The 100 Greatest Rock Hall Prospects, #20-11
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20. Weird Al Yankovic: It’s quite likely that some readers think Weird Al is placed too high, or maybe should not be on the list at all. Let me explain my case as best I can. Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia takes place across several decades, and in every scene features a tortoise, the sole creature with the longevity to witness to the entire narrative as it unfolds. In a lot of ways, Weird Al was like that tortoise. As trend after trend unfolded, as political and cultural events marched through the landscape of history, as movies and television shows came and went, Weird Al was there, resiliently bursting their bubble and busting their balls. Some of the acts he lampooned were ushered into the rock and roll pantheon: Nirvana, Madonna, and Green Day are but a few of the artists whose legitimacy was validated by the fact that Weird Al made fun of them. Others fell by the wayside, as he parodied forgotten mooks like Men Without Hats and Gerardo. But the craziest thing of all was that Weird Al kept getting better. Eventually the songs about food and television gave way to funny, but slyly insightful material. “Party in the CIA” took on the national security state in a way no serious song could. “Whatever U Like” was the smartest take I heard on the 2008 economic collapse, and “Skipper Dan” was a strangely affecting meditation on broken dreams, where a Julliard-trained actor ends up as the guide on Disneyland’s “Jungle Cruise.” Way back in my intro to this series, I described one of my chief criteria as “zeitgeist,” the ineffable quality of representing one’s time. Almost every person who was a fourteen-year-old boy at some point between Al’s debut and the present remembers a time when he was the funniest person he knew. Watching the video for “Amish Paradise” for the first time was one of my ten most cherished music memories of all time. And other people can say the same for the first time they heard “Eat It” or the time they came across “White and Nerdy” on youtube. Last year, Al debuted his last conventional album from a brick-and-mortar record label, ending an over 30-year trajectory where he entered our homes through MTV, and concluded with Mandatory Fun. Al realized that he had even managed to outlive the record industry itself. Al is the tortoise, man. Al is the tortoise.
