The thing is, he’s not at all hackish. I totally get that might be the impression if you only know his parodies, he can seem that way. And he’s smart enough to know how he’s perceived — thus the inspirations for his songs in the movie.
But in reality, he takes an amazing amount of care in the music he does. His band is freaking amazing, nailing styles from The Kinks to Coolio to The Doors to Polka. He researches the heck out of the artists he parodies, and if you listen to his style parodies —- everything from Devo, the Talking Heads, and The B-52s to Bob Dylan and James Taylor — you’ll see he nails everything from musical styes to narrative elements.
And yeah, I’m a bit of a fan. That’s me at 2:03 in this video in the “Now, just this guy!” part. Right up there with flying an F-15 and having a child in the greatest moments in my life. (I’ll leave the order up to you to guess.)
Yeah, some of his best work. My brothers and I can still crack each other up at any time with one of two things - Holy Grail lines, and Weird Al lyrics. The latter mostly from Dare To Be Stupid.
Now I need to go listen to that again. It’s been too long, I get forgetful somewhere around the Sizzler.
Maybe it’s a generational thing. I grew up enamored of Alan Sherman (Al’s most direct influence), but even as a child I remember my parents and grandparents having Spike Jones, and, more importantly, Mickey Katz (father of Joel and grandfather of Jennifer Grey) records around.
Aw, that’s a bit harsh. But I did watch the first video, and while I think I’ve established myself as someone who has a very positive impression of Al, it’s great and all, but he’s not a very good singer. If that’s what you’re arguing, and I’m not sure of that, and I’ll completely agree that he puts in massive effort and talent in his parodies, but . . . he’s a regular guy that has been doing music all his life, not a person that was gifted with a voice or an instrumental talent of note.
He’s a ridiculously talented guy who has surrounded himself with other ridiculously talented people. The deep irony of the whole thing is that he’s a vastly better musician than 95% of the people he parodies. Compare “Party in the U.S.A.” and “Party in the C.I.A.” One of these people is an extremely talented lyricist, and it isn’t Miley.
The problem with getting tone and intent across on the Internet. I was just kidding about the dead to me part. Explaining jokes makes you regret ever joking, but the Internet is so hard to communicate on sometimes… “I am a big fan of something, and you don’t love it as much as I do, so your opinions are worthless to me and you are dead to me” is like 80% of Internet discourse. It’s NOT how I actually feel. But I felt this was a safe topic to… parody… Internet discussion in. :)
I think the Al fans got it, at least.
As for his singing, commercial musical success is often about other things besides raw singing talent, or we wouldn’t have Madonna, Simon Lebon, John Fogerty, Bob Dylan, Lil Uzi Vert, or Florence Foster Jenkins.
Mandatory Fun was the #1 Billboard album in August 2014. How many other artists who first charted in the early 1980s had #1 albums that decade? Damn few.
NAME ME ANOTHER ACCORDION PLAYER WITH HIS TALENT? NO? YEAH, JUDY TENUTA IS DEAD, BITCH. AL RULES.**
** For the love of God, please do not respond seriously to this post.
To be fair, whenever I start a post with “Aw . . .” I wasn’t taking it that seriously either. There’s a brotherly/sisterly shoulder chuck implied in those two letters.
Don’t forget “Slime Creatures from outer space”, “I’ll be mellow when I’m dead”, “Midnight Star” and on and on and on…
Speaking of being mellow when you’re dead, it suddenly occurs to me that all these years later, I actually know what a Jumbo Jack is, though I’ve never had one.
Turns out I had a Roku device lying around from the days when we didn’t have a smart tv, so I plugged it in and gave this a watch. For the record, I was moslty ambivalent to Wierd Al’s music (and to most music while in grade school in the 80’s), but his movie “UHF” I hold in the highest regard and is slapstick comedy second to none (“Top Secret” being runner-up, the cowboy-ninja-brand-sponsor cafe battle scene in “Return of the Killer Tomatoes” being good enough to take the whole third slot.)
This was a decently amusing watch. The dad beating the crap out of the salesman led me to believe it would be a biopic through the interpretative hyperactivity of Al’s memories or sensibilities. Well, I wasn’t ready for it to go full nonsense, and I feel it detracted from the film… facts being stranger than fiction, as it moved into obviously parodied fictional events, the movie lost some of its charm for me.
My favorite moment was Al’s very smooth and easy slide into complete success, and the frank acknowledgement of it, his roomies being completely supportive and the world embracing him with so little friction… the only roadbump being the agent, played by Al, his own foil. That was all great. The bit where he says “Eat it” came first and started dating Madonna, I was transfixed… it was almost plausible… but then, the joke is played on the viewer.
I think I’d heard somewhere how Al was a talented, smart, but squeaky clean guy… maybe he didn’t have the ‘usual’ tortured chequered artist’s past to build a satisfying biopic around, or maybe the script needed another few rewrites to wring more jokes out of the divergent history he was telling. UHF is a better rags to riches comedy in my book, by a mile. But hey, I googled his wikipedia page afterwards, so I know my Al history better now.
