Word Crimes: The Surreal Wrongness of The Isthmus' Notorious "Weird Al" Yankovic Live Concert Review
When THE “Weird Al” Yankovic hired me to write his coffee table book Weird Al: The Book a decade or so ago I had a clear-cut conception of what the job entailed. I wanted to make a strong case for Yankovic as an important American satirist whose work is deeply ingrained in the fabric of American pop culture and whose dark, satirical original songs make gleeful comic sport of the arrogance, entitlement and insanity at the core of American society.
I wanted people to appreciate the entirety of Al’s extraordinary achievements, to understand and appreciate him as a satirist, artist, thinker, writer and musician, not just the goofy guy with the accordion who did “Eat It.”
Since Weird Al: The Book’s release, Yankovic is increasingly recognized as one of pop music’s true greats, a national treasure who has maintained an astonishing level of quality control over the course of his four decades as a household name and the single most successful parody artist in American history.
I wanted people to take Al seriously. They are. In one case, however, he is being taken way too seriously.
I was both amused and horrified when a critic for The Isthmus, which was the stuffy Margaret Dumont to The Onion’s zany Marx Brothers back in my Madison days, wrote a mesmerizingly misguided pan of a “Weird Al” Yankovic concert where the critic futilely attempts to destroy him with words, condescension and withering disdain for the crime of performing dark songs that treat somber subjects like insanity and stalking with an irreverence that is downright comic, almost as if he literally WANTS people to laugh.
The review begins by establishing that the critic is a fancy, important, serious adult who is far too mature and sophisticated to listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic of her own accord or purchase one of his compact discs.
She opens by writing about how shocked she was that her coworkers were “Weird Al” Yankovic fans who expressed the bizarre and, to her, ultimately insupportable conviction that going to one of his concerts might somehow be “fun.”
She naturally and not at all obnoxiously assumed that they would share her view of Yankovic—as someone whose music she is vaguely familiar with but feels utterly indifferently about—since that is clearly the only appropriate, adult take to have on a juvenile performer such as Mr. Yankovic.
This is a wonderful and not at all condescending and insulting start. It makes sense that she’s surprised that Al has fans among her colleagues because when someone is the single most successful person in the history of their field and a beloved component of generations of American childhoods you can expect them to have very few fans. You can furthermore expect those few fans to be very lukewarm in their enthusiasm, if not downright ambivalent.
Having been to seventeen “Weird Al” Yankovic shows over the course of the last thirty-five years, and written between 3 to 5 books about him, I can safely say that is not true of Al.
Al has LOTS of fans and they are as obsessive as Phish fans and Juggalos. It defines them in much the same way.
The critic portrays herself as someone with an appropriately minimal level of familiarity with Yankovic’s work, having heard the hits and listened indulgently to some album cuts on a family iPod without ever thinking about the words in his songs.
We then segue into praise that’s both condescending and moderately insulting. Al is so good at playing that silly-looking, goofy-sounding accordion contraption. Why didn’t he play it more? He could play it while performing the six or seven songs of his she was familiar with and wouldn’t have gone home a broken woman, her spirit destroyed by the eviscerating darkness of the EXTREMELY problematic “Weird Al” Yankovic.
And his band is so tight! Why not showcase them more? The critic goes out of her way to make it clear that she does not know anything about Al or his music and also that she does not like his tunes. That apparently qualifies her to give THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PARODY ARTIST IN AMERICAN HISTORY advice on how to more successfully entertain audiences nearly a half century into his fabulously successful career.
Al is one of the most careful, cautious and deliberate people I know, as well as one of the most brilliant. He doesn’t do ANYTHING without first thinking long and hard and methodically about it first. Yet the critic somehow imagines that Yankovic wrote and recorded all of these dark songs, then performed them hundreds of times over a period of decades before ecstatic live audiences without ever thinking about their larger ramifications or ever-shifting relationship to society and contemporary music. Since the high school valedictorian clearly never thinks about his words and ideas, it has apparently fallen upon the critic to obsess grimly about them for him.
After stingily doling out modest praise for Al and the band’s musicianship, the writer gets to the heart of the matter. Since we live in a violent, chaotic and often tragic world, it is the sacred job of satirists NOT to expose hypocrisy and speak truth to power by commenting on the violent, chaotic and tragic nature of society.
In the critic’s mind, the job of “Weird Al” Yankovic was to dance around like an animal with his accordion while performing the five or six songs of his everyone knows. He shamefully did not perform that job to her satisfaction. For that he will never be forgiven.
She then moves into the “Are you fucking kidding me?” portion of the live review when she writes, “I couldn’t help feeling that culturally, we — as a nation — have crossed some kind of line recently. After one mass shooting or another, or after the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, or on January 6, 2021, or during the pandemic, when circumstances forced a re-evaluation of a lot of things. Last night, as I was sitting in the audience with the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and Highland Park all within the last two months, I kept noticing how many times a Weird Al song centers on the extreme anger and resentment of a young man.”
Now you could argue, and I certainly DO argue in the 500 page extended version of The Weird Accordion to Al that many of Al’s songs center on the extreme anger and resentment of young men BECAUSE THAT’S ONE OF THE PREEMINENT THEMES OF HIS SATIRE. It’s not a flaw. It’s a feature. It’s like complaining that a blues concert is too downbeat and would benefit from less complaining and more gratitude and positivity.
I would go on to say that Al has been ahead of the curve in using his warped anti-love songs to critique toxic masculinity, entitlement and the myriad tragicomic character flaws of the white American asshole.
A characteristic paragraph in the Isthmus pan reads, “Sure, it can be written off as all in good fun when the speaker in “My Baby’s In Love with Eddie Vedder” suggests he’s going to start stalking Alanis Morrissette to get back at his girlfriend for her fangirl crush on the Pearl Jam singer, but it’s a lot harder to dismiss “Melanie,” a song about a guy who’s spying on a woman through her window and wondering why she won’t go out with him. Is it funny that he gave “a Mohawk to [her] cat”? Maybe it was in 1988, when it was released. What about playing it in the same concert with “Close But No Cigar,” a song about a guy who rejects a series of girlfriends for minor infractions like misusing a word?”
I love the passage “Is it funny that he gave “a Mohawk to [her] cat”? Maybe it was in 1988, when it was released” as if that is the very specific place where a hard line must be drawn.
Do you think this is FUNNY?
To answer her not at all idiotic question, it WAS funny that the psychotic narrator of “Melanie” gave a cat a mohawk in 1988, when the world was innocent and pure and we knew nothing of madness and murder.
It is no longer funny, however, that the lunatic singing “Melanie” gave a feline an unusual hairstyle. We as a society will crumble into anarchy without rules. No rule is more sacrosanct than the one about not performing songs about an unwell man giving an unwanted hairstyle to a displeased feline.
For Al to so flagrantly flaunt this sacred directive is unconscionable. No wonder attending a “Weird Al” Yankovic was such a traumatic experience for the critic. She didn’t come home with a souvenir tee-shirt. She went home with PTSD.
What about “Close But No Cigar?” I personally think it’s a hilarious song with great lyrics and a terrific melody but now I see that I was wrong to see it through the prism of those qualities rather than the morality of the intentionally obnoxious character singing it.
Throughout the piece, the critic ignores the show on a musical and comic level so that she can focus on what she sees as the only part that matters—morality and gender politics.
She’s seeing everything through the prism of morality and gender politics and the intentionally loathsome creeps in Al’s songs do not come off well in her eyes BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO! YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LAUGH DERISIVELY AT THEM! YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FIND THEM FOOLISH! In no universe are you supposed to listen to a song like “Melanie” and think, “I see a lot of myself in this. Al really articulated what I’m going through right now in my relationship.”
I’m not going to lie. It’s tough out there right now for us Progressives. The overturning of Roe Vs. Wade is a tragedy with calamitous, society-transforming consequences. The Biden-Harris administration has been a failure in many ways. It’s entirely possible that Donald Trump will be elected president in 2024.
Most disastrously and dangerously, beloved entertainer “Weird Al” Yankovic is traveling the country performing thirty year old album cuts with unlikable protagonists.
Will we, as a culture, survive? I honestly can’t say. Al playing darkly comic songs live could prove apocalyptic.
The article saves its worst hyperbole for last. It closes with the reviewer observing bleakly, “I wanted to feel good. But I couldn’t.”
She JUST WANTED TO FEEL GOOD. She thought that would be possible at a “Weird Al” Yankovic show. She learned, to her surprise and horror, that it was more of a soul-crushing, utterly dispiriting endurance test.
I hope that she ends all of her articles this way, and that if I scroll through the archives I’ll see a piece on a Harlem Globetrotters game that ends, “I wanted to have fun and watch silly men play a comic game of basketball. Instead I felt dead inside” and an article on petting puppies that closes with, “I thought petting a golden retriever puppy would feel nice. Instead I felt nothing.”
She wanted escape. Instead “Weird Al” Yankovic spent ninety minutes shoving her face in the ugliness and cruelty of the broken-glass-crusted dog shit that is contemporary American life. He didn’t just shove her face in the world’s ills: he made her eat it. This ain’t no Amish paradise! It’s real life!
In the end the article will help Al more than it will hurt. It will probably be the best read article in the history of The Isthmus because it is being so widely hate-shared, hate-read, hate-commented-upon and, in this instance at least, hate-blogged.
This staggeringly off-base attack is inspiring Al’s legion of obsessively devoted fans to defend him as publicly and voraciously as possible.
Seeing someone get Al and his world so egregiously wrong only highlights and underlines what is so wonderfully right and enduring about his extraordinary career.
This vitriolic, idiotic hate is making the public’s deep, abiding love for Al shine even brighter.
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