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"
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