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There are people who think "Weird Al" Yankovic is a hack. People who think he's a silly novelty act with no real talent or cultural value of his own. Those people were not at the Oregon Zoo on Saturday night.
As protesters outside begged Weird Al to save the elephants, he opened his tight, well-choreographed show with "Tacky," his take on Pharrell Williams' awful earworm "Happy," while a camera followed him through the Zoo until he reached the stage. Yankovic, 55, has been known for his parody songs since (Reed alum) Dr. Demento discovered him at age 16, and he's playing with the same band since he was 21. That experience, plus a surprising amount of enthusiasm, was apparent throughout his live show. He danced, changed costumes between numbers while the screen played Weird Al-related clips, and at one point jumped off the stage to gyrate and sing "Wanna B Ur Lovr," which includes lines like, "My love for you's like diarrhea/I just can't hold it in," into the faces of audience members, who couldn't have been happier about the whole thing.
All evening, Yankovic gave the sold-out crowd sitting on blankets, slowly becoming soaked on the wet grass, what they wanted. During the first half of the show he did big numbers, songs from the album he's touring for, Mandatory Fun, mixed in with blockbusters from the past like "Dare to Be Stupid," "Fat" and "Smells Like Nirvana." He also did a couple of medleys: His newest pop song polka medley, "Now That's What I Call Polka!" and an inspired mash-up of his own songs, including "Party in the CIA" and "It's All About the Pentiums," a hacker to a Luddite burn released in 1999 that manages to get funnier even as the technology mentioned in the song gets older and older.
About halfway through, Yankovic broke for a classic rock-star acoustic set, giving new and hilariously self-serious life to classics like "Eat It" and "Like a Surgeon." As soon as that finished, Yankovic disappeared and a few minutes later came out on a Segway, doing spins and twirls, to sing his "Ridin' Dirty" parody "White & Nerdy." After another quick costume change, Yankovic was Robin Thicke in a striped suit, singing "Word Crimes," a list of grammar mistakes that was maybe the funniest song of the night and really the only appropriate way to listen to "Blurred Lines" at all at this point.
Weird Al's staying power is most apparent in those songs which have outlived the band that originally performed them, and never was that more obvious than on "Amish Paradise," the song that makes Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" (itself based on Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise") seem like a terrible first draft. It was the best number of the show and included the highest level of audience participation in arm-waving hat I have ever seen.
The show ended with a long, Star Wars-themed encore, in which Yankovic dressed as a Jedi and surrounded himself in dancing stormtroopers for "The Saga Begins" and then went into "Yoda." As the smiling crowd filtered out of the zoo, to the parking lot and the MAX station, not even babies or children seemed tired, cold or upset. Everyone had gotten what they came for: a night of laughing to sometimes ridiculous, sometimes utterly genius song parodies that only get better with time.
All photos by Emily Joan Greene.
WWeek 2015
