He's more than a comedian to me. He's more than a pop culture satirist to me. He's more than a pop culture icon to me.
To me, he's an inspiration.
I can remember feeling that way since I was 8. Centuries ago! I've always admired - even if I didn't understand what I was admiring until much later - his ability to skewer the popular, the topical, and in some cases, the powerful. He is a cornerstone - if not the cornerstone - of the development of both my musical tastes and my sense of humor. More than that, his squeaky-clean nature combined with his give-no-fucks attitude formed a basis for my own.
Weird Al can do no wrong.
...okay, that's not true. Like, at all.
And anyone who thinks that Al can do no wrong needs to go find a copy of "Polka Party" and put it on straight play. You won't last three songs, if you can even get past one.
I've been threatening for as long as I've been threatening to do this music review thing to do a full Cover 2 Cover review of "Polka Party", and I still intend to someday, because there are reasons why that album flopped, mostly having to do with both the choices of songs and styles to parody and the choices of topics to write those parodies on.
But that was 1986. It's 2014. Almost 30 years and nine albums - ranging from good to amazing - have passed since then. And it seems like that the stigma of Polka Party was left behind for good.
And up to this point, he had succeeded. "Now That's What I Call Polka!" is a masterpiece, far outshining his previous polka medleys. "Handy" was... okay. Not spectacular, but not awful either. Then came "Tacky", which is not only an awesome parody, but a well-written comedy song in its own right, and uses the source material in a very tight, agile fashion. From what's been revealed thus far from Mandatory Fun, it seems like that maybe Al, for at least one album, really CAN do no wrong.
Enter Word Crimes.
Start/Finish: C, Instrumentation: A, Hook: N/A (no hook to speak of)
So let's go right to the lyrics.
I was worried about this when I found Al was going to do a parody of one of the worst-reputed songs in recent history, if not all of music history. When taking on a song as poorly-received as Blurred Lines, it can go either very, very right or very, very wrong. There's no middle ground.
No blurred lines.
And, really, the choice of subject matter plays a huge role in what tips the scale from good to bad. So, what's the subject of Word Crimes?
Okay, now here's the deal... I'll try to educate ya...literary elitism.
Gonna familiarize you with the nomenclature
You'll learn the definitions of nouns and prepositions
Literacy's your mission
...
You know, I expected the "Old man yells at cloud" stuff to come out of "First World Problems", not this. But, yeah, apparently chatspeak, hashtags, emojis, and even the Oxford Comma (see what I did there?) are creating enough speech static that something has to be said about it.
And even though the song says he going to "educate" you, the "education" offered in the song is the equivalent of verbally berating a puppy for piddling on the carpet while beating it with a rolled-up newspaper.
As much as I hate using the term, given all its connotations and history, I can't avoid it, especially considering his regalia on the album cover:
Weird Al is literally being a grammar Nazi.
Literally.
And the things he's harping on are things that have been harped on endlessly by everyone and their creepy uncle.
Say you got an "it"
Followed by apostrophe
"s" Now what does that mean?
YOU WOULD NOT USE "IT'S" IN THIS CASE
As a possessive
It's a contraction
Sorry, but Strong Bad did it better
OOOooohhhh, if you want it to be possessive
It's just I-T-S
But if it's supposed to be a contraction
Then it's I-T-apostrophe-S
...Scalawag
And how about this one?
You should know when
It's "less" or "fewer"
Like people who were
Never raised in a sewer
Yeah, then he put up this gif to prove his point:
Hmm.... " X items or less...". Why does that sound familiar? Surely I'm not recalling something hypocritical and ironic...
I was waiting in the express lane with my
Twelve items or less
At the checkout counter at my local grocery store
And, yes, I did use "ironic" correctly. Kiss my apostrophe.
As the song progresses, his disdain for grammar deviants escalates to full-blown rage
And, I thought you'd gotten it through your skull
Whats figurative and what's literal
Oh, but, just now, you said
You "literally couldn't get out of bed"
That really makes me want to literally
Smack a crowbar upside your stupid head
By his own logic, he just literally threatened someone with violence over his use of a word. A word that even linguists have acknowledged has changed in definition so that it doesn't literally have to mean "literally".
See, that's the issue with the tone of these lyrics. Language is mutable. Not everyone will use language the same way as another person in the same time period, and language evolves over time, meaning that the meaning of some words, and even things like syntax or even parts of speech of words will change.
Oh , and while we're talking about that last line, "your stupid head"?!
The rough part about becoming keenly aware of social issues is that you start to see this casual, almost imperceptible tossing aside of entire groups of people built into the language, and this is especially true in the primal common tongue of music.
And the most stealthy of this "othering" is that of the disabled. As if the elitism of trying to squeeze everyone into a single mold of language and education isn't bad enough, it's worse when it's peppered with words that imply that people who aren't as developed as the so-called "norm" are somehow less than others that are.
And this song is littered with this kind of language. Literally.
Don't be a moron
You dumb mouthbreather
'Cause you write like a spastic
To his credit, he did apologize for that last one. Doesn't get him off the hook for all the others, though. Or the implied eugenics...
Get out of the gene pool
Try your best not to drool
Granted, it is difficult to write a song about tryong to police language without some ableism seeping through... which is why you shouldn't do it in the first place!!!
But, really, in the grand scheme of things, none of this is that big of a deal.
The condescension, the grammar hammering, even the casual ableism isn't enough to make me hate this song. Sure, it'll make me not want to listen to it, change the station or hit "next" on my media player, but that alone doesn't make this song rise to the level of hate I have for it.
In point of fact, Al's entire discography is littered with all kinds of insults based on personal features (Fat comes to mind right away) and casual ableism. Hell, another song off of Fun that I really like - Lame Claim to Fame - has an ableist word right in the title (and, thus, the chorus).
Hell, if I hated everything that was problematic, even in a casual sense, I'd have to forego listening to 99% of my music library. Liking problematic things isn't a problem so long as you know they ARE problematic, don't make excuses for them, and let the artists know that they can do better.
No, a song has to go out of its way to inspire this much bile in me.
I love music. I love comedy. I'm very forgiving of mistakes from artists and people and songs I love. So for a song to inspire this much anger in me, it has to be something completely unforgivable and beyond the pale.
A song has to EARN my hate.
And this song does that in just one line:
Well, you should hire
A cunning linguist
...
Play that again, please.
Well, you should hire
A cunning linguist
...
...
How can one line piss me off so much? Well, there are scores of reasons swirling around my head, but, truth be told, it can be narrowed down to three things:
1) It's a sex joke in a Weird Al song.
Seriously, the guy's image has been so disgustingly squeaky-clean for the whole of his career, that something like this is as though Al showed up in the recording studio with a pointy goatee and a shiny gold shirt with a plunging neckline.
On his sendup of charity singles "Don't Download This Song", he threw a curveball right at the end, hiding in the repeat and fade, yelling, "JUST BUY IT! YOU CHEAP BASTARD!" That was out of character, but it was okay, because it was cleverly masked.
Then on his last album, Al laid a real turd.
I give you my wordYea, that was questionable, but it passed the smell test because the whole song was about a borderline sociopath trying to express his love, so that choice of word kind of fit.
You're so beautiful
You make a glorious sunset
Look like a big, fat turd, yeah!
But this? This is like going online and seeing your third-grade teacher doing porn. It's the kind of thing that poisons your memories and shakes you to the very foundations.
Now, let me be clear: I don't have a problem with the joke per se. I personally have made this joke many times (Well, part of me has...), and if this had been any other comedy artist, I would be totally down with it. Jonathan Coulton, Paul and Storm, The Lonely Island, ... T-Pain, any of them.
Not Al, not like this, and not in such a casual-throw away fashion.
Which brings me to the second reason why I hate this particular Word Crime:
2) It doesn't fit in the context of the song.
Sure, the words that form the pun fit into the song fine enough, but the punchline... It's like the song literally goes "people can't word right, blah, blah, you're dumb, here's how to word, oh, by the way, sex joke".
It's like if someone was writing a song for Schoolhouse Rock, then, in the middle of it all,threw in a dick joke. It's the kind of thing takes you completely out of the song as your brain catches on it trying to parse it in relation to everything else. Suddenly,the entire song ceases to be educational or entertaining in the parody sense, and becomes all about the dick joke.
And since the point of making a song - epsecially a parody of a well-known song - is to get people to listen to the new lyrics, it's counterprodctive at best, self-destructive at worst.
Which brings me to the third and, arguably, biggest reason why this one line destroys the entire song for me.
It's not just that it's a sex joke in a song about literacy.
It's not that just it's a sex joke in a Weird Al song.
It's the fact that it's a sex joke... IN A PARODY OF FUCKING BLURRED LINES!!!
Have we all forgotten the actual subject matter of the original song? "You know you want it?" "You're an animal, baby, it's in your nature!" It's about a douchebag trying to convince a girl that she wants to have sex with him. The last thing you want to do when writing a parody of such an infamous song with such infamous subject matter is to include a line that hearkens back to that subject matter!
Hell, it would make more sense if this joke were actually in Blurred Lines. That's a problem. A big problem.
So to summarize: questionable lyrics about a questionable subject with a questionable joke thrown in for bad measure. To issue a grade for these lyrics, I once again call on the true master of wordplay, teacher of children and little tiniest babies everywhere, Strong Bad:
Not good enough. F--
It's depressing that in an album of almost comedic and musical perfection, there's this disease lurking beneath the surface. The "song that shall not be named" that parodies that other "song that shall not be named". And it's seriously making me question whether or not I want to go out and buy the whole album.
One song.
No, not even that. One line in one song. Three words!
It's like taking the worst of Polka Party, distilling it to its worst essence, and cramming it into three words. An ill-advised line in an ill-advised parody of an ill-advised song by an otherwise on-point artist and comedian.
Word Crimes. After hearing it, I can only assume that it's referencing itself.
Power off.
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