Accordion Noir - "Weird Al" Interview
Look. I grew up worshipping Weird Al. So it’s very weird to be on the radio, with the host asking me about Al’s, erm, “dark side”. But there I was—driving a stupid goddamned rental van from Hertz that would eventually charge me for an extra day for being 24 minutes late returning to Corvallis, Oregon—on the phone with the wonderful Bruce Triggs of Accordion noir radio, being asked that exact question.
I mean, look, UHF was a formative film for me. The Off the Deep End album was on constant rotation on my Sony Walkman. One of the most impressive things about that album is that its original material is actually really solid: the ballad “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” is both funny and constructed around a melody that thousands of pop songwriters would happily steal. The man is a master comedian and a brilliant musician, as everyone says.
Now, on this episode of Accordion Noir, Bruce asked “Weird Al” about his relationship to polka, and Al responded by saying, correctly, that he’s a kind of Spike Jones figure. The masterful Jones (1911-1965) used polka to spice up a song, enhancing comedic effect. He pulled this off most brilliantly in his version of “Der Furher’s Face”, which I still listen to regularly, a song that lampoons Hitler’s totalitarianism and which was released with the (in)famous Donald Duck cartoon in 1943.
(A song which, by the way, is played at a blistering 142 beats per minute… when older people today say our polkas are too fast, I always want to remind them that their frickin grandparents danced to polkas were the same speed. “Polka never Dies”: 145 bpm).
But I digress. The point is that there is indeed a long history of using Polka as part of a comedy act, and you can’t complain about that. And in his conversation with Bruce, Al reported that his concerts feature 15,000 people dancing around like wild to his rock-polka mashups, the suggestion being that this is a very good thing for polka music in general. Given my last grumpy rant about this on this very Substack, Bruce asked me what I thought of this.
My answer didn’t make the final cut of the interview. Instead, what you hear from about 51:00 on is my passionate plea for participation in Polka scenes and for musicians to pick up the style. Which is great. But you don’t hear what preceded it.
Prior to that, I had asked Bruce two pointed questions:
After attending the “Weird Al” concerts, do any of those 15,000 people go home and look up classic, traditional or contemporary polka music? Do they start listening to the genre? Do any of them look up local acts or festivals or events and start to attend?
If “Weird Al” ditched the formula of polka-covers-of-popular-songs, and just played classic polka tunes and originals, would he get the same crowd response?
We know that the answer to both of these questions is “no”. We know that the answer to the first question is “no”, because if even 2% of Al’s fans actually picked up the polka Genre, hard working polka bands would be playing to large crowds in clubs and dancehalls every night. Top national acts would have 28,000 monthly Spotify listeners instead of… *checks*… 317. You would even occasionally hear polka on mainstream radio. But that idea is ludicrous.
And we know the answer to the second question, because AL actually recorded a trad-polka song with his namesake (but not relative), Frankie Yankovic, the undisputed King of Polka. Nobody even knows about their version of “Who Stole the Keeshka”, because nobody cares. in 1955, people would have loved it. Now, it’s not even a footnote.
And the video the two of them made in 1980, when both were up for Grammys, is, I have to say, pure cringe:
I’m sure they had fun making this, but in retrospect, Frankie probably didn’t realize that this was a dark portent for the future of the genre. One polka band, who shall remain nameless, told me that without rock covers in their set like “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Brown Eyed Girl” they couldn’t get gigs at bars in my area.
So yeah: In this video Frankie doesn’t realize that 40 years later his descendants will be forced to do this shit that he is joking around with.
In this video Al doesn’t realize that as of 2009, there wouldn’t even be a Polka category at the Grammys for people like Frankie to win, because the genre was axed for failing to be “representative of the current musical landscape”.
This is what Polka’s death rattle sounds like. Brilliant comedy geniuses can make a lot of money by amplifying that sound and broadcasting it to the world. It may sound fantastic, it may blow people away and put a smile on their faces, but it is still a death rattle.
I debated hitting the "heart" button because it seemed wrong to "like" the concept of polka's death rattle, but I did it anyway to indicate support. Now *exhales cigarette*, prepare yourselves while I pontificate. Insufferably.
There's something vaguely paradoxical, or at least slightly incongruous, about this message and the other recent one from Rebellion Festival. Punk undoubtedly climbed out from the shadows, and ultimately became much more main stream (to the point where people started calling Blink-182 punk), which innately undercuts the concept of rebellion. I know, I know, that's one of the points of your prior article. But imagine for a moment that polka did the same. There would be a gleeful 5-10 year honeymoon period of "OMG! POLKA'S NOT DEAD!!", invariably followed by an adulterated, bastardized, mainstream adaptation that would itself invariably be monetized and eventually regulated.
That's not to say music shouldn't evolve. We wouldn't have The Beatles (or more aptly The Pogues) if it didn't. The point is, there's something tragically valorous about being the "old guard ." About being the torchbearer, but never the gatekeeper. Saying "I liked them before they were cool" is itself one of the uncoolest things one can utter. All music is available to everyone, always. But I'm not sure I trust today's society to be the custodians of it (see Rebellion Festival). It's why I love St. Virus Bar. There's something delightfully antiquated (and likely unsafe) about that red light on the street with no signage, the blacked-out door and interior, and the total lack of ventilation. It SCREAMS of a time gone by, but still alive as long as we continue to support it (setting aside that the government shut them down...f**k the man!!).
Punk traveled underground until it didn't. I submit to you that polka does the same. It's why one of my favorite lines in Polka Never Dies is "to the Main Street Legion Hall..." The inevitable wellspring of all things "oompah" in the upper midwest. It's dressed up, different, sure, but it's its own underground. And it'll continue to be long after we're gone.
The last thing I'll say is: you know it won't die in your lifetime, and if you keep preaching, it won't die in your kid's lifetime either. Because as long as someone's playing it, it's not dead.
TL;DR - plz keep making records.