"... But three, I couldn’t help feeling that culturally, we — as a nation — have crossed some kind of line recently. After one mass shooting or another, or after the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, or on January 6, 2021, or during the pandemic, when circumstances forced a re-evaluation of a lot of things. Last night, as I was sitting in the audience with the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and Highland Park all within the last two months, I kept noticing how many times a Weird Al song centers on the extreme anger and resentment of a young man.
Sure, it can be written off as all in good fun when the speaker in “My Baby’s In Love with Eddie Vedder” suggests he’s going to start stalking Alanis Morrissette to get back at his girlfriend for her fangirl crush on the Pearl Jam singer, but it’s a lot harder to dismiss “Melanie,” a song about a guy who’s spying on a woman through her window and wondering why she won’t go out with him. Is it funny that he gave “a Mohawk to [her] cat”? Maybe it was in 1988, when it was released. What about playing it in the same concert with “Close But No Cigar,” a song about a guy who rejects a series of girlfriends for minor infractions like misusing a word?
There are plenty of pop songs about guys doing bad stalky stuff, from The Beatles’ absurdly cheerful “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” to Warren Zevon’s blithe “Excitable Boy.” What gave me pause about Weird Al’s setlist was how frequently these themes came up and in songs that come on at full heavy-metal furor.
Sometimes it is an overwhelming feeling of the narrator of the song feeling left behind — like in “Lame Claim to Fame,” a fun singalong on one level that is perfectly in keeping with Weird Al’s nerdy persona. But in today’s fraught political climate, it starts to feel more ominous. Put it in the same setlist with “Good Old Days,” in which the narrator remembers when “life was so much simpler” (and when he killed the kindly grocer and set fire to his store, as well as I guess torturing his girlfriend and leaving her to die in the desert) and that pattern of resentment becomes more troubling.
Are these songs really a critique of our culture? That case could be made. I don’t know if Yankovic senses that times have changed; after all, these songs were all in the same setlist. But in “Albuquerque” (on one level an absurd story-song in which the narrator is pushed to the brink from his mom force-feeding him sauerkraut, but on another level a song full of anger at all sorts of slights) he paused mid-song to apologize for a line about a hermaphrodite (“It's some big fat hermaphrodite with a Flock-Of-Seagulls haircut and only one nostril”) in what struck me as a very “sorry/not sorry” sort of way.
No matter. By that time I was in no mood to sing along with the genuinely charming “Yoda” (a “Yo-Yo-Yo-Yoda” parody of The Kinks’ “Lola”) that closed the concert. I wanted to feel good. But I couldn’t."