If only 70 million more had followed my lead.
I, for one, despise internet memes. Don’t you? You come across a video on some obscure blog of a young Governator sexually harassing women in Rio or a Russian dude expertly singing on “Oo ya ya ya ya ya”, and you think, “Whoah. I found this. This is mine. I have discovered a secret treasure of the internet!” Proud of your triumph, you forward it to everybody and their brother, you feature it on your blog, you help your grandmother set up internet access just so she can watch it, and she’s all like, “Meh. I saw this three years ago.” Oof. Like a punch to the gut, it is.
There is one glorious exception. The video I saw last week. I don’t care if you already saw it two weeks ago. Watch it again, and cry tears of joy anew.
I know there is no god. But Dear God: I’ll take back all those things I said about You if You just make sure this gets made into a real movie. Please?
I first saw this over here at the Onion A.V. Club. At the time I saw it, literally the first 10 comments were all folks saying, “His was the first concert I ever went to.”
Funny thing. His was the first concert I ever went to, too. Put on a helluva show, too.
I’m sure many of you are thinking to yourself, “Weird Al? He’s okay, I guess. Never really saw the appeal.” But for me, and outsider geeks like me (I’m guessing that’s who those 10 comments are from), he was a revelation. Well, okay, I was 10. But to my too-clever, socially awkward, happily creative 10 year old mind, he was a revelation. He was weird, like me! But weird and proud! And, for about two weeks there when “Eat It” came out and hit #12 on the pop charts, weird and proud and popular!
Then– I was in 5th grade– my school held its very first lip synch competition. I entered with “Eat It”. I had a whole routine, unpacking various food from my Snoopy lunch box and throwing it around as the song called for it. (If I recall, my enthusiastic delivery caused a 5 minute delay, as paper towels and cleaning spray were called for.) For the big finale, I slipped on a banana peel, and learned the valuable theatrical lesson that realism and comedy don’t always go together. My fall was too convincing. Despite the fact that it’s quite possibly the oldest comedy cliche known to man, an unbelievably large percentage of people thought it was a genuine accident. I guess it’s because I hadn’t yet learned how to do a stage fall, so even though it was on purpose, I really fell. Then as now, I was ready to suffer for my art. That my suffering was in vain still irks me.
But in the end, it all paid off. I won third prize! A $10 gift certificate to a record shop at the mall! It was the first thing I ever won, or anyhow the first thing I remember winning. True, I probably only won it because another act got disqualified for performing a rap song with naughty lyrics– alarmed teachers stopped it about 30 seconds in. Sure, cool kids might do rap songs. I didn’t need to be cool anymore. I was weird.
The tone I write this with has slipped into the range of affectedly arch now, but honestly, no lie, Weird Al really was a huge influence on my still growing sense of self. I went through a hawaiian shirt phase for more years than I’d like to admit. I only stopped wearing them once they literally fell apart at various points throughout high school career. But I got much more from Weird Al than a nonsensical, girl-repulsing fashion sense. I picked up on the joy he projected in being an outsider, one who relishes and revels in dorkiness so much that it stops being lame and becomes a source of power.
Once I started getting into playing and writing my own music, this perspective became a major part of my creative life. No, I didn’t write song parodies. Just music that tried to explore the realm of “weird” a little, in a way that pleased me.
Just because it’s put me in the mood to share, here’s a piece I wrote for big band in college, entitled, quite appropriately for this occasion, “Blues of the Weird”.
The music composition contained within this recording, entitled Blues of the Weird, by Quin Arbeitman, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
One last anecdote. One of the best presents I’ve ever received: one day, out of nowhere, maybe six months or a year after the lipsynch triumph, what comes in the mail but a package from one Al Yankovic. Like, for real. What? Really? Was it a joke? Inside was an autographed photo of Al in his “In 3d” album pose– probably the original shot, that got reworked for the album cover. Written on it, words of true wisdom: “Dear Quin– Eat your broccoli!”
It turned out that my best friend Nikki– who liked Weird Al fine, but was really more a fan of hipper stuff from that period like Prince and the B-52s– had written to Al, saying “My friend Quin really likes you, so could you send him something?” And Weird Al actually did.
Al Yankovic — one classy guy.
WTF. The player is playing the wrong song, and I can’t get it to do the right one. One moment, people. That is NOT Blues of the Weird.
***
Fixed. There’s a reason I’m in music and not in computers.
Al still has that joyous sense of being exactly who he is, and he’s still genuinely friendly & considerate to his fans, and he still puts on a great live show. And he’s gonna be on tour this summer! Squeee!
Quin, didn’t he throw a sweaty towel into the audience, which you caught? I reminded him of that in the letter, and I gave a physical description of you. Maybe they can put a 10-year-old you in the concert scene in the biopic.
Better yet, they can give me a cameo portraying myself at the age of 10! I’m sure he still remembers me.
Helen, I’m glad to hear that. Unless he’s touring Japan, though, I’m going to have to miss him.