The Big Squeeze: Day Eighty-Nine: "Waffle King" from Alapalooza
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with three primary objectives in mind. First and foremost, I want to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero.
Even more importantly, I want 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 80 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. Third, I want to promote the Weird A-Coloring to Al “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book I am doing with Felipe as well as its hardcover, full-color signed and numbered limited edition version, which you can pre-order here
Author’s Commentary: When I was writing The Weird Accordion to Al as a column my first and foremost goal was to amuse myself. That might seem narcissistic or egomaniacal but for much of the column’s duration it really felt like I was the only person reading it. How unpopular was The Weird Accordion to Al? Let’s just say that I knew the two people who read it and shared it regularly BY NAME and would like to send a shout out to Eric and Ramona.
Thanks for reading! I’m pretty sure you were the only person who did! Because I was writing for an audience of anywhere from one to four there was no reason not to indulge every last self-indulgent riff and goofy bit.
The great thing about writing too much is that it gives you a LOT to cut. One might even argue that this entry gave me entirely too much to cut by being entirely too much and boy oh boy did I hack this one to shreds in the book.
Like the Waffle King, I am a businessman VERY enamored of my product but I like to think I’m a little more humble and modest, although that is setting the bar almost inconceivably low.
Original article:
I’d like to begin the ninety-first entry in the little online column that could by welcoming new readers. It only took six months and ninety entries, but the Weird Accordion to Al finally seems to be finding a modest but appreciative audience. For most of the column’s life it has been almost perversely unpopular.
I write “perversely unpopular” because “Weird Al” Yankovic is, if I might wax a little hyperbolic, easily one of the most beloved and popular humans ever. He’s right up there with Moses of Biblical fame and Pat Boone in the 1950s. Yet in trademark self-defeating form, I chose to write about an exceedingly popular figure with an obsessiveness and completeness damn near guaranteed to push a mainstream audience away.
Al may be a beloved American icon but how big can the audience for an eleven hundred word manifesto on “Gotta Boogie” really be? Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place is a cult website, and the Weird Accordion to Al is a cult within a cult. Thankfully, that cult is growing steadily thanks to three factors.
The excitement over the novel nature of Al’s big nation-wide jaunt made my perversely exhaustive project unexpectedly useful and timely: these aren’t just oddball non-single oddities I’m writing about obsessively here, but songs “Weird Al” Yankovic could very well break out in concert for the first time in literally decades, if ever.
How exciting is that? With the big announcement of next year’s tour Al’s musical history, a history I’ve explored more extensively than any other writer in history, suddenly roared to life and became the blueprint for his future. These songs are suddenly all in play.
In a related development, Al was recently interviewed by Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene (who won a permanent place in my heart for giving You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me four stars) about his upcoming tour and was asked about this very column. Oh my goodness! What a thrill! Al said he was reading the column, and described me as an old friend, and I was overjoyed.
I’d noticed a surge in traffic and when I looked for the source, sure enough, it was a link in the Rolling Stone article. For a mom and pop operation like Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, it was huge break. I really hope that if you were introduced to the column only recently, you stick around and explore the archives, as I’ve already devoted 100,000 words or so to the man’s work, and we’re only half done.
New readers, I should probably warn you that I found it impossible to write 600 to 1000 word entries just on Al’s songs so I felt the need to weave in a lot of narrative aspects, kind of a new journalism kind of thing. And, to be honest, I took a lot of liberties with the facts of Al’s life to make things interesting for myself and, to a much lesser extent, the reader.
For example Al dies of a fluke illness just after recording Polka Party! in the Weird Accordion to Al, if not necessarily in his “real life”, but is then brought back to life by Dr. Demento, who in this timeline at least is a genuine mad scientist, an amateur necromancer, and, I think this really spiced things up, Al’s illegitimate, long-lost half-brother.
As I’ve chronicled earlier, Al reluctantly took on the mantle of Gotham crime-fighter The Batman briefly in the late 1980s and again early in the 1990s and, in an appeal to YA audiences once the Weird Accordion to Al book comes out, in the Weird Accordion to Al, the titular popular American pop parodist is alternately a sensitive vampire and an Emo werewolf immersed in a tragic romance with a sulky girl named Bella.
To bring you up to date, by the time we catch with Al deep into Alapalooza he’s a popular, Grammy-winning veteran pop artist and American icon but within the world of the Weird Accordion to Al he’s also a scruffy, down on his luck private detective with a sassy talking parrot named Bonkers. Will Al and Bonkers find out who’s been murdering student nurses and using their heads as bowling balls?
None of that is true, of course. No, writing 600 to 1000 word articles even about tracks like the 21 second curio “Harvey the Wonder Hamster” has come surprisingly easy to me, and I’ve never, but never, been reduced to being silly or self-indulgent.
Never.
This brings us to the second to last track on Alapalooza, “Waffle King.” It’s a tribute to a very specific era in Peter Gabriel’s career long after he stopped being a poster boy for Prog Rock theatricality and established himself as a solo artist to be reckoned with. “Waffle King” is a loving tribute to Gabriel’s mid-1980s music video smashes “Big Time” and “Sledge Hammer”, when he devoted himself to making big, cartoony pop songs for kids with ubiquitous music videos utilizing the same stop-motion animation technique as Al’s Grammy-nominated video for “Jurassic Park” from this album.
My reservations with “Waffle King”, a song I respect more than love, begin with it sounding not unlike “Talk Soup”, which to me at least also has the vibe of Gabriel’s mid-1980s smashes. “Big Time” and “Sledge Hammer” are both tongue-in-cheek exercises in pop art braggadocio so goofy they border on novelty songs.
The breakfast titan crooning “Waffle King” is similarly full of himself, and, presumably, also the delicious waffles he’s peddling in song. To paraphrase a later Al original, this food pimp has a lame claim to fame and while “Waffle King” nails the sound, style and production of Gabriel’s biggest hits the song is distressingly light on jokes, if very big on feverish exaggeration, sneering attitude and screaming hyperbole.
The singer doesn’t just think making superior waffles makes him special: he seems to think it makes him superior to everyone else on earth. He doesn’t just want people to eat his tasty treats: he wants to be worshiped as an angry, waffle-making God. The Soup Nazi is a mellow hippie compared to this waffle-pimping sociopath.
“Waffle King” made me realize that the 1990s might be my least favorite era for Al. I think his last three albums measure up to anything he’s done and of course the 1980s were Al’s golden age but the 1990s are too full of commercial calculation and songs rooted in smash movies and television shows for my taste. It’s still great, of course, and full of highs like “Frank’s 2000 Inch TV” and “Everything You Know Is Wrong” but there’s a slickness to it that makes it a little harder to connect with than the rest of Al’s oeuvre.
Buy The Weird Accordion to Al AND The Weird A-Coloring to Al from me directly here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from Amazon here
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace