Weird Al For Warped Tour

Oh no.

It is 2003 and you are about to buy your first ever CD at FYE.

The University Mall in Burlington, Vermont is home to the only Hot Topic this side of Lake Champlain, where in a year’s time, you will beg your mom for a Mario t-shirt that reads “Game Over”, and with your purchase will come a Warped Tour Sampler CD which your mother, upon returning to her minivan, will swiftly break over her knee. But this story takes place sooner. You don’t yet know how badly you will covet that Warped Tour Sampler.

You are not there yet.

You are in FYE. A store whose acronym, like the fossilized skeleton of an Archaeopteryx, is an enigma to the uninitiated— “For Your Entertainment”. Fluorescent lights sunburn your retinas. Scattered throughout the aisles are are headsets slick with the sweat of the last skull they gripped where you can preview your purchases. Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit or Britney or Backstreet are playing overhead. You don’t even hear them.

Good god.

It is 2003 and in a year’s time some of your favorite bands will release your favorite albums but you don’t even know who they are yet.

It is 2003 and your only understanding of music is mediated through dad’s jazz fusion records, mom’s Fleetwood Mac compilations, and an annual month of Christmas songs.

It is 2003 and there is only one man you will trust completely with your life at this formative moment, one man who’s existence was revealed to you by your best friend Jeremy whose name you cannot help but pronounce, “Germy.”

It is 2003 and that man must be Weird Al Yankovic.

You place Yankovic’s 9th studio album Bad Hair Day into your handheld CD player, don the over-the-ear headphones with the black Styrofoam cushions, and press play.

You ask your father what the word “slut” means because the yassified poodle man has uttered the epithet in a parody-song about the 1994 film Forrest Gump. Your father explains the word, and likely regrets abetting this acquisition.

You do not ask him to explain the album’s final track.

But then again, do you really need him to? Comedy is a study in contrasts. A horrific, Ozzy Osbourne kind of Christmas song is almost low-hanging fruit. It is 2003 and it’s unclear if you still believe in Santa Claus, but you have to imagine St. Nick puts up with a lot of guff anyway, and a song fictitiously cataloguing his bloody rampage through the North Pole is probably as incendiary as whatever your parents have to say about George W. Bush. You’ve quit being Catholic so in your world there is no one more powerful than Kris Kringle. Making fun of this manmythlegend feels more transgressive than turning back the egg-timer you mom uses to monitor how long you play video games.

The song is a pastiche of “Black Gold” by Soul Asylum, which I don’t believe I’d ever heard until I was writing this essay. The original is mid, if you ask me, and had it played on a radio in the intervening years I probably would’ve asked, “Did Weird Al parody that?” and not followed up.

I’m not unique in encountering Al’s parodies long before the originals. I’m not unique in that every aged emo kid has a latent appreciation for the one-time most-famous-accordionist-alive. I began with that second person pronoun not just because casting a little retrobait isn’t beneath me, but because I’m aware of the unifying force of Weird Al. How a joke is just another language we learn to speak with our beloveds.

In the car with my dad, I played "This Song Is Just Six Words Long” and he laughed, took both hands off the wheel and said, “Oh poor George!” I think George Harrison must’ve died only a couple years before. Then followed an instructive on the boys from Liverpool. I don’t know that I knew who the Beatles were before then. I certainly didn’t take to them at that age. I was not interested in the idols of earlier generations. And yet, I was being inducted into a shared language of pop culture via parody. Even if we didn’t understand each other’s tastes and desires yet, we knew six words between us.

If you’re a kid for whom violence is an abstract taboo, “The Night Santa Went Crazy” is uncut catnip. Violent kids scare adults, and kids take notice when adults produce an unexpected, or outsize emotional reaction. When I was 10, I saw trailers for V for Vendetta, a movie that promised comical levels of carnage, which my parents would never let me watch. I imagined it instead, and lied to my fellow fifth-graders about all the blood and knives and guns and gore, so graphically I can distinctly recall my teacher, Ms. Poquette, admonishing me, “If you’re going to watch those kinds of things, you need to learn when they’re appropriate to talk about.”

When is it appropriate to talk about those kind of things? Certainly not at Christmastime.

Good god.

It is 2023, and you finally have an inkling of what your mom and dad felt watching America turn it’s crosshairs on innocents again. The helplessness they felt explaining to a child the words “invasion” and “cluster bomb”.

When I was 12, the social studies teacher tried to explain the invasion of Iraq by screening A Bug’s Life, and comparing the evil grasshopper in it to Saddam Hussein.

Recently, I had the distinct displeasure of viewing V for Vendetta for the first time. Admittedly, had I seen it at age 14 it would’ve consumed my entire personality the way the music video for Rise Against’s “Re-education (Through Labor)” had.

(This music video, which had me in a full-nelson for all four years of high school, is functionally no different than the Wachowskis’ worst, so I have no high ground here. The song goes, tho.)

If you haven’t seen V for Vendetta, it single-handedly informed the Guy Fawkes Fedora aesthetic of late aughts “free-thinking” 4channers and redditors. Alan Moore, who wrote the original graphic novel in the 80s, was so disdainful of the adaptation he refused to have his name anywhere on it. All this cringe in spite (or because?) of its very earnest attempts to critique the union of George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s petro-imperialism. Perhaps the most appalling example of “protest” “art” from that era, amidst stiff competition.

There are many things to scoff at in Vendetta, but the scene that earned most of my ire comes about halfway through. Stephen Fry’s character is British Jimmy Fallon and he bravely lampoons the dictator in an absolutely banal skit set to the Benny Hill theme. This tomfoolery inspires the somnolent masses to point and laugh and ultimately soften their ears to the titular vigilante’s call for revolution. It also gets Stephen Fry killed by jackboots in a moment the movie wants us to believe is martyrdom. It’s two fistfuls of Christmas honey ham, absolutely impossible to take seriously if you’ve ever seen a second of late-night TV. Like Jimmy Fallon won’t be naming names at the next HUAC. Like old white guys making comedy from the comfort of their million-dollar mansions have anything interesting to say about the plight of the proletariat. Like they would face any consequence for speaking out.

Importantly, the sketch for which Stephen Fry’s character is murdered isn’t funny.

Now I’m not saying Weird Al is the martyr Fry’s character thinks he is. Al is now also an old white man millionaire, who never had much political punch anyway. His satire is safe and saves no lives, it’s true. Then again, whose does? At least Weird Al has a good idea of what’s actually funny. And the Wachowski’s point isn’t without merit, even if their execution leaves oodles to be desired. If art is the only expression left to us, then I suppose we ought to use it. Though, I chafe at both assumptions that art is ineffectual, and that it supposedly sits alone inside the democratic dissident’s toolbox. My assessment could be watery nostalgia, sure, we all have our 2003s to which we return when 2023 once again reminds us that we cannot ignore all the world’s evils. Weird Al’s certainly not perfect. Some of his songs have aged poorly, yet I don’t think he has.

The desire to transform treasured cultural touchstones into something silly is an impulse reborn within every generation. My dad always said that as a child I would go for whatever made me laugh. If we must live in a serious world, we must find a way to mock what makes us ill. Hell even “treasured cultural touchstones” is probably giving too much credit. What is Santa but a corporatized mascot for an imaginary hand of the free market? If the poor kids aren’t getting a lot of Christmas gifts it must be because they were naughty! Almost 30 years after Bad Hair Day, I’ve seen endless gritty reboots of Santa Claus that are boringly tasteless. Maybe Weird Al’s is no different. Maybe it’s prurient boomer-humor appealing to turn of the century acned-edgelords. Maybe it’s the undying childish mischievousness of a man who long refused to grow up. Maybe that’s more naïve nostalgia.

Each generation’s music is a riff on and a ritual refusal of what preceded it, facing former-gods and walking backward into the future. The Ramones said “no” to soft rock, Nirvana said “not a chance” to disco, Kanye said “get lost” grunge, and so on and so forth. Warped Tour attempted for many years the shape and ride that generational wave. Bad Hair Day dropped the spring before Warped’s second year. As flippant as I’m being, was there not a place there at one time for Weird Al?

I don’t believe Weird Al will inspire global revolution, but maybe humor can disarm the deadly explosives set inside us: despair, hopelessness, and apathy. We have a right and a duty to laugh in the face of whatever cherished myth greases the bloody wheels.

Who is Weird Al’s audience but those on the cusp of entering culture? “All right,” he says. “Let me show you what everyone’s been talking about before you got here.” And he uses a language universal to the young folk: a laugh.

Anyway, here’s the Dear Hunter again.

I’m on Instagram now: CarlRLavigne.

I already regret it; the ladies at the Sunday Artists’ Market bullied me into it.

I made these new posters recently.