World of Weird Al Yankovic

The new technology I can survive without, but don't take away my food or TV!

Dave

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.

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.

I noticed this on my friend's fridge last night at a party. His name is not Eric but he works for someone who is so named.

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 Johnson is right!

I will say that I'm a fan of his parodies based on blockbuster movies, though. Hope he doesn't give that up completely.

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.

TMBJon wrote:I noticed this on my friend's fridge last night at a party. His name is not Eric but he works for someone who is so named.

[ http://i54.tinypic.com/34y18ic.jpg ]

Eric Stonestreet


BTW I posted a review on my blog

ludovica64 wrote:Eric Stonestreet

That's not the guy but I should say no more.

Your review was a great read, by the way!