For every career high that parody king “Weird Al” Yankovic has
\nexperienced, there has been an equal low. For the smash success of
\n“Eat It” and the
\nIn 3-D<\/i> album, there was a flop like
\nPolka Party!<\/i> For a commercial comeback like
\nEven Worse<\/i>, there was the commercial failure of
\nUHF<\/i>. (“Close Personal Friends Of Al”, please take note: I
\nsaid
\ncommercial<\/i> failure, not creative. Insulting this cult film
\nis like making jokes about Mother Teresa in church.)<\/p>\n
Yankovic experienced another career peak with
\nOff The Deep End<\/i>, his sixth full-length release (not
\nincluding the soundtrack to
\nUHF<\/i> or any best-of collections). But one year later,
\nYankovic’s creativity hit the wall with
\nAlapalooza<\/i>, an album which proves to be an incredible
\ndisappointment.<\/p>\n
Lacking a lot of the creative spark behind both parody and
\noriginal numbers, this album feels rushed, almost as if Yankovic’s
\nrecord company demanded he push something out to capitalize on the
\nre-direction of attention to his career. Bad move. Most of these
\nideas come off less than half-baked, lumbering worse than the
\ndinosaurs which are mocked on the album’s cover.<\/p>\n
Now, I won’t say that a parody of
\nJurassic Park<\/i> was a bad idea – nor can I fully fault
\nYankovic for choosing “Macarthur Park” as the song to base his
\nparody on. But to his younger audience, the original song will be
\nabout as foreign to them as a bar of soap was to Pig Pen in the
\n“Peanuts” comic strip.Even if the actual parody had some real
\nsubstance to it, Yankovic could have overcome this obstacle and
\ncreated something memorable. If only this were the case; it really
\ndoesn’t sound like Yankovic’s heart is in this one.<\/p>\n
The same complaint could be made for much of
\nAlapalooza<\/i>. “Bedrock Anthem” is a poor parody of the Red Hot
\nChili Peppers; Flea was onto something when he admitted on VH-1 he
\nwasn’t fond of this song, saying it wasn’t Yankovic’s best work.
\nOriginals like “Young, Dumb & Ugly,” “Frank’s 2,000″ TV” and
\n“Waffle King” dare to suggest that Yankovic was running out of gas
\ncreatively. Even the beloved polka medley is nowhere to be found,
\nreplaced instead with a lame-brained attempt at turning Queen’s
\n“Bohemian Rhapsody” into “Bohemian Polka”. Three words: No, NO,
\n
\nNO!!!!!<\/i>
\n<\/b><\/p>\n
Only two songs merit any type of praise on
\nAlapalooza<\/i>. “Livin’ In The Fridge” is, admittedly, not the
\nbest parody that Yankovic has written, but his take on the
\nthen-recent Aerosmith hit does have its moments. The same goes for
\n“Achy Breaky Song,” from the “kick-a-man-when-he’s-down”
\ndepartment… though some people today might not remember the
\noriginal Billy Ray Cyrus hit, especially the younger crowd. (They
\nmay also miss some of the pop music references that Yankovic drops
\nin this one.)<\/p>\n
While Yankovic would rebound from this effort to prove his
\ncareer wasn’t extinct,
\nAlapalooza<\/i> is an absolute collection of primordial ooze that
\nshould be left to fossilize.<\/p>\n
2002 Christopher Thelen and “The Daily Vault.” All rights
\nreserved. Review or any portion may not be reproduced without
\nwritten permission. Cover art is the intellectual property of
\nScotti Brothers Records, and is used for reference purposes
\nonly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6172],"rating":[5616],"class_list":["post-37469","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-weird-al-yankovic","rating-rating-d"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37469"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37469"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}