How Weird Al Predicted The Future
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The best “Weird Al” Yankovic albums work like a musical version of Mad magazine – they lampoon the times, but also capture their essence. His second and best, In 3-D, doubles as a yearbook of 1983′s junk culture – tabloids, game shows, reruns, infomercials, slasher flicks, mini-malls, breakfast cereals. Ignoring the looming shadows of nuclear and economic anxiety, Yankovic boils American life down to our guiltiest pleasures and lowest-brow distractions, a point no doubt driven home by using popular songs as his canvas. In this case, he satirizes no less than five inescapable, ubiquitous singles that cracked the Billboard top three. Recorded at the tail end of 1983 and released at the beginning of the following year, In 3-D certainly illustrates the times better than Time magazine’s Yuri Andropov Man Of The Year cover story. In that same issue, I imagine Yankovic would have been more drawn to the Plymouth Voyager ad starring Doug Henning.
But even more remarkable than Yankovic’s cynical, supermarket Norman Rockwell sketches is his prescient vision of America in 2010. The civilization that was dying under the watchful eye of this cultural critic has not only survived, but has completely repeated itself in high definition. Everything that was endemic of 1983 would return again to shape the latter half of the ’00s – a problem that goes way beyond the fact that one generation’s “Ron Popeil” is another generation’s Billy Mays.
Yankovic’s Nostradamus effect is natural since In 3-D is his most zeitgeist-obsessed work – exploring our movies, our TV shows, our music. More about American consumption, less about “talking about food to the tune of a popular song.” Duly, as history repeats itself, so does Al’s version of it. For example. Yankovic and a generation of moviegoers, laughed off ’83s 3-D movie resurgence as a fad – but today, someone had to make Avatar the highest grossing movie of all time, right? The dozen or so films that represented the last 3-D craze was reborn with Tony Anthony’s 1981 western Comin ‘At Ya – a trend that was wearing out its welcome by Yankovic’s ’83 and effectively dead shortly after. That summer, Anthony told People, “I’m praying to God that Jaws 3-D is a good picture…It will definitely influence the major studios ‘decisions,” You got the same sense in 2009 when Gawker starkly reported “If Avatar makes as much money as 20th Century Fox basically needs it to, we may never see a plain 2-D movie again.” Two generations lured in droves to the cinema by the same simple gimmick. The only difference? Jaws 3-D wasn’t Avatar.
Yankovic’s “Theme From Rocky XIII” attacked our similar compulsion to swarm to sequels. Yankovic’s hypothetical Rocky film takes place 12 films after the original, screenwriters so sapped of ideas and the lead actor so old that the champ is reduced to owning a deli and selling meat. The song emerged from in the middle of sequel season for sure. The gangbusters summer movie explosion of 1982 (Rocky III, Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan, Friday The 13th Part 3) had movie studios scrambling for more by ’83, unleashing no fewer than eight sequels during the summer months. Save maybe Return Of The Jedi, the list looks like a video store cut-out bin of the damned: Porky’s II, Psycho II, Jaws 3-D, Superman III, Octopussy, Curse Of The Pink Panther and Staying Alive. Annoying at the time, laughable in retrospect. But even Yankovic’s worst imagination couldn’t conjure a vision of movie studios (and movie audiences) at the end of 2009, when a whopping 16 of the decade’s 20 highest grossing movies were sequels. (It’s also worth noting that in the unnecessary 2006 sequel Rocky Balboa, a pushing-60 Sylvester Stallone reprises his role – and he actually does own a restaurant. Eerie!)
And what of the campy horror films lampooned in “Nature Trail To Hell”? With a similar windswept creep of “Thriller,” Yankovic ribs the booming splatter industry as assembly line, paint-by-numbers, obsessed with gore and cheap tricks. He eloquently jibes with Tom Lehrer aplomb, “See severed heads that almost fall into your lap, see that bloody hatchet coming right at you/ You’ll never see hideous effects like these again, until we bring Nature Trail To Hell Part 2.”A microgeneration of low-budget bloodfeasts felt uncreative at best, exploitative at worst. But once they returned to popularity in the ’00s, movie studios set a new low – remaking them entirely. A handful of the flicks that Yankovic might have seen in 1983 and 1984′s for $3.15, have been simply redone for the $9 decade – most notably The House On Sorority Row (2009), Children Of The Corn (2009), A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010) and The Hunger (coming soon from Warner Bros.) It’s easy to imagine that a Nature Trail To Hell “reboot” could certainly be given its due, complete with fake David Fincher cinematography and a theme song redone by Rob Zombie.
The publishing industry took a nosedive in the early ’80s, but trashy tabloids like Star, Globe and the National Examiner glutted the news racks. As National Enquirer owner Generoso Pope, Jr. told Business Week in 1983, “The recession didn’t affect us at all.” Yankovic imagined fictional headlines in his tabloid rundown “Midnight Star. They were hilarious – “The Ghost of Elvis is Living in My Den!” – but actually not too far off of reality. In ’83, the perennially ridiculous Weekly World News found Bigfoot taking a bath, but the theoretically more reliable Globe ran a series of stories on Princess Grace’s ghost. And while the tabloid mags themselves have somewhat faded from pop culture omnipresence, the late aughts produced their hyperkinetic, caffeinated, internet-era offspring – the muckraking, journalistically questionable Godzillas of TMZ and Perez Hilton. Once again gossip is big business, producing grating TV personalities and scooping the mainstream media almost daily.
In 3-D‘s most famous track, the infectious “Eat It,” belies its subject matter. It’s not really about food and more about inhabiting the body of Michael Jackson for three minutes. As In 3-D‘s first single, “Eat It” was also Yankovic’s coming out party as a comedy-pop chameleon who actually inhabited the shells of pop songs. The parodies on his previous album were dragged through a bratty, punkish, cartoon swirl of accordions and hand farts; but “Eat It” was meant to sound almost exactly like “Beat It,” an alternative universe where Jackson and Quincy Jones created a pop monolith about yogurt and spam.
Here, Yankovic was pretending to be the most famous person on the planet. Michael Jackson was, as Greil Marcus noted, “an event in which pop music crosses political, economic, geographic and racial barriers in which a new world is suggested…the center of American cultural life” (and the only musician to grace the covers of both Time and Mad in 1984). And, sadly, once again, Yankovic would foreshadow the ’00s, as Jackson’s death would be the only thing that could still unite a splintered post-internet music audience. Said Jody Rosen in Slate, “Weeping for Michael, we are also mourning the musical monoculture – the passing of a time when we could imagine that the whole country, the whole planet, was listening to the same song.”
This generally means Yankovic’s job has suddenly become a lot harder. But luckily In 3-D covers enough ground that the album is still relevant to this day – if not more so. Something tells me “Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch” isn’t going to hold up nearly as well.
