The Big Squeeze: Day Forty-Seven: "Stuck In a Closet With Vanna White" from Even Worse
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: When I look back at the three years I spent writing the Weird Accordion to Al column, I divide it into two eras: pre-Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity tour and post-Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity tour.
That’s how much of a game changer the tour that gave the extended version of The Weird Accordion to Al its name is to me.
Seeing Al and his band perform originals, pastiches and obscurities seven times in the space of two weeks deepened my love and appreciation for Al’s music and gave me a world of good memories to associate with individual songs and Al’s music as a whole.
I will, for example, always associate that tour with “Albuquerque” since Al mentioned me onstage in the introduction to that particular fan favorite during a show in Augusta, Georgia.
But I will also always associate “Stuck In a Closet With Vanna White” with Al’s 2018 tour because he shocked and delighted me, and the rest of the crowd, by performing that not so golden oldie.
I was surprised both because “Stuck in a Closet With Vanna White” is the deepest of album cuts and because it contains a phrase that was not considered particularly hurtful at the time of the song’s release but today is seen as an ableist slur.
Al, being a responsible, conscientious human being, stopped the song on a dime in concert to apologize for using a phrase that had become offensive in the three decades separating Even Worse from the 2018 tour.
That’s all you can ask for, really. We all make mistakes but if we’re mature, decent folks who care about being on the right side of history we learn from them.
Original Weird Accordion to Al article:
Al casts such a long shadow over the past forty years of American entertainment that just about anything in pop culture can be connected to him, Kevin Bacon-style. For example, I was recently on Engage, the official Star Trek podcast to promote this website and this column and to discuss the musical careers of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Al is obviously a huge Star Wars fan, or someone doing an astonishingly convincing impression of one, but he’s not as powerfully connected in the public mind with Gene Roddenberry’s television gift to nerds everywhere.
Of course I remembered that on “Ebay” Al took full advantage of the fact that “William Shatner’s old toupee” rhymes with the song’s title and subject. But I’d forgotten that “bowling on the Starship Enterprise” is one of a series of strange, surreal and pop-culture-satiated misadventures the singer of “Stuck In A Closet With Vanna White” experiences in dream land.
Sonically, “Stuck In A Closet With Vanna White” is driven by some of the most audacious fretwork and fancy shredding in all of Al’s discography. The guitar work is flashy, hard-driving and aggressive, as is Al’s delivery as he addresses his psychiatrist/the listener in a desperate attempt to make sense of the free-floating insanity of an intense and troubling dream life that always seems to end with the singer in the titular predicament.
Like Ed McMahon,Vanna White became very rich and very famous for doing not much of anything at all. Unlike Ed McMahon, she was absurdly overcompensated largely because she looked so ravishing doing nothing . She elevated the art of smiling, walking, and turning letters into pop-art but she also loomed as a preeminent sex symbol of the 1980s. It seems safe to assume that many people would love to be stuck in a closet with the Wheel of Fortune staple in 1988. Despite Freudian sexual imagery involving “hot dogs and donuts flying everywhere”, however, Al is interested in White as a walking punchline and random pop-culture reference rather than as an object of widespread lust.
White was the subject of countless sexual dreams in her prime, and to be fair, she does not seem to have aged in the past three decades (she’s like Al in that respect) but the role she plays in this song more closely resembles a nightmare. That closet that Al and Vanna find themselves in is a coffin or prison rather than a place to make out.
“Stuck In A Closet With Vanna White” runs an epic five minutes because it has a lot of crazy business to get through, a lot of loopy scenarios and vivid imagery tied together with dream logic, silliness and of course television, that great common denominator in Al’s music.
The song plays like an MC Escher painting by way of Mad Magazine. Alternately, it’s Yankovic-goes-Lewis-Carroll, Al in Wonderland, as it were. Like a Mad cartoonist doodling in the margins, Al fills the song with a crazy cast of characters that includes a dinosaur, Russian spies and the chest-buster monster from Alien.
Al’s dream world is predictably television-saturated. Wheel Of Fortune and Star Trek have clearly taken up valuable real estate in the singer’s subconscious, which brings us back to the Star Trek podcast I recently recorded.
After taping the podcast, I looked at some of the listener reviews and came across this angry blurt of nerd rage:
“(Engage) is a rose colored stained glass window into the world of ST. Sounded like a poor PR department attempt to brainwash listeners to watch all things Star Trek. The mid-sentence break for an ad was an insulting reminder of what the purpose of this podcast truly is---Money. (Host) Jordan (Hoffman) is easy on the ears and has some good insights, but comes across as a bit of a pitch man. Darren's laughter sounded misplaced and 'purchased', and his voice turned me off immediately.
They claimed DS9 to be the inventor of long sci-fi story arcs, but Babylon 5 was the trendsetter for DS9 to copy...which it did well in later seasons.
An official podcast should, like the new series, GIVE fans what they want, NOT TELL them what they want. And those ST fandom podcasts are already out there.
Even with guest stars, I will not give this another chance. Give me TrekFM and This Week In Trek.”
Christ, I’m surprised it did not close with “Worst. Podcast. Ever” but that would require a level of self-awareness this fellow clearly does not possess.
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