The Big Squeeze: Day Fifty-One: "I Think I'm a Clone Now" 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: Looking back at these Weird Accordion to Al entries, I’m amused by how often I complain about the column’s exceedingly modest leadership.
I thought that The Weird Accordion to Al was a terrific idea that would catch on like wildfire with Al’s pathologically devoted cult. What I did not realize was that The Weird Accordion to Al was in fact a great idea, albeit for a book.
As an ongoing column, The Weird Accordion to Al had all sorts of inherent weaknesses above and beyond me abandoning it for long months so that I could turn my attention to more popular and lucrative features like My World of Flops and Control Nathan Rabin 4.0
Even for a weird cult website like mine, writing a thousand or more words on EVERY track on every “Weird Al” Yankovic is awfully niche. And my writing in the online column was silly and self-indulgent enough to scare away “Weird Al” Yankovic fans who wanted to read about their hero, not be subjected to half-baked riffs and tangents.
So I am pleased to report that at this late stage my most immediate problem is that The Weird Accordion to Al might just have turned out to be TOO popular in that I am currently in the simultaneously enviable and tricky position of having to send out FIVE HUNDRED copies of the extended version of the Weird Accordion to Al I pre-sold vis Kickstarter and my website in the next few weeks on top of all my other responsibilities as a husband, father of two, podcaster and website proprietor.
500, incidentally, is also the number of people who read The Weird Accordion to Al column regularly, and I’ve already sold about 1500 books additionally, so it’s safe to assume that the book is way more popular the column. That is how it should be. The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Edition represents The Weird Accordion to Al in its best, truest form.
What does that make this? A clone, of course, a smudgy carbon copy of an original that has already been spun off into not one but two books.
Call me the Carbon Copy Man; I’ll keeping cranking out these daffy doubles until y’all stop reading although God knows complete public indifference has never stopped me before!
Original Weird Accordion to Al entry:
It’s appropriate that “I Think I’m a Clone Now” would wind up on Even Worse because the albumfeatures more musical clones than anything Al had done before or would go on to do later. There are the musical clones of Al’s parodies, of course, which appropriate the melodies and arrangements and instrumentation of the songs they’re spoofing while transforming them lyrically, creating something at once comfortingly familiar and excitingly fresh.
Beyond that, Even Worse finds Al creating weird musical clones of recent hits that are themselves clones of sorts in that every hit Al parodies on Even Worse with the exception of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” is a cover. Even George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You” is actually a cover, and Al’s cheeky deconstruction of the song’s creative and lyrical limitations is certainly referencing Harrison’s smash cover and not Rudy Clark’s 1962 original.
Al is not just spoofing songs here. He’s spoofing specific performances and recordings of songs that are not the originals. The blandly futuristic, intentionally plastic version of “I Think We’re Alone Now”, for example, that “I Think I’m A Clone Now” is based on musically is most assuredly the work of big-haired mall teen dream superstar Tiffany and not that of Tommy James and the Shondells.
With “I Think I’m A Clone Now” there is a pleasing harmony of sound and subject matter in that synth pop, like its New Wave cousin, is science fiction music created with eternally futuristic instruments of technology like expensive synthesizers and drum machines. If a robot or a clone or robo-clone were to become a recording artist and release a song, it’d probably sound a lot like “I Think I’m a Clone Now”, all futuristic keyboards and technological gloss and zero rock and roll grit.
Where Tommy James and the Shondells’ “I Think I’m Alone Now” is suffused with the ache of adolescent romantic longing, with the hot-burning passion of early infatuation, and Tiffany’s with a synthetic recreation thereof, “I Think I’m A Clone Now” instead offers the science-fiction creation story of a self-professed “Carbon Copy Man”, who owes his curious existence to being “part of some genetic’s plans.”
I learned more about cloning from “I Think I’m a Clone Now” than I have from any work of fiction since the poorly received Michael Keaton Multiplicity. I learned, for example, that a clone is created by taking a donor’s body cell and fertilizing a human egg in a petri dish. Is that true? I don’t know and I can’t be bothered to check, but Al is a very smart man, and would never go around deliberately misleading the public about the nature of cloning in song just to get some kind of sick thrill, so I’m going to assume that it is.
The science in “I Think I’m a Clone Now” may be bogus. In fact, I’m going to tweet at Neil Patrick Harris Degrassi High Tyson Givens, our country’s official scientist, to ask him if the science on “I Think I’m a Clone Now” checks out and if he gets back to me, honestly, it would be an incredible thrill and I would instantly forgive him for ruining both Batman v Superman and Zoolander Number 2 with his terrible acting. But I don't think it’s bogus so this is another instance of Al educating his audience in addition to entertaining them. Besides, how much useful scientific information is there in the Tiffany version? Probably not a lot.
If Tiffany’s hit was a mall-brat anthem, Al’s is a dad joke pun spree. The couplet “Look at the way/We go out walking close together/I guess you could say/I’m really beside myself” is both genuinely clever and more than a little eye-roll-inducing, as is the line “Every pair of genes is a hand-me-down.”
“I Think I’m a Clone Now” is the punniest, if not quite the funniest Al parody since “Addicted to Spuds.” The vibe is half science fiction novel, half wacky, Small Wonder style 1980s sitcom about the nutty adventures of a kooky clone and someone exactly like them. Al took a featherweight mall rat anthem and created an infectious parody that’s at once smart, silly, sci-fi and unabashedly nerdy.
Like the protagonist of “I Think I’m a Clone Now”, Al is on some level a “Carbon Copy Man”, a musical superhero who creates sonic duplicates of popular favorites that he corrupts and transforms through words and jokes and ideas. Yet this Carbon Copy Man is also one of pop music’s true originals, both in the sense that no one is better or more successful than Al at what he does (spend decades releasing album upon album of beloved, enduring hit parodies of contemporary pop songs and acclaimed originals) and also no one really does what Al does, either.
He’s dominating his field to the point where it can feel like he’s the only person in it.
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