You've got to laugh
For one writer, “Weird” Al was a gateway to the avant-garde
By David Cotner 06/26/2008
When VICE Magazine calls me “the world’s foremost expert on experimental, conceptual, and all-around-obscure weirdo-art-noise music,” two things happen. I ride that quote to the bank as quickly and as often as possible — and I remember what life was like before I was the world’s foremost expert.
Not all experts and brilliant men are introduced to the world fully formed as though sprung ready-made from a sucking deific head wound. Before I was interested in such things as infrasound, Tibetan thighbone trumpets, free improv and acoustic laptops, there I was in 1983, with a fistful of no-name cassettes from TG&Y (or possibly Federated), breathlessly slamming them, like a rat at the feeder bar, into a portable Tandy tape recorder. This was the beautiful device of deliverance on which rested the Gemco clock radio that dutifully recorded each and every Sunday night’s episode of Dr. Demento’s radio show on the Mighty Met, KMET 94.7. Hoo-yah. All hail the miracle of simulated walnut.
The king of that program — besides Demento himself — was “Weird” Al Yankovic. When you’re young and you’re into comedy records because you have no other way to deflect the cruelties of those who are miserable and feel irrelevant, whose only satisfaction in life comes from making others around them miserable, too — well, it’s a strange and awesome way to look up to this guy, who is also probably a little maladjusted as well. He plays accordion. He wears glasses and has stringy hair. He also happens to be sincerely funny, wildly talented, and the very fact that he exists in this world at that time gave everyone who was genuinely misfit and outcast great hope. It’s a hope that bases itself in, at the very least, being yourself — which, at the very most, is all about the care and nurturing of one’s own soul.
It was also a time — briefly — during which everyone (expect possibly Prince) was into “Weird” Al. “Eat It,” his parody of Michael Jackson’s already insanely popular “Beat It,” played incessantly on MTV, and Al hosted ALTV every so often on the channel. He had made it. He was on MTV! And if you could make a girl laugh kind of the way that he did, you made it, too. Nerds were sincerely nerds; there was no post-modern hipness that filtered uniqueness through a beige and whelming boredom machine to taint the sweet and singular feeling of victory that shimmered through the spirit of outcast teens in the ’80s. Wait, strike that; reverse it — not so much victory as vindication. Vindication that people would actually care about your weirdness; if it was funny and strange and interesting enough, you had a shot.
Al’s brand of funny art existed in a time in which the outcast was, for a little while, occasionally actually invited to the party. There was a tenuous but amicable rapprochement between squares and spastic nerfbags — and after everything that’s happened in the past quarter-century, “Weird” Al Yankovic has no imitators. He stands alone. Al exists as entirely his own man; an artist who is wholly his own individual adult human being. And he never gave up the thing that made him unique, and this is the shining example that we who were outcasts took away from those deeply sucky post-Nixon ’80s.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, this encouragement and confidence in staying true to oneself was in fact a practical ideal for living — that if something seemed weird it did not mean that it was psychically harmful or heralded the dead stare of friends who did not want to understand. Entirely blank records made as a statement on Zen; contact microphones swallowed and the body played as an instrument; the electrical field of psychotropic mushrooms made into sound. An appreciation and enjoyment of the works of Weird Al Yankovic prepared me for the world of Fluxus, Dada, Lettrism and conceptual art. The willingness to experience these new, bizarre ways of making sense and nonsense I trace directly back to those Sunday evenings listening to “Weird” Al’s hysterical parody songs. That’s why his appearance at the Ventura Theater is a kind of homecoming for me. Al has always made a kind of music that made life so much more enjoyable because it took the risk of being outcast — it’s an art that takes the chance that no one might like it but loves it enough to go do it anyway.
Because, to quote the late sound poet Henri Chopin, “You’ve got to laugh.”
Visit David Cotner online at pictograms.blogspot.com.
“Weird” Al Yankovic
June 29, 7 p.m.
at the Ventura Theater
26 S. Chestnut St., Ventura, 653-0721
www.venturatheater.net
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