The Big Squeeze Day Thirty-Five: "Hooked on Polkas"
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with two big objectives in mind. First and foremost, I wanted to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero. Even more importantly, I wanted to promote the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and over 27 new illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and over 120 new pages covering The Compleat Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 tour that gave the extended version of the book its name.
Author’s Commentary: I will begin this post with a confession. It has been a LONG time since I last updated this column. A long, long time. Like, forever. It’s been well over a month since I posted the last entry, on “Cable TV” on June 11th.
What happened? Life happened. When I was conceptualizing The Big Squeeze, I set out to update it every day, or, at the very least, several times a week. I conceived The Big Squeeze as a feature that wouldn’t require a lot of time or energy since I’m re-running old articles with a smattering of new commentary and perspective.
Yet I have ironically found myself WAY too busy working on the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of The Weird Accordion to be able to do justice to a column promoting the original incarnation of the book.
Also, I have discovered over the course of my career as an author that books have a natural lifespan. If you’re lucky, and I have been very lucky in many ways, there will be a flurry of interest and sales around your book’s publication date that will decline gradually over time.
I definitely reached that point a few months ago with The Weird Accordion to Al. I was very lucky, in that I was able to sell something like two thousand copies independently through Amazon, Kickstarter and this website but at a certain point my sales topped out at two or three copies a day no matter how aggressively I promoted the book.
So at a certain point, I took the universe’s very strong hint and pumped the brakes on promoting the original version of the book and shifted my focus to finishing the expanded version.
Now, I am overjoyed to report that not only is the extended version finished, but it’s ready for purchase! It’s ALIVE! You can buy it from Amazon and have it by Wednesday, all 500 pages.
So I figure it’s a good time to start up with The Big Squeeze again. I didn’t plan it this way, but with this entry, The Big Squeeze officially catches up with the extended version of The Weird Accordion to Al. The new material begins with 1985’s The Compleat Al, a long-form showcase for Al’s seminal first eight episodes.
As I write in the Compleat Al chapter excerpted on the site, my favorite single moment in The Compleat Al is Epic executive Harvey Leeds’ strangely hypnotic solo rendition of “State of Shock.” So you can only imagine how tickled I was to discover that Michael and Mick’s big duet is one of the songs polkafied by Al and his band on the album-closing “Hooked on Polkas.”
Al and Harvey Leeds are essentially doing the same thing in markedly different ways by transforming a swaggering meeting of the minds between two of the most beloved and important rock stars in history into a joke, a goof, a lark, pure sonic silliness.
Listening to “Hooked on Polkas” is like injecting 1985 into your bloodstream. ZZ Top! Tina Turner! Hall & Oates! Nena! Kenny Loggins! Duran Duran!
The contemporary hit portion of the medley concludes with Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax.”
Like many of Al’s signature hits, “Relax” has enjoyed a long, ironic, comic afterlife. In Zoolander, for example, it’s the trigger that’s supposed to transform the film’s titular idiot into an unwitting assassin.
Whether choosing songs to parody or polkafy, Al has an uncanny ear for what will not only be huge in the moment but endure over time.
It’s bittersweet closing out Dare To Be Stupid because it means the end of Al’s mid-1980s golden age but as this column has hopefully illustrated, EVERY phase of Al’s career deserves celebration, appreciation and exploration, not just the out and out triumphs.
Original Weird Accordion to Al article:
“Hooked On Polkas” is the second of Al’s polka medleys to pop up on an album but the first to exclusively feature new songs instead of the first polka medley’s combination of contemporary pop hits and classic rock anthems like “Hey Jude” and “My Generation.” On the first polka medley, impishly titled “Polkas On .45” after the “Stars On .45” series, Al and his band of merry-makers made satirical mincemeat out of some of the most respected songs in rock history.
On “Hooked On Polkas”, Al and his band narrow their focus to contemporary top 40 hits. “Weird Al” Yankovic and his band take listeners on a speedy, tongue-in-cheek journey through the pop charts. By the time “Hooked On Polkas” ended Al’s third long playing record, Al had firmly established himself as the world’s preeminent parodist of pop hits. But he was more than that. He was also a proven hitmaker in his own right, with popular favorites like “Eat It”, “Like A Surgeon” and “King Of Suede” to his name. By taking the entirety of top 40 radio and putting it in a blender, Al proved himself uniquely gifted at re-contextualizing hits in ways at once goofy and oddly revelatory.
That’s what Al is doing on “Hooked On Polkas.” He’s taking songs everybody at the time knew due to their ubiquity on radio and on MTV and recreating them in his own goofball image. “Footloose”, for example, is radically re-imagined as a jazzy little a cappella ditty instead of a propulsive rocker.
“We’re Not Gonna Take It”, meanwhile, morphs from a hair-metal anthem of snotty, if pointless rebellion into an old school declaration of defiance you can easily imagine a barber shop quartet in matching suits performing while marching in unison down main street some time in the 1930s or 1940s.
In its original, non-polka form, “What’s Love Got To Do With It” derives much of its power from the iconic baggage that Tina Turner brought to it, to the sense that it reflects, in an artful but very real way, Turner’s exquisitely world-weary take on life in general but love specifically. That sense was only heightened when the song provided the title to the well-received but now half-forgotten Tina and Ike Turner biopic.
Turner transforms the song into a survivors’ world-weary lament. Turner is the raspy, authoritative voice of experience, of hard-earned wisdom. When Al sings the song, however, he’s doing it from the perspective of a youthful dullard, a goober devoid of any life experience at all, let alone the kind that allows Turner to sing her signature song with such bittersweet conviction.
The genius of Al and his band is twofold. First and foremost, they can perform pretty much any style or genre of music. Secondly, but almost as impressively, they can also transform any genre of music, and every song, into polka. Well, not every song, necessarily. I’m not sure what Al could do with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music or John Cage’s “4’33” but he’s illustrated a remarkable gift over the decades for transforming everything into a polka medley.
Al paved his own lane professionally while still in his twenties, and polka medleys were a big part of his overall aesthetic, commercially, professionally and satirically. They allowed Al to disappear inside words and melodies of a bunch of different artists at once, while finding the connective tissue to stitch together songs and anthems from across the pop culture spectrum.
Medleys also allowed Al to be a little dirtier and more risqué than he tends to be on his own parodies or original compositions. “Hooked On Polkas” is a good example. Before Al closes with his own “Ear Booker Polka”, he ends the hit portion of the medley with an extremely repetitive riff on the chorus of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax”, an intensely homoerotic song about ejaculation. Al would never record something like this himself, but for a fraction of one medley, he and his band suddenly sound a whole lot dirtier.
Dare To Be Stupid’s first half ranks alongside Al’s best work. The second half is a little weaker, but ending one of his best and best-loved albums with “Hooked On Polkas” further established how important these medleys were to Al. They weren’t just filler, or a blast of the familiar in an unfamiliar context, but rather a stealthily satirical ongoing project cheekily subverting rock pretension by cross-breeding it with the goofball world of polka.
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