Day Fifty-Two: "Melanie" from Even Worse and not the XXX: the Return of Xander Cage soundtrack

A good rule of thumb when dealing with Al’s softer, slower, gentler songs is that the prettier the melody, the more demented the lyric and overall vibe. “Melanie” has one of the loveliest melodies in Al’s entire oeuvre. With its lush, Beach Boy-style harmonies and gentle acoustic guitar, it’s the kind of obsessive ode to impossible love that would be perfect for weddings if the man lovingly, longingly singing it didn’t happen to be completely insane, and on the evil and menacing side to boot. 

I’ve written here extensively of the sociopathic and deeply deluded nature of Al’s creepy Casanovas, his sleazy swingers, his warped would be womanizers. The lovelorn romantic pleading to know why the woman of his feverish, sweaty dreams rejects him here may be the worst of the lot. 

Like a disturbing number of mainstream romantic comedies, the man’s conception of romance looks suspiciously like stalking and criminal harassment from the outside. He furthermore confuses horrifying expressions of psychosis, such as going through her garbage and having her name tattooed on his forehead as extravagant romantic gestures. Nowadays of course everyone gets someone’s name tattooed on their forehead. It’s a third date kind of thing, like sex, but back in 1988 it was still considered eccentric and extreme behavior.

The story “Melanie” tells is elegant in its archetypal simplicity. It’s the old boy-buys-telescope, boy-spies-beautiful-stranger-in-nearby-building-while-snooping-on-her-with-aforementioned telescope, boy-begins-stalk-courting-girl-with-psychotic-acts-of-obsession and then finally boy-deliberately-plummets-out-window-to-his-death-and-is-possibly-singing-the-entire-song-as-a-ghost story you find in pretty much every Taylor Swift song. Or in most of the infectious ditties cranked out in the Brill Building. 

The weirdo singing “Melanie” isn’t a complicated romantic hero, or even an anti-hero so much as he is a flat out villain, a demented misogynist who interrupts his hilariously misguided declarations of love and devotion to ask his would-be partner if she’s “too dumb” to realize that their love would last forever and forever if she’d just stop hating and fearing him long enough to fall in love with him. 

Like the country-creep creep crooning “Good Enough for Now”, the maniac singing “Melanie” seems to be practicing an early form of “negging”, that deplorable practice of pick-up artists who insult their way into women’s minds, insecurities, and then, if all goes according to sleazy, contemptible plan, into their pants. Am I once again suggesting that Al accidentally introduced and developed the concept of “negging” through songs like this and “Good Enough for Now?” Yes. I am crediting Al with everything in this column, including the construction of both Stonehenge and the Pyramids and the failure of the metric system to catch on in the United States. 

Musically, “Melanie” is completely straight-faced, to the point where Al manages to invest a shocking amount of genuine, sincere romantic longing into the character of a creepy, stalkery, Peeping Tom. “Melanie” is one of my all-time favorite “Weird Al” Yankovic songs. It’s a pitch-perfect combination of naughty and nice, sweet and psychotic. It’s pretty enough for a summer picnic and insane enough to be committed into Arkham Asylum. It’s a gorgeously crafted song of very “Weird Al” Yankovic contradictions. Sonically, “Melanie” is a perfume-scented valentine on expensive stationary. Lyrically, it’s more like the 75 page romantic manifesto of a man convinced Katy Perry is sending him secret messages to kill small woodland creatures in her songs. 

“Melanie” is my favorite song on Even Worse although I understand why “Fat” was the big single and the engine behind his big critical and commercial comeback. It’s certainly a lot easier for radio and MTV to understand and get behind another food-themed Michael Jackson parody from the man who gave the world, and them, “Eat It”, rather than a beautifully dark Marshall Crenshaw homage that ends with the anti-hero singing it leaping to his death in the building of his beloved, yet vowing to keep on pursuing her in a way that’s supposed to be romantic and encouraging but instead comes off as threatening and unhinged. 

The lunatic terrorizing the title character here labors under the delusion that he just needs to break through his love interest’s seeming hatred and fear of him in order for them to realize their destiny as soul-mates but he’s actually a powerful illustration of why restraining orders are not just useful but essential and also maybe she last beyond death, since the singer makes it apparent that he’s not about to let anything as minor as his own violent demise keep him from continuing his very one-sided courtship of/psychological warfare with dear, sweet, poor, poor, appropriately terrified Melanie. 

In popular music, love is generally more powerful than death. In the warped anti-romantic ballads of “Weird Al” Yankovic, and in this all-time classic in particular, that happens to be true of romantic psychosis as well. 

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