See this thing right here? *pats bulky and primitive-looking machine next to him* This baby is a Music Snob Detector. Starts beeping every time someone says something snobby about music. Let's try it out. Ahem. "You're not a true Bowie fan unless you own the bootleg 1976 Nassau Coliseum concert on vinyl." beep beep beep beep. Okay, good! The M.S.D. works!
I wanted to bring this machine out of storage and set it up today because we're talking about "Weird Al" Yankovic. This is a name that 100% of America is familiar with, and I can't imagine that the percentage of people who genuinely like "Weird Al" Yankovic is much lower than that. I'll include myself in that universal group. He seems like a good dude. He has a shtick, and that shtick has worked for him for decades. Good for him. I mean that!
His songs and his albums exist purely in the context of "being fun." They are designed to make you laugh. I don't think anyone is listening to Weird Al because of his meticulous craft. It's a joke. That joke is what's fun. That's all. And yet, here we are, bound by the obligations of what one might ostensibly (and generously) call an "album review," during which we discuss the good and the bad. To me, at least in the context of discussing Yankovic, that still seems snobby to me. To critically appraise an album such as Mandatory Fun seems to be missing the point. This is an exercise in cheap laughs. To take it seriously would be, well, snobby.
beep beep beep beep Oh come on, I can't even get through the introductory paragraphs without sounding like a music snob?!
Probably the most interesting aspect of "reviewing" (again, only if you want to call it that) Mandatory Fun is that it was released in 2014, and so the songs that directly lampoon colossal pop songs are lampooning songs from over seven years ago, which is a fucking millennium in the shelf life of pop music. So it feels weird to even be debating the worth of any of these songs as music—like, I hated "Blurred Lines" seven years ago, but to argue about it in 2021 seems weirdly unnecessary beep beep beep okay, fine, it's not that bad of a song beep beep beep jesus christ alright I admit it! I liked the song! Fuck!
And of course, we're here to talk about Yankovic's versions of these songs, which necessitates a whole different form of criticism. If we know the songs already (and for the most part, these were very popular songs, so of course you know them, no matter where you were in 2014), then the success or failure lies solely in whether Yankovic's comedic bit lands or not. I think that the "Word Crimes" song is fucking genius, and I laugh every time. "Foil" got some chuckles out of me—mainly because of the wild conspiracy theory tangent in the back half—but got a lot older the more I listened to it. "Inactive" wasn't funny enough to save an already awful song beep beep beep clearly the M.S.D. wants me to acknowledge here that "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons holds the record for the most weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 in history at 87 weeks beep beep beep I don't give a shit if you're beeping, it's a bad song and "Inactive" is just as bad!!!
More interesting to me is that "Weird Al" Yankovic doesn't just do direct parodies on this album, he also does comedic songs in the "style" of well-known artists. I don't care enough about Weird Al to look up whether he's done anything like this before beep beep beep beep fuck, fine, yes, Weird Al has done this before, just based on Wikipedia pages for his last few LPs. I guess I didn't know that he did this because it's the direct parodies that get all the press, whereas these "style parodies" act more like deep cuts.
My point being that I can imagine it would take considerably more talent to create these pastiches than it does to directly ape a well-known song. I'm way more impressed with "Mission Statement"—which manages to sound exactly like Crosby, Stills & Nash while spouting nonsense business buzzwords and without copying any specific CSN song—than I am with, say, "Handy"—which is a really fun parody of "Fancy," but more amounts to expertly performed lyric-switching than any actual creation of music.
beep beep beep beep But I said "Handy" is a fun song! What, you want me to lie and say that it was as fun on the sixth listen as it was on the first? Snobbery or no, I think that I am able to appreciate the style parodies for much longer because they are new songs, even if the lyrics are a lot dumber. "Jackson Park Express" features probably my least favorite style of humor (kind of reminded me of Cheekface, now that I think about it), but shit, man, that's a great song. Possibly better than anything that the artist whom Yankovic is parodying (Cat Stevens) ever came up with. (beep beep beep beep this is because I used "whom" isn't it?)
The best song on Mandatory Fun is neither a direct parody nor a style parody. My favorite song is "Now That's What I Call Polka!," and it's in many ways the simplest song on the album. The song is not really even a parody at all, but more of a medley of a bunch of covers of other popular songs from around that time. The "comedic" part of it is that they are all performed in the style of polka. That's it, that's the bit. And I just think that's fucking incredible, honestly. It's such a simple way to take the piss out of this whole fucking endeavor, as if Weird Al is saying "Jeez, these songs are kind dumb, aren't they? Let's make them dumber." I laugh more during "Now That's What I Call Polka!" than during every other song combined at this point.
So I guess I'm saying that Mandatory Fun is a comedy album, but there are three different styles of comedy on here (beep beep beep beep). There are the direct parodies, which can be fun at first but get old after a while and certainly live and die on your attitude toward the songs that they're parodying. There are the style parodies, which can be funny (e.g. "Lame Claim to Fame") or not funny (e.g. "Sports Song" beep beep beep beep no I refuse to kowtow to the beeping this time, it's neither funny nor fun to listen to beep beep beep beep NO even the La Salle University Pep Band could do better than this), but they exist as actual unique songs, and can be judged accordingly. And then there is the polka medley, which says more about the very idea of music than maybe even Weird Al realizes, and which will never not be great.
Your appreciation for Mandatory Fun might not be constant based on your preferences in these three categories. For me, I found about half of it good enough to be enduring past the third listen, and the other half amusing enough the first go-around that I can't necessarily dislike it. And it's tough to dislike Weird Al at all, isn't it? Like, the man just wants to make you laugh and feel good. Why be a cynic and deny him of that pleasure? That would, after all, be pretty fucking snobby.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5 beep beep beep beep beep beep
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