For those of you who may not know, I am a card-carrying nerd and have been for years. Actually, I think my nerd card dates from that fateful afternoon in August of 1989 when my friend Brent loaned me a copy of the "UHF" soundtrack. I listened to that cassette so many times in such rapid succession that I wore out the magnetic tape and had to buy Brent a new copy. To this day, I have the entirety of "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" memorized down to the interjections and the background vocals.
Thus, one could say that "Weird Al" Yankovic is not only a symptom of my nerdishness, but he is also at least partially to blame for its inception. After listening to that gloriously clever album on my Fisher stereo system in the halcyon Oklahoma summer of '89, I realized that I no longer cared if people would make fun of me for liking such things; they were simply too pleasurable to pass up for something as paltry as social acceptance.
Anyway, I believe the above video demonstrates the essence of his genius in a way that few others in his impressive body of work ever have. Those of you who like the Doors (and Jim Morrison's in-your-face, drug-augmented smuggery) will hardly miss the canny allusions involving random stock film footage looped behind psychedelic acid filters and shots of the desert. One thing must be said about Al the Parodiest: the man knows his material.
Like the childhoods of countless others, my adolescence was unpleasant and occasionally emotionally draining due to my parents' alcoholism, pathological dishonesty, and bankruptcy, but "Weird Al" was always there to make me laugh until I needed to pee. If you've longed to try him out but were afraid to be labeled a nerd, now is the time to cross over, because it has never been cooler to be uncool.
Click the T!
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