The Big Squeeze: Day Seventy-Two: "The White Stuff" from Off the Deep End
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with two big objectives in mind. First and foremost, I want to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero. Even more importantly, I want to promote the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and over 27 new illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and over 120 new pages covering The Compleat Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 tour that gave the extended version of the book its name.
Author’s Commentary: If it seems like I published way less often than usual last week, that’s because I was hopelessly distracted writing a listicle for Fatherly that required me to watch and write about all THIRTY “Treehouse of Horror” episodes.
I did it because I need the work and the money and also because I love horror anthologies but also because “Treehouse of Horror” shares “Weird Al” Yankovic’s genius for pitch-perfect pop culture parody.
But where “Weird Al” Yankovic has maintained an extraordinary level of quality control over the course of his remarkable and unexpected career, The Simpsons is famously a pale shadow of its former self.
In the listicle I wrote that “Treehouse of Horror” was like Al’s parodies in that there was a direct relationship between the quality of a parody and the quality of its inspiration. The better the inspiration, the better the parody is liable to be.
That does not bode well for the New Kids on the Block parody “The White Stuff”, which filters a boy band anthem through Al’s long-standing fascination with processed food. Unlike Gerardo or Mili Vanili, New Kids on the Block don’t even qualify as a guilty pleasure. It’s all guilt and no pleasure and even though no one in pop music could get more out of a conceit like this than Al there’s unfortunately very concrete limits as to how good even a “Weird Al” Yankovic Oreo-themed New Kids on the Block parody can be.
Original Weird Accordion to Al article: I am a man who enjoys a good boy band. If I were at the Essence Festival and New Edition or Boyz II Men were performing, I would be in heaven. The joyous sounds of the Jackson 5 provided the soundtrack to some of the happiest, or rather least traumatic moments of my childhood. I think Justin Timberlake is a fantastic pop singer and songwriter whose gifts manifested early when he was the brightest light in N’ Sync.
Yet New Kids on the Block, those mullet-sporting teenybopper idols of my youth always left me a little cold. They had hits, alright, and those hits had hooks but they were never quite as infectious or as irresistible as the boy bands listed above. I mean, sure, I appreciate the perversity of the group roping my beloved Nice n’ Smooth into appearing on their ill-fated comeback single “Dirty Dawg”, in which they attempted a slightly more adult image by trading in their babyish old name New Kids on the Block for the super-tough and unimpeachably adult NKOTB.
New Kids on the Block were a commercial powerhouse and bona fide pop culture phenomenon but they did not command respect from critics and audiences. They were thought of as a silly cartoon, partially because their merchandising blitz included the group starring in a silly cartoon. NKOTB garnered instant respect, however. They were the Velvet Underground of their time: they weren’t very popular (unlike New Kids on the Block), but everyone who bought one of their albums or went to one of their shows went on to start Big Star.
But before the walking punchline known as New Kids on the Block could reinvent themselves as gritty sonic outlaws NKOTB they were an unusually boring and white bubblegum outlet known for inane ditties like “The Right Stuff.” Like so much of New Kids on the Block oeuvre, it’s a nauseatingly sugary Ring Pop of a love song that finds the teen idols crooning in harmony about young ladies who possess “The right stuff” and I’m not talking about Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction novel or the acclaimed 1983 motion picture of the same name. Actually, that may not be true. Rumor has it there are outtakes with lyrics like, “you’re got The Right Stuff, baby/the best-selling account of Chuck Yeager’s solo flight!”
Regardless, the version that ended up getting released contained zero references to Tom Wolfe’s book and Phil Kaufman’s film and lots of generic lyrics about love. As is his custom, Al transforms a song about romance into a song about gluttony. In “The White Stuff”, “Culinary Al” Yankovic returns to his beloved supermarket aisle for inspiration for a comically over-the-top exploration of a pathological obsession not just with one particularly iconic American snack food but rather for one element of one particularly iconic American snack food. That is some specificity right there.
When I was a kid, my sister, dad and I would make up parody lyrics to commercial jingles. The one that sticks out in my mind is a jingle for Smurf-berry Crunch that we changed to “Smurf-Berry Crunch is fun to eat/it makes you fat and rots your teeth!”
I was channeling the spirit of my hero “Weird Al” Yankovic with my revised lyrics. Al even sings on “The White Stuff” that “My teeth are clear rotted right through, but who cares?” In “The White Stuff”, Al draws a very straight line between sandwich-cookie over-consumption and ill health when he humble-brags, “Had so many (Oreo’s) my pancreas just went into shock!” Al’s songs are full of people bragging about things they shouldn’t boast about, like being proud of the traumatized state of their internal organs.
This obsessive gent takes his obsession with cookie filling to what some might deem comic extremes, rubbing it on his roast, putting it in his coffee and spreading it on his toast. It’s another song of obsession from a man whose life is ineffably enhanced by a consumer product that’s dragged down by the threadbare shabbiness of its inspiration. It’s fun hearing Al fill all the roles of a boy band but it’d be much more fun if he were impersonating a good boy band instead of New Kids on the Block. Though it has its moments, “The White Stuff” cannot ultimately overcome the thinness of its central comic conceit and the banal emptiness of the inane pop song it’s spoofing.
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