Poodle Hat (studio album) by "Weird Al" Yankovic

From spigelwii 12/05/2023 01:25

Though it seems this record has ultimately aged better (critically, based on what people say on this very website) than his other more well-known work, Weird Al and his awesome band have LITERALLY never been at a higher peak creatively than they were with Poodle Hat.

Exhibit A: The parodies. Everyone loves the parodies, right? It's Weird Al, that's the point. Well, maybe, maybe not (I'll get to that in a bit), but while immaculately swerving from rap (Lose Yourself), to hip-hop (Trash Day), pop-rock (A Complicated Song), boy bands (Ebay), and, inexplicably, Billy Joel (Ode to a Superhero), Al and the band prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are more than capable of recreating the genre of the moment. IMMACULATE. There's just no other word that can be used to describe the effort put forth here. John Schwartz, Jim West, and Steve Jay are INCREDIBLE musical chameleons. Tempting as it may be to dismiss Al as "the parody guy", this misses the "point" of his brilliance so badly, it would be like watching Dracula and saying, "Big deal, it's not even in color." (Note: The parodies on this album are not his best or funniest, though that has as much to do with the problematic source material as much as anything else...Billy Joel? Really? And I'm not sure if Al deserves credit or criticism for making the joke WE ALL THOUGHT OF when we heard "Complicated" for the first time.)

Which brings us to Exhibit B, and in my opinion, the thing that everybody doesn't understand about Weird Al: The originals. Holy crap; we're cooking with gas here. You don't need to look any further than Genius in France, an astonishingly accurate and brilliant and hilarious and just *wild* summation of the ENTIRE FRANK ZAPPA EXPERIENCE IN A SINGLE 9 MINUTE SONG, but go ahead and do so anyway. You'll find Al spitting lyrics with the best of them in Hardware Store (did he just say something about an automatic circumsizer?), an utterly bizarre dad-joke-filled Bo Diddley takeoff in Party at the Leper Colony, Why Does This Always Happen to Me?, which possibly owes its Ben Folds-ness to the appearance of Folds himself, and of course, Bob, which is just Al reading off palindromes in a delightfully stupid Bob Dylan affectation. These songs are absolutely ludicrous and absolutely wonderful. The lyrics are hilarious, sure, but the concepts themselves are even funnier.

This album is both a classic Weird Al record with tracks that casual appreciators can enjoy AND an impossibly high-quality example of WHY parody is a totally valid art form. And also: My love for you is like diarrhea; I just can't hold it in.

From dmercado 11/16/2022 01:56

surprisingly consistent - the parodies don't steal the show but are still good, his originals are quality listens, and the polka is one of my favorites

From junodog4 03/15/2015 00:27

Lacks the real moments of genius that is seen on other albums by Weird Al.