The Big Squeeze Day Forty-Nine: "You Make Me" from Even Worse
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 wanted to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero. Even more importantly, I wanted to promote the 500 page Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but better because it has illustrations and copy-editing, fact-checking AND an introduction from “Weird Al” Yankovic himself and over 80 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 gives the extended version of the book its name.
Author’s Commentary: By a fortunate coincidence, I am scheduled to talk about “You Make Me” tonight at seven o clock on the Weird Al-Phabet podcast. What are the odds?
That said, if I were to choose which “Weird Al” Yankovic song I’d like to talk about, “You Make Me” would not be my first choice. Or my second choice. Or my third. Or my fiftieth. It’s one of those songs I respect more than I love.
The same holds true of Oingo Boingo, the theatrical New Wave weirdoes who began life on the streets of Los Angeles as freaky theatrical troupe The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo before shifting into musical theater and then ultimately re-inventing itself as a New Wave rock and roll band with Danny Elfman as its charismatic front-weirdo in the late 1970s.
I just don’t know Oingo Boingo particularly well. I’m familiar with them primarily through their movie songs for totally 1980s cult classics like Bachelor Party, Weird Science, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Sixteen Candles and Back to School.
I knew that Oingo Boingo was commercial but until I started researching this article I did not realize that it had actually recorded a cover of the “This Bud’s for You” jingle for a Budweiser ad.
Al famously turned down an opportunity to make millions by recording a beer commercial. His contemporaries in Oingo Boingo were obviously not quite as principled.
“You Make Me” is a decidedly minor pastiche, a highly stylize goof with Al rattling off a litany of crazy things the subject of the song makes him want to do. It is, of course, a fine, wacky assemblage of zany shenanigans that moves purposely from the comically banal to the cosmic, from eating pork to disregarding the laws of space and time.
Lyrically the song is rooted in Al’s love of randomness and trash culture in all of its tacky majesty. In that respect it feels a little like a companion song to “Dare To Be Stupid”, which similarly re-purposed inane pop culture catchphrases and advertising jargon to its own anarchic ends.
This loving tribute to simpatico theatrical weirdoes grew on me. It may be a clamorous, busy little ditty but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Original Weird Accordion to Al entry:
As I have shared here before, when I worked at The Dissolve we were struck that a Forgotbusters piece I wrote about the somewhat popular but seemingly little-loved Vin Diesel XXXtreme James Bond knock-off XXX somehow still ranked as one of the most popular articles on the site months, even years after it was published to a middling to sub-middling response.
Why was this piece so consistently popular? Then we realized it had nothing to do with the content of the piece, just the name of the movie: XXX. That’s XXX as in the poorly received late-period Kiss cash-in single, “Let’s Put the XXX in S-E-X-X-X, That’s Technically Different From Our Earlier Single With A Similar Title.”
So in the first month of this website’s life I decided to write about XXX: The Return of Xander Cage in a way that would hopefully both get me that sweet, sweet porno bump we got at the Dissolve for my XXX Forgotbusters piece while also commenting irreverently on the nature of that porno boost for the sake of full transparency.
The XXX Lukewarm Takes got an appropriately sleepy response reflecting tepid public interest in the ego-fueled vanity projects of Vin Diesel. But then something predictably weird started to happen. Even though seemingly nobody was talking about my XXX: The Return of Xander Cage article, and it wasn’t being commented upon or shared on social media, or talked up on podcasts, the article kept popping up in lists of the most-read pieces on the site.
Months after its publication, the XXX: The Return of Xander Cage Lukewarm Takes entry continues to stay in the top ten most-read pieces on the site on any given day, and sometimes even cracks the top five. I’m talking now. Like, today and tomorrow and five months from now. Hell, on some days, more people accidentally find my glib dismissal of XXX: The Return of Xander Cage while searching for things to look at while masturbating than intentionally find entries in the Weird Accordion to Al that I work incredibly hard on (no pun intended).
Because I don’t want to tell tales out of school, or provide a glimpse inside the sausage factory, or reveal a magician’s tricks, or confess to the murder of a series of student nurses in Canada in the late 1980s, but these pieces have not been well-read at all. That’s not surprising, necessarily, when we’re dealing with a song like “Toothless People” but even the hit songs and beloved fan favorites have failed to find even a modest audience, and that’s a bit of a bummer, because I work very hard on these and there are still about 140 more entries left to go.
Honestly, I wish more people read the Weird Accordion to Al and fewer people read the Lukewarm Takes on XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. Heck, I’d be happy if people stopped reading XXX: The Return of Xander Cage altogether and discovered the Weird Accordion to Al and went on a big binge with the dozens of lovingly crafted earlier entries already available.
To that end, I decided I’d rope XXX: The Return of Xander Cage into my quest to get web searchers to discover the Weird Accordion to Al while once against stressing that this column, and this website does not prominently feature pornography of all stripes. I’d furthermore like to state that if you’re looking for celebrity sex tapes, mind-blowing orgy movies, you’re not going to find them here, nor are you going to find anything involving Donald Trump, The Harlem Shake, the Kardashians, Justin Bieber, Channing Tatum nude or Star Wars, Star Trek and Disney’s Cars.
You’re not going to find any of those things here, so don’t even look. Heck, here at the Weird Accordion to Al we keep things strictly SFW and PG writing about things like the Oingo Boingo pastiche “You Make Me” from Even Worse.
Al is a creature of New Wave to the extent that when he pays tribute to acts like the B-52s, The Talking Heads, Tonio K or Oingo Boingo he wasn’t lampooning pop stars so much as we was paying loving homage to his peers. This is particularly true of an Al pastiche like “Happy Birthday”, where the underlying joke as well as the style of humor and sound are suspiciously close to the inspiration (in this case Tonio K’s “The Funky Western Civilization”), if not borderline identical.
Like its snottier, more ragged sibling punk, New Wave attracted big, larger-than-life characters whose colorful personas informed the music and the art that they created. That’s the case with Danny Elfman, who, like Al, was creating crazy miniature movies for the ears long before he became involved in the film business.
As with so much of Elfman’s work with Oingo Boingo, “You Make Me” sounds like it was created in a stop-motion animation cartoon factory using some manner of crazy, Dr. Seuss-meets-Rube Goldberg contraption involving an assembly line and a cartoon mallet.
The song is one of Al’s regular exercises in randomness and absurdity. It finds humor in comfortingly familiar places, whether in pop culture detritus (The Gong Show, The Care Bears Movie and “phone home”, E.T’s catchphrase, are all referenced), in the interplay of the banal and fantastic (the singer expresses a humdrum desire to “eat pork” immediately after announcing a slightly more exciting intention to “break the laws of time and space”) and words and ideas Al has always, and will always, find funny either separately, or in tandem, like Slurpees, the Limbo, styrofoam, the Eiffel Tower, trailer parks, shorts, weasels and bagels.
The song is a quintessential album cut, a featherweight, clamorous ditty best understood as one great pop culture eccentric’s tribute to another. When he made Even Worse, movies loomed large in Al’s very near future as both a screenwriter and leading man. Films loomed even larger for Elfman, who was well on his way to becoming better known and more successful as a composer (most famously and auspiciously for the films of Tim Burton) than as a rock star and New Wave theatrical weirdo.
It’s worth noting, however, if only for the sake of search-engine clicks, that neither Al nor Elfman worked on XXX, nor did they work on XXX: The Return Of Xander Cage. Neither works extensively in the field of hardcore pornography and if a Donald Trump/Jennifer Lawrence sex tape were to be leaked, they would have no connection to that either.
No, they’re just two talented men doing excellent work in their chosen fields, and, honestly, it would be beautiful if that was enough to attract people to columns obsessively chronicling their life’s work but, sadly, that just does not seem to be the case.
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