The Big Squeeze Day Forty-Eight: "This Song's Just Six Words Long" 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 500 page Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but better because it has illustrations and copy-editing, fact-checking AND an introduction from “Weird Al” Yankovic himself and over 80 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 gives the extended version of the book its name. 

Author’s Commentary: Al’s relationship with George Harrison has changed dramatically through the decades. Yes, Al has come a long way since a lawyer representing the interests of The Beatles and George Harrison sent Dr. Demento a cease and desist order informing him that he would no longer be able to play “Pac-Man”, Al’s video game themed parody of the Harrison-written “Taxman.”

“Pac-Man” could have been one of Al’s first singles. Instead it was not officially released until nearly four decades later, as one of the main attractions of Medium Rarities, the obscurities compilation that was included as the fifteenth album on his Squeeze Box box set. 

In 2014 Al covered Harrison’s “What is Life” at a Harrison tribute concert. In between Al took delicious glee in deconstructing the singularly lazy, repetitive songwriting of Harrison’s late-period smash “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You.” 

“I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” was one of a number of covers Al parodied on Even Worse; though Harrison released the definitive version it began life as a 1962 single from James Ray from songwriter Rudy Clark. 

Al ended up having much more of a relationship with Harrison and his songs than any of the other Beatles, even famous fan Paul McCartney, who nixed Al parodying “Live and Let Die” as “Chicken Pot Pie” for vegetarianism-related reasons. 

Both of Al’s Harrison parodies are goofy, impish trifles but that doesn’t make them any less breezily appealing. 

Original Weird Accordion to Al entry: 

Al tends to parody songs from the outside, to radically re-imagine Coolio’s intense, almost hymn-like “Gangsta’s Paradise” as a proud Luddite anthem on “Amish Paradise”, for example, or The Police’s dour “King of Pain” as a passionate tailor’s spiel. But at various points in his career, Al has attacked songs from the inside out. 

In these instances, Al’s spoofs double as critical analysis and commentary in addition to crackerjack parody. “Smells Like Nirvana” for example, is about Kurt Cobain’s iconic, irresistible incomprehensibility and charismatic mumble while “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” uses George Harrison’s irritatingly infectious late-period hit “Got My Mind Set On You” to explore a popular theme of Al’s: the mind-numbingly, yet ingratiatingly repetitive nature of contemporary pop music. 

The clattering, mindless repetition of pop hits is a central theme of Al’s polka parodies. Al takes songs that are already sadistic in their unrelenting repetitiveness like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and makes them even more psychotically intent on repeating the same earworm of a hook over and over and over and over and over again. Also, they mock unnecessary and gratuitous repetition, the kind that just takes up space and repeats previous points rather than adding anything new whatsoever. 

There somewhat conspicuously is not a polka medley on Even Worse. Needless to say, no one wanted anyone to mistake the album for some manner of Polka Party. Yet polka die-hards jonesing for the staples of Al’s manic mash-ups of popular favorites could take comfort in knowing that “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” addressed the medleys’ enduring obsession with repetition while the throwback track “Lasagna” (a throwback to both Al’s past, as well as pop culture’s) afforded Al at least one showcase for the accordion. 

“(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” is not, of course, six words long. The chorus alone is six words but Harrison’s clamorous ditty repeated its six word chorus so relentlessly that it began to feel like the song consisted of just a few catchy words repeated to the point of madness. In deconstructing the song, Al assumes the perspective and persona of a pop singer who plum forgot to write a proper set of lyrics for a song and decides to wing it for three minutes in hopes that catchy music will distract listeners from its emptiness. 

So why does the singer of “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” feel obligated to sing a song he gleefully admits, even brags has “got nothing to say?” As the song’s cheerfully arrogant singer gleefully brags, “Oh I make a lotta money/They pay me a ton of money/They’re payin' me plenty of money/To sing this song, child.”

As a twelve year old, I loved how often Al’s characters sang about money as the great motivator, whether they’re Luke Skywalker pondering unemployment if he kills Darth Vader or the singer here rubbing it in listeners' faces that even though he’s not willing to put in the work to write an actual song, he will happily accept the financial rewards. 

This was more than a joke to the 12 year old me. It felt more like Al was exposing one of the open secrets of the adult world, namely that the primary reason people do things is because someone is willing to pay them money to do so. 

The purpose of most pop songs is to fly by as quickly and breezily and painlessly as possible. “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” has an antithetical agenda. It wants listeners to feel the singer’s quiet quiet desperation as he attempts to fill what’s actually closer to three and a half minutes worth of time with absolutely nothing, with throat clearing and repetition and, for the sake of sonic diversity, a guitar solo. Al’s parody seems to last twice as long as the original because it’s continually calling attention to how threadbare it is lyrically.

It’s a silly ditty that doubles as a sly deconstruction of pop songwriting, particularly the original song’s maddening insistence on “rhyming” a word with itself instead of finding actual rhymes. So while the singer at one point insists “I know if I put my mind to it/I know I could find a good rhyme here” the best he can muster is, “Oh, you gotta have a music/You need really catchy music.” 

“(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” is about as meta as Al gets, and as a dude who has been taking pop culture apart and putting it back together in fascinating and revelatory ways for close to four decades, he’s a pretty meta fella. “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” is a song about a song that’s also a song about songwriting, particularly lazy songwriting. It’s not the weightiest song in Al’s oeuvre. In fact, it's aggressively featherweight, a meta-trifle as it were, but in its own irreverent way, it has something to say, unlike the annoyingly infectious song it’s both spoofing and deconstructing. 

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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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