Volume 4, Issue 39: Dane Iorg

"He's found the most unusual way to be known forever."

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Before I became a parent, I had grand ambitions for the sort of music my children would listen to. The reason there was so much junk in the world, the reason pop music had gotten so bad, I told myself, was because kids weren’t being introduced to the good stuff. In my imaginary, Dogtooth-esque cloistered universe, my then-theoretical children would only be exposed to great music, music they’d then spend the rest of their lives spreading the gospel of throughout their various social circles, thus reversing the course of our collective cultural decline, getting Lucinda Williams and TV on the Radio atop the pop charts and making this country a place you could be goddamned proud of again. I imagined them as the Typhoid Marys of our musical future, little Lester Bangs out there eradicating the Luke Bryans and Maroon 5s from the face of the planet.

When I actually had children, it’s fair to say that it, uh, did not turn out this way. While I was trying to get them to listen to Pavement, they were watching YouTube videos of “Never Gonna Give You Up” and polluting my Spotify algorithm with Imagine Dragons and Charlie Puth. I’ve sold them on a few things—one of my proudest achievements is getting them to do the claps in Wilco’s “Nothingsevergonnastandinmyway(again)”—but on the whole, they’ve gone their own musical way, like, as kids, they are supposed to. They’ll come around eventually. My parents spent most my childhood constantly playing Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, and I spent most of that childhood rejecting them. Now I listen to them more than my parents do. I’m sure they’ll be spinning In Utero throughout their 30s.

But you’d still like to point them in the right direction, and you particularly want to do so with the live music experience. If you don’t count DC Talk—the Christian rock band I saw about 20 times in junior high, as I’ve written about before—my first four live concerts were ones that laid the groundwork as well as I could have possible hoped: Metallica (I was 16 years old, right after The Black Album came out; you can still find this concert, at Assembly Hall in Champaign, on YouTube), The Black Crowes, Bob Dylan and R.E.M.. I have no issues with that foursome, do you? I’m glad I waited until I could drive myself to a show to see my first one: My dad took my sister to see New Kids on the Block (the “Magic Summer Tour”) when she was 10, and I’m not sure Jill touts that as loudly these days as I do my Metallica/Black Crowes/Dylan/R.E.M. quartet. You want to get off to a good start.

But which show for my kids? I think we picked the right one.

I don’t remember exactly how, but they’d stumbled across one of Weird Al Yankovic’s polka parodies—where he plays a medley of pop songs like they are polkas, amusingly—and they loved them. So do I, actually: They’re funny, but also weirdly sweet, and they have a way of pinpointing exactly what’s so appealing about those pop songs—why they were hits in the first place.

The polkas led inevitably to the Weird Al parodies, which is one of the funniest things about Weird Al and his relationship to how kids listen to music. Yankovic famously keeps all his songs PG and family-friendly—he’s also a devout Christian, something he has been loathe to talk about but I do think quietly comes across in his music, in a positive way—which allowed me to make a Weird Al playlist for the boys (they have a little MP3 player they fall asleep to sometimes) without worrying I’m going to have to explain “WAP” to them. But if you’re a kid and you listen only to Weird Al music, and his parodies of several decades of pop music, you end up learning about those songs exclusively from Weird Al. My kids don’t know anything about Dire Straits, or Tiffany, Fine Young Cannibals, or even Coolio, but they know all Weird Al’s parodies of those songs. If you didn’t know Weird Al was doing parodies of existing songs, frankly, you’d think he was the most versatile songwriter in the history of the world.

But that’s one thing I noticed about the way the boys reacted to Weird Al: They didn’t need to know the source material. They found the songs fun, and funny, and catchy, and whether or not they caught all the references was irrelevant. Listening to the songs with them myself, it dawned on me how many Weird Al songs I’d grown up listening to without realizing they’d implanted themselves in my subconscious. Did I know that I knew all the words to “I Want a New Duck?” I did not know that. But I do. I don’t know how. But I know all the words to “I Want a New Duck.” The human mind is an infinite mystery.

So when I heard that Weird Al Yankovic was playing at the Atlanta Symphony Hall in October, I immediately grabbed tickets for the three of us. Researching the shows online, I learned that this tour was unlike other Weird Al tours in that he wasn’t playing his parody songs: He was actually playing only his original songs, with his band (that has been together for 40 years), in a smaller, stripped-down setting. No “Eat It,” no “Smells Like Nirvana,” no “Yoda.” The band would play all the other songs on his albums, the ones that only the diehards know, the ones that, I’m sure, are the most fun to play. So I made a Weird Al Concert Prep playlist on Spotify, and we all did our own deep dive.

It turns out: These are the best songs. One of the best things about Weird Al, I’ve discovered in my own late-in-life catchup, is that his funniest songs are also his catchiest ones—the originals. These originals are often their own sorts of parodies, but driven by the music rather than the words. The artists that Yankovic admires, he ends up doing little odes to them with original songs. And it turns out—perhaps alarmingly—that Yankovic’s favorite bands are some of my favorite bands.

Thus, there’s an ode to the Talking Heads (“Dog Eat Dog”), R.E.M. (“Frank’s TV”), the White Stripes (“CNR”), Rage Against the Machine (“I’ll Sue Ya”), The Pixies (“First World Problems”) and the Foo Fighters (“My Own Eyes.”) (There are ton more. Here’s a really fun Doors one.) These are picture-perfect parodies—I’d actually love to see Jack White play “CNR”—but they are also excellent songs on their own merits. And I’m sorry, but doing a song called “Bob” in the style of Bob Dylan, except all the lyrics are palindromes, is freaking brilliant: I’d never realized how much some Dylan lyrics sound like palindromes. “Ma is as selfless as I am/May a moody baby doom a yam.”

(And while I have you: “Your Horoscope For Today” is hilarious, correct about astrology and enough of an earworm that I think if someone else had recorded it, it would have hit the pop charts.)

OK, who we trying to kid here? I was glad the boys wanted to see Weird Al, but, really, I wanted to see Weird Al.

Well, the show was last night. And I have to tell you: He was great. It turns out there are real benefits to playing with the same band for 40 years. Weird Al has said he wanted to do this tour not just to showcase the band but to showcase those songs, the ones that are so fun to play but the ones most people don’t know, and he absolutely made the right decision: There is pure, unalloyed joy in the performances, of a band with four decades together finally, in their seventh decade, playing exactly the show they’ve always wanted to play. We all grinned like fools the whole time.

Weird Al is having a moment. A mock biopic of his life, co-written by him, comes out next month, starring (Deadspin fan) Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al. I have to say, it does look funny.

And all told: Weird Al has lasted longer than almost every artist he parodied. Who thinks about Robert Palmer, or The Offspring, or Chamillionaire anymore? (It remains one of my favorite stories that Kurt Cobain was reportedly deeply touched that Weird Al wanted to parody him.) There is a certain timelessness in his songs that lasts even when the artists and the songs and the genres and the jokes themselves are no longer relevant. And I think it comes from that joy. I suspect it comes from just figuring out what you want to do and doing it the rest of your life. Eventually, the culture meets you where you are—where you were the whole time.

The three of us got back to our hotel last night, still humming the songs, watching funny Weird Al videos, staying up way past everybody’s bedtimes. And now the boys can say, forever, that their first show was a Weird Al Yankovic concert. I hope they’re proud of that someday. I hope it ends up even being sort of cool. I don’t know what kind of music they will ultimately love. It might not be my music: It probably won’t be. But if they love it half as much as they, and we, loved Weird Al last night … that’s all I could hope for. It’s the joy that matters. Sometimes you’ve just got to dare to be stupid.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. MLB Playoffs Rootability Rankings, New York. I like doing this format because it allows me to just make jokes for 1,400 words.

2. Potential World Series Matchups, Ranked, MLB.com. None of these, alas, have the Cardinals in them.

3. DC Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with Black Adam.

4. The Best Moments of a Wild LDS Saturday, MLB.com. Remember that crazy day last week? I wrote about the best moments from it. That’s how the meat is processed, folks.

5. The Ten Best Players of the Postseason So Far, MLB.com. Happy for Harrison Bader.

6. The Irresistibility of the Asshole Celebrity Anecdote, New York. Hahahahaha James Corden.

7. Go Vote Early, It’s Fun, Medium. And easier, and a lot less stressful.

8. The Immense Stakes of the Yankees-Guardians Game Five, MLB.com. Outdated, but at least a rainout gave it an extra day.

9. Your Saturday Storylines Preview, MLB.com. Up to date!

10. Your Wednesday Storylines Preview, MLB.com. Very outdated.

    
    PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Halloween Ends,” “Stars at Noon” and the terrific “Decision to Leave.”

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we recapped the Georgia-Vanderbilt game.

Seeing Red, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Original Tiger Kings,” Chris Jones and Michael J. Mooney, The Atlantic. Just a classic, old-school glossy magazine story, about the incredible rise and tragic fall of Siegfried and Roy.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Final Bow,” H.C. McIntyre. I will confess to have not come across H.C. McIntyre before, but she opened for the Bob Mould show last week and she was just terrific. I’ve been deep-diving her whole catalogue since. I bet you are really going to like her.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Baseball team photo! (Taken by an excellent local photographer named Jack Duvall.)

Don’t ask about the mustache, it’s a long story. (And it will be gone very, very soon.)

Best,
Will