National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But — somehow, for some reason — Weird Al keeps rocking.
Last summer, in the middle of what struck me as an otherwise very full life, I went to my first Weird Al Yankovic concert. Weird Al, for anyone reading this through a golden monocle, is the most renowned comedy musician in the history of the multiverse — a force of irrepressible wackiness who, back in the 1980s, built a preposterous career out of song parodies and then, somehow, never went away. After 40 years, Yankovic is now no longer a novelty, but an institution — a garish bright patch in the middle of America’s pop-cultural wallpaper, a completely ridiculous national treasure, an absurd living legend.
I have spent much of my life chortling, alone in tiny rooms, to Weird Al’s music. (“I churned butter once or twice living in an Amish paradise” — LOL.) And yet somehow it had never occurred to me to go out and see him live. I think this is for roughly the same reason that it has never occurred to me to make my morning commute in a hot-air balloon or to brush my teeth in Niagara Falls. Parody is not the kind of music you go out to see in person — it’s the joke version of that music. A parody concert felt like a category error, like confusing a mirror for a window. To me, Weird Al had always been a fundamentally private pleasure; I was perfectly content to have him living in my headphones and on YouTube and — very occasionally, when I wanted to aggravate my family — out loud on my home speakers.
The show was in New York, at Forest Hills Stadium — a storied outdoor arena that once hosted the U.S. Open, as well as concerts by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. It was late July, the hottest weekend of a punishingly hot summer, and the humidity was so thick it felt as if gravity had doubled. The backs of my knees were sweating onto the fronts of my knees. A performance in this context struck me as a heavy lift, even for a normal rock star. For a parody rock star, it seemed basically impossible. Deep in my brain, a blasphemous little wrinkle kept wondering, secretly, if the concert might even be sad. Weird Al was on the brink of turning 60, and his defining early hits (“Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon”) were several decades old, which means they were made for a version of the culture that is now essentially Paleolithic. Down in my sweaty palm, every 10 seconds, my phone dosed out new shots of racism and bullying and disaster and alarm. I felt exhausted, on every possible level, and I assumed everyone else did, too. Would anyone even show up?
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Poster comment: As Lod points out, we need a break from Covid 19