsessive but far sillier song about two people helpless before their addiction to all things potato-related. 

“Addicted To Love” is very overtly about sex and lust and compulsion lyrically but it also just plain sounds dirty. Needless to say, Al’s mutation is nowhere as lascivious but at times it captures the visceral, sweaty intensity of the original when the singer moans of his compatriot’s helpless potato addiction: “Your greasy hands, your salty lips/looks like you’ve found the chips/your belly aches/Your teeth grind/some tater tots would blow your mind!” 

Never has an overwhelming desire to munch Pringles until you’re sick (because if you’re not binging to the point of sickness in a “Weird Al” Yankovic food song, then what’s the point of eating in the first place?”) seemed so obsessive and pathological. This is not just someone who enjoys potatoes in all their admirable majesty and variety (which are of course listed here in obsessive detail here): he’s a man with a problem. A serious problem. 

I will be the first to concede that potato-overconsumption is not the most fertile subject matter. On “Addicted To Spuds”, Al works up a sweat wringing every last bit of humor out of the fairly fallow ground that is being unhealthily consumed with consuming every form of a certain starch. 

Al’s wordplay in the song is dad joke-shameless but also dad joke-ingratiating and dad joke-mildly-amusing, like when the singer observes to a fellow french fry fiend of their shared addiction to potatoes,”I understand how you must feel/I can’t deny they’ve got a-peel!” Al’s stylized delivery, a sort of Bizarro World version of Robert Palmer’s taunting bluesy growl, carries some of the humor as well. 

I particularly love the way Al turns “fried” into two syllables when he pronounces it “Fuh-Ried” (that french fried potatoes), and I especially like both the line, and the sentiment, “Some tater tots would blow your mind!” to the point where I am considering getting it tattooed on my neck. “Addicted To Spuds” is rooted in the surprisingly sturdy conviction that potato words (like deli words) are inherently funny: it doesn’t hurt when they’re neatly symmetrical and catchily alliterative phrases like “french fries” and “tater tots.” 

“Addicted To Spuds” fits the profile of a “Weird Al” Yankovic lead-off first single a lot more than “Living With A Hernia.” It’s a parody of a massive, massive, unmissable smash in “Addicted To Love” that spawned an equally, if not more massive, unmissable smash video featuring a snazzily dressed Palmer (looking not unlike someone who might hang out with Patrick Bateman) crooning before an all-female band of vacant, dead-eye sex doll automatons barely pretending to play their instruments. 

Like the notorious woman-in-a-grinder Hustler cover, the video is so grotesquely misogynist that it almost comes all the way around and becomes a weird, disturbing commentary on the nature of misogyny and the dehumanization of women’s bodies in pop culture and society as a whole. The video would be an obvious satirical target for Al but for whatever reason a video was never made and the song never became a single. 

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