Artist A-Z #2

Let me make one thing absolutely clear: I am no fanboy.

Yes, there are certain series, musical artists, writers, etc. that I enjoy immensely...

(Disintegration? Sorry, Kyle: Recovery is the greatest album ever.)

...but I don't automatically assume the sun rises and falls on these things. I am free to admit that there are problems with some (sometimes a great deal) of the output related to my favorite book/comic/anime series, artists, etc.

For example: I love Stephen King. His Dark Tower series is one of my favorite books, and his fantasy is just plain amazing.

However, I am not a huge fan of his horror. Misery was gripping and suspenseful, yes, but that was more a thriller than pure horror. And I nearly fell asleep trying to read The Stand. And The Langoliers was lame as hell.

What I'm trying to say is, if there's something wrong with something, even something from someone or something I really like, I'll be the first to point it out.

...which brings us here:

This little number is off of Al's fourth studio album, "Polka Party!", widely dismissed as his worst album.

And I have to agree. There are only four tracks on the CD that are any good, and one of those is the polka medley!

There are ten tracks on "Polka Party!".

You do the math.

I was thinking about skipping the Polka Party tracks on the A-Z list and just do a full Cover2Cover review of Polka Party, but I concluded that I needed to show that, yes, there are bad Weird Al songs, and that I can critique them honestly.

I just wish I didn't have to do this right out of the gate.

The song itself is a parody of the Robert Palmer song "Addicted to Love"

This highlights one of the major problems with the problems with this track - indeed, the same issue exists in all four parodies off of "Polka Party!", but I'll get to that later. For now, let's get right to the review.

There's no good way to say this, so I'll just say it: This song is stupid. And it's not even the good kind of stupid. The funny kind of stupid.

Normally, if you want stupid, Al's your guy. He's made plenty of stupid songs that were actually funny. Hell, just look at any other album in his discography, and you find one or two there that are good, listenable, fun tracks.

This, on the other hand... this one's the bad kind of stupid. The unfunny, lame, embarrassing kind of stupid. This is the kind of song an eight-year-old trying to be Weird Al would write. Hell, this is the kind of song that record executives who think they can write comedy songs would come up with.

But, I repeat myself.

The song is directed toward a guy with a potato fetish, and, in a stunning twist (and by "stunning", I, of course, mean "stunning that I stayed awake this long"), we find out in the end that the narrator happens to be a potatophile too. M Night Shyamalan, eat your heart out!

Now, I personally have no use for potatoes - eating them in any form make me sluggish and sleepy and phlegmy (yeah, you wanted to know that. You're welcome), and IMO have little to no nutritional value whatsoever. But I understand that some people like them and eat them regularly - granted, not to the extremes hinted at in this song, but still...

But as the subject matter for a comedy song, there's not really that much to go on. I mean, how many potato jokes are there? Not a lot, and very few of them actually in the song. It just goes on and on about how much the subject likes potatoes, and the kinds of potatoes he likes, and describes the many ways he gets his potato Jones resolved ("You took a trip to Idaho/Just to watch potatoes grow").

This does not make for a funny song. There's really only two jokes in the song, and even those are a stretch: the first s a pun on the words "potato bug".

("Potato bug/has got me too!")

...and the other one is a groaner about whipped potatoes

("I've often seen them whipped/But they just can't be beat")

Told you.

And, to my utter disappointment: not one eye joke. Potatoes have eyes, people have eyes, there's got to be some kind of joke there! How do I know potatoes have eyes? The beans told me. You know how the beanstalk.

See? I can make lame vegetable jokes too! Where's my recording contract?

Seriously, though, as I hinted at before, there is a specific problem with this, and all the parodies on "Polka Party!", and this is totally my personal opinion based on the evidence at hand.

Up to that point in his career, since his self-titled debut, Al released an album a year, likely to keep himself fresh in the minds of the listening public, since he's lumped in that amorphous group of artists called "novelty acts". This idea can be a double-edged sword, in that in the race to keep yourself relevant, you also may become overexposed, causing fatigue and backlash.

But it wasn't really a backlash that depressed sales and recognition of "Polka Party!"; it's the quality. You see, in that race to remain relevant, with a relatively short time to produce output, you make some poor decisions.

(I'm looking at you, 3 Doors Down)

The choice to make this song was, to me, doomed to fail from the start for two reasons: One, as mentioned, the subject matter doesn't lend itself to very many jokes; and Two, the original song isn't all that lyrically dense to begin with so, even if there were jokes to add, there are very few places to put them. It's like trying to make a DVD case sink to the bottom of the lake by filling it with Styrofoam peanuts.

The song seems to want to make the fact that it's a parody as the joke instead of putting jokes into the parody. And this, as I've stated, a failing of all four parody songs on "Polka Party!", so expect links back to this article in the future.

After the critical and commercial failure of "Polka Party!", Al's next album wasn't released until two years later, and if you thought "Polka Party!" was bad, his follow-up was even worse.

No, that's the name of the album: "Even Worse".

(That was the only chance I was going to get to use that joke, so I took it. Again, you're welcome.)

Okay, that's done, and I'm glad to be away from this one. There's more bad to come, and not just off of "Polka Party!"; there's still enough bad for everyone spread out over the entire discography; "Polka Party!" just happened to get the bulk of it.

Join me next time when we take a first look at one of his original songs. Until then, in the words of a couple of the greatest non-thinkers of the 20th century: "Be excellent to each other!"

Power off!

Next: "Airline Amy"

Artist A-Z #1

Okay, all. I decided it's time to actually post some content, rather than telling you that I may be posting some content sometime in some nebulous future.

One of my original ideas, once I got some traction as a reviewer, was to do a discography series, where I review a single artist's albums from their first to their most recent. I even had a few artists in mind: Green Day, Van Halen, Fiona Apple, and so on.

But I decided that that would be too close to what I plan to do with bad albums (and, no, I haven't abandoned the original C2C idea; I just need to get some momentum going; and Covering the Covers and another originally canned segment, Analyzes the Lyrics, will also come in its own time. Please be patient.). As such, I've decided to do something a little different.

If someone else has already done something like this, fine, but I'm doing this just to get my foot in the internet's door, so to speak, and to sharpen my style and sense of humor so the finished product when I do actually make the move to video will be cleaner and, well, exactly as aweXome as my ego demands it be.

Anyway, rather than cover an artist album by album, I'm going to go from song to song, in alphabetical order, doing a short review of each song in that artist's repertoire.

And the artist I'm going to start in on is...

...

Hey, come back!

Meh, who needs them, anyway?

So, yeah. I've been on a Weird Al kick recently (and by "recently", I mean for the past 15 years). And to celebrate the release of his first studio album in five years (and not that bad a one either), I'm going to start at the A's and go all the way down to the Y's (no Z's in this mix), and review each one, starting with the above.

It should be fairly obvious what song this parodizes - or, rather, flat-out ridicules.

Most of Al's parodies take the title or the lyrics, put a completely different spin on them, and makes a completely different song out of the same tune, while at the same time having little to no connection with the source material.

Not so here.

This is one of a handful of what I term "meta-parodies" in which the subject matter of the song is directly tied to the song it's parodying. Other examples of this are "Smells Like Nirvana" and "Perform This Way", both of which I'll get to later.

The song itself is a list of things the narrator would rather do than listen to "Achy Breaky Heart". Now some of the alternatives don't seem that bad to me: I love the Bee Gees and the Village People, and some of Abba's songs are okay. Just about every other artist on the list, fine. Still better than that overplayed fake country-pop-crossover piece of garbage.

After a while, however, he gets into the weird, self-mutilation territory that has been a part of Al's repertoire, especially in his early days. "Tie me to a chair/and kick me down the stairs", and "I'd rather have a pitchfork in my brain." Pretty harsh, yes, but still, arguably, more pleasant than another listening of "Achy Breaky".

This brings up an interesting point that I'd like to mention in passing here: Al seems to have a fascination with things being stuck to, driven into, or smashed against his head and/or face. As we continue further down this list, you will hear many other references to things being done to his face. In fact, I'm going to start a counter:

Things being driven into head and/or face counter: 1

Every time we hit a verse that mentions something happening to his head or face, I'll increment the counter. Let's see how high this thing goes.

There isn't much else to say about this song. It sets out to say ""Achy Breaky Heart" is a terrible song" - and it is - "and I really really don't want to listen to it." And it accomplishes that through the use of parody, which means, in a way, we actually are listening to the song we so rabidly, viciously hate. Oh, cruel, cruel irony.

But then we get to the ending... and it's at that point that the song abandons all pretense that this is anything other than an opportunity to openly mock this song, as well as everyone and everything associated with it. Take a listen...

Kazoo and Mockery sounds by JackPowerX

I mean, sure, the belch sounds and hand/armpit farts in the background during the spaces between lyrics gave it a bit of a sting, but this? This is the equivalent of ending a performance of the original with no applause, and one guy in the back yelling "You suck!"

I hope Billy Ray has a good sense of humor, because I'm pretty sure this was not part of the pitch.

Al: "Hey, Billy"

Billy Ray: "Yeah?"

Al: "Can I do a parody of your song, "Achy Breaky Heart"?"

Billy Ray: "What you gonna do with it?"

Al: "Well, I was thinking about giving a laundry list of songs and things that I'd rather suffer through than listening to it. What do you think?"

Billy Ray: "..."

Al: "..."

Billy Ray: "Throw in some people doing that "Na-na-na-na-na-naaaah" thing, and you got yourself a deal!"

Okay, not a whole lot of material on this first one; the song itself took all the good jokes (and that's a good thing). Hopefully, there'll be more to work with on the next song. What song's up next?

Next up: Addicted to Spuds

...aw, crap...