White, nerdy, and here to stay
IT IS TIME to congratulate the man who once rewrote Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" as "Chicken Pot Pie." (McCartney, a vegetarian, denied him permission to record the song, on the grounds that it promoted the slaughter of animals.) "Weird Al" Yankovic, satirical pop-goblin and parody merchant, has not simply endured but triumphed: His new album, "Straight Outta Lynwood" (Volcano), shot into the Billboard Top 10 upon its release last month--his highest chart placing since he opened his one-man spoof-factory in the early '80s.
Back then, it was the platinum gods of pop on whom he was practicing his trade. Michael Jackson's "Bad," in Al's hands, became "Fat": "The pavement cracks when I fall down/ I've got more chins than Chinatown." Madonna's "Like a Virgin" emerged as "Like a Surgeon," the stone-faced luxury rock of Robert Plant's "Addicted to Love" as "Addicted to Spuds," and so on. The satire was fairly toothless (perhaps if Jacko had been overweight) but that wasn't the point: The point was to perturb the inhuman gloss of these artists with his homemade brand of wriggling idiocy.
Eighties pop had a merciless, airtight quality to it--the music seemed to have sealed itself off from outside influences or the possibility of change--and Al, in his wacky way, was an antidote. He also proved himself equal to the MTV age, taking to the new medium of video with great flair: in the case of "Fat," he made (with Jacko's blessing) a video on the set of the original "Bad" video. It won a Grammy.
Al's comedy is of a familiar kind--the kind in which it is taken as axiomatic that certain words connected to the human body (e.g. hernia, pancreas) and certain types of food (especially Italian food: bologna, lasagna) are always, always funny. Beyond that, there is also the perennial pleasure of deliberately mishearing something ("deck the halls with Buddy Holly," etc.): It seems to massage some rogue node of gibberish in the cerebral cortex. My father still fondly retails an episode from his school days, when subversive choristers delighted themselves by singing the phrase "deeply wailing"--from Charles Wesley's hymn "Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending"--as "deep-sea whaling."
Al's songbook is a litany of these genial distortions. He comes out of the tradition of mildly absurdist Jewish-American musical comedy that produced Allan Sherman and Tom Lehrer and, in an efflorescence of '70s freak-power, Shel Silverstein. Like Silverstein, Al was a regular on the weekly syndicated radio shows of Los Angeles DJ Barret Eugene Hansen, a.k.a. Dr. Demento. It was Demento who gave Al his first exposure, back in the days when he was accompanying himself on the accordion, by airing numbers like the Queen takeoff "Another One Rides the Bus."
His career hit the skids briefly with the 1986 album "Polka Party!" (not actually an all-polka record, although the cover shot of Al grinning in lederhosen may have frightened a few people off), but since his rebound two years later with "Even Worse" he has shown remarkable staying power--becoming, in effect, the music industry's satirist laureate. It is considered a sanctification of sorts to have one's material burlesqued by Al: Kurt Cobain was said to have been particularly gratified when the Yankovic version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ("Smells Like Nirvana") was released in 1992.
The question remains, though: Why is Al at the peak of his popularity in 2006? Why now? Mainstream pop is considerably more various and multi-hued than it was in his '80s heyday, and his targets--one would imagine--harder to locate.
But Al's aim is true: His new hit single "White and Nerdy" is a bull's-eye strike on Chamillionaire's rap anthem "Ridin'," turning the original's refrain of "tryin' to catch me ridin' dirty" into "I'm just too white and nerdy," and its ghetto prowess into the pale lament of a suburban hip-hop fan. "I wanna roll with the gangstas/ But oh well it's obvious I'm white and nerdy." The infatuation of whites with images of black outlawry has long been hip-hop's cash cow--why shouldn't it be Al's too? (And his fake rapping isn't bad either.)
"I'll Sue Ya," meanwhile, translates the indignant hyperbolics of activist punk-funkers Rage Against the Machine into a fit of consumer pique: "I sued Taco Bell, cuz I ate too many chalupas/ And I got fat!" Then there is the maniacal facility of "Polkarama," the album's by-now-traditional polka medley, in which the lyrics of various hits are spliced into a stream of accordion-aerated high velocity nonsense.
Novelty artists--and he is one--have a notoriously short lifespan. They age badly, they run out of gags. But Al, by simply refusing to stop, has turned himself into a sort of cultural Geiger counter, ticking and squawking around the hot zones. The oddity of a humorist titling himself like a pro wrestler (there's no "Funny Jerry" Seinfeld) has long since worn off--he's the champ, and he's earned it.
James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the Critical Studies column in Sunday's Ideas section wrongly attributed the recording "Addicted to Love" to Robert Plant. It was by Robert Palmer.) 