"Weird Al" Yankovic, the All-Star "Eat It" Cover and the Puncturing of Pop's Pretension and Pomposity

As the author of two books and several hundred articles about “Weird Al” Yankovic, my professional and financial fortunes are inextricably tied to those of the preeminent American pop parodist. I’ve been piggy-backing shamelessly on the public’s affection for Al for years now. So it’s a damn good thing that the great American love affair with Alfred Matthew Yankovic shows no signs of ending, or even slowing down, any time soon. If anything, it’s only gotten more passionate and intense through the years.

Al hasn’t put out a record of new material in six years, since 2014’s Mandatory Fun, his first number one album but he doesn’t need to release new music to make news or headlines. If anything, this extended break between albums had given us ample opportunity to truly appreciate what a gift we have in Al’s catalog, his example and in Al himself. 

Thankfully, something glorious is always happening in Al’s weird, wonderful world. He’s getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, or the subject of a glowing profile in The New York Times Magazine, or performing “One More Minute” on a quarantine edition of The Tonight Show. 

The most recent high-profile development involving Al is a star-studded Youtube video in which Al is joined, in song, by a dazzling galaxy of comedy and music stars including Scott Adsit, Fred Armisen, Rachel Bloom, Amy Carlson, Bryan Cranston , David Cross, Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn, Al Franken, Heidi Gardner, Tony Hale, John Hodgman, Jack Black, Michael Mando, Michael McKean, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, Bob Odenkirk, Alison Pill, Phil Rosenthal, Paul Scheer, Rhea Seehorn and Amber Tamblyn for a very good cause. 

The video is shot and performed exactly like the Gal Gadot & Super-Rich friends’ cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine” which famously provided us all with a welcome distraction from this awful pandemic by reminding us just how tone-deaf, clueless and myopic celebrities can be, especially when they try to do the right thing by sharing their shaky singing voices with us in a time of need. 

Only instead of taking turns singing a painfully earnest and just plain painful a cappella cover of “Imagine”, the ultimate Important Song, the song Al and his comedy friends are sincerely crooning is Al’s own “Eat It”, a song about how you should enjoy a nosh.  

To the idealistic dopes who believe in it, “Imagine” isn’t just AN important song. It’s the MOST important song. But it’s more than just that. To true believers, it’s not just an anthem, it’s a goddamn poem. It’s a philosophy. It’s a way of seeing the world, a dream that outlived the dreamer who created it to inspire generation upon generation of insufferable hippies and college kids with acoustic guitars out to get laid. 

That’s an awful lot of baggage for any song, let alone one of the most overwrought, overplayed and over-rated songs of the rock and roll era. That makes it, and particularly Gadot’s gloriously misconceived rendition, the perfect subject for parody. 

The “Eat It” sing-along is an unusually pure representation of one of the most resonant and enduring themes in Al’s music: puncturing the pomposity and pretension of pop and rock by transforming very serious songs about love and sex and life into goofball parodies and polka medleys about television and food. Al has always had a keen eye and ear for subverting and undercutting rock’s tendency to take itself VERY seriously, a crime everyone in the Gadot “Imagine” video is most assuredly guilty of, including Sarah Silverman. 

I singled Silverman out in my My World of Flops piece on the “Imagine” video as a performer whose tentative, confused, frustrated and overwhelmed performance epitomized the project’s profound existential confusion. She’s much more comfortable here delivering a performance that is supposed to be funny, in no small part because she, ands everyone else involved, plays it as straight and deadpan as possible. There’s no tonal conflict if everyone’s on the same page, the way they are here.

Al subverts pop’s self-seriousness by treating “important”, “serious” songs as goofy larks, primarily in his polka medleys but also through parodies like “Amish Paradise” and “Phony Calls” and by treating silliness with incongruous seriousness. 

The “Eat It” sing-along is glorious example of Al (and friends) treating one of the silliest songs ever to hit the top twenty with dirge-like solemnity but it’s also a nifty companion piece to “Don’t Download This Song”, which similarly took aim at celebrities trying to reach the little people from the comfort and privilege of their Beverly Hills mansions. 

If “Imagine” served as a dispiriting reminder of how out of touch many famous folks are, the tongue-in-cheek rendition of “Eat It” reminds us that some celebrities have a sense of humor about themselves, their wealth and power and their place in the world, “Weird Al” Yankovic chief among them. 

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AND of course I sure would love it if you bought my new book about “Weird Al” Yankovic, The Weird Accordion to Al, a gorgeously illustrated guide to Al’s complete discography, with an introduction by Al himself here  

AND there’s still time to buy a deeply discounted, signed bundle of both of my 2020 books, The Weird Accordion to Al and Postal for a low, low price and a limited time only here