My dad apparently thought "Party In The CIA" was a parody of "Back In the USSR" when I showed him the tracklist...as he asked me if it was a Beatles song. He's also the second person I know to think that "Perform This Way" could work as an Aerosmith parody.
Life is a bowl of three-legged salamanders swimming around in an infinite ocean of strawberry jello...
Did anyone else who ordered from the mothership get a satisfaction survey from the myplaydirect thing that it goes through? Must have gotten a lot of complaints from people getting it late.
Concerts i have attended:
memorial day 2000
july 27, 2003
august 22,2004
june 27, 2007
May 29, 2011
2015
July 8, 2016
March 26,2018
July 3, 2019
*****
ACTUALLY GOT AUTOGRAPH & HUG
6-27-13
After show autograph 7-3-19
Al-gal since '99
While there's no doubt that Al's albums have contained an increasing number of technology based songs, I don't think they're nearly as repetitive as his food or TV songs were.
Look at the vast majority of the food songs. Nearly every single one is about the same thing - the character being addicted to a particular food - usually whatever food happens to rhyme with (or in the case of "Addicted to Spuds" only sort of rhyme with) the original song's title. Sharona-Bologna, White Stuff-Right Stuff, Rock 'n' Roll-Rocky Road, etc. The jokes were okay, but as Al was still a novelty artist in the early years, it was enough just to be parodying "My Sharona" with "My Bologna" because nobody else was doing that kind of thing at the time.
The TV songs were a step up from the food songs. The ones that focused on a specific show like Jeopardy, Gilligan, and Jerry Springer were fantastic. But so many of the TV songs, even more recent ones, offered little more than a string of TV show names - The Brady Bunch, I Can't Watch This, Couch Potato, and the worst offender of all - Syndicated Inc.
Now, Al may have done a lot of technology based songs recently, but as far as quality and quantity of jokes per song, I think they far exceed either the food or the TV songs (at least most of them). The technology songs have given us "Pentiums", "eBay", "Craigslist", "Don't Download", "TMZ", etc. All phenomenal songs! The food songs and TV songs were always hit or miss, but from my point of view, out of all the technology-based songs, he's only done one that was below par - "Ringtone".
So, I'd say this trend of technology songs isn't necessarily a bad thing or the same as Al's former obsession with food and TV.
A further point, that I think Dave made a while ago - Al has always focused on pop culture. That's it. And for the past decade, television has become less and less of an important part of pop culture, while the Internet and technology in general has become a greater and greater part. So, it stands to reason that Al would move away from TV songs and do more and more technology songs. And I really doubt that America's obsession with technology will be going away any time soon.
Bruce the Duck wrote:Now, Al may have done a lot of technology based songs recently, but as far as quality and quantity of jokes per song, I think they far exceed either the food or the TV songs (at least most of them). The technology songs have given us "Pentiums", "eBay", "Craigslist", "Don't Download", "TMZ", etc. All phenomenal songs! The food songs and TV songs were always hit or miss, but from my point of view, out of all the technology-based songs, he's only done one that was below par - "Ringtone".
I agree. Although I don't really care for SFTCTM, it isn't bad. Ringtone is, musically, awesome, but lyrically stale.
On a related note, was "Pentiums" influential in the nerdcore genre, or did that already exist in '99?
I didn't even know what Nerdcore was until reading your post, but a quick search on Wikipedia shows that the first use of the term to describe a recording artist was in 2000, which is after IAATP. Al is mentioned in the article as being an influence along with They Might Be Giants.
<º))))><.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´"Not too stupid..... Just stupid enough!"¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸ ><((((º>
Jul 20th,23rd 2008
AlFest 1/8/2009
Al's Brain x20
Aug 13th,14th,21st,22nd, Dec 3rd,6th 2010
Aug 12th,14th,26th 2012
Oct 4th 2015