35th anniversary review: “Weird Al” Yankovic – “Polka Party!”

This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Records – 21 Oct 1986

A swing and a miss, but has some of my faves

Much maligned, Polka Party! holds a special place in my heart because it was one in a batch of the first albums I ever bought with my own money!

Yep, on a family trip into Chicago in between Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 1986, my two older sisters convinced my parents to stop in a record store, likely to buy Duran Duran shirts. 11-year-old me, however, walked out having spent a large chunk of my Christmas money on THREE “Weird Al” Yankovic albums, including his newest release, Polka Party!

To say that “Weird Al” Yankovic was riding high by the mid-80s is a bit of an understatement. After a successful enough run on the Dr. Demento radio show, Al was able to start releasing his own albums. Starting with his eponymous 1983 release, 1984’s in 3-D, and through 1985’s Dare to Be Stupid his star kept rising. However that star took a bit of a tumble for 1986’s Polka Party!, and there are a lot of reasons for this, not all entirely Al’s fault.

As per his modus operandi at the time, Polka Party! features a mix of satires of “popular” songs (I put that in quotes for a reason, and we’ll get to that later), original tracks, and a polka medley combining parts of recent top hits.

The latter two portions of the album work out surprisingly well. His polka medleys are always fun, and you can tell that “Weird Al” and his long-running bandmates are having a blast with putting together these frenetically-paced polka renditions, this one including “Sledgehammer” (Peter Gabriel), “Party All the Time” (Eddie Murphy), and Madonna‘s “Papa Don’t Preach” among others.

As for the originals, two standouts are “Dog Eat Dog,” a Talking Heads-styled commentary on the life of office workers; and “Christmas at Ground Zero” a Cold War/Mutually Assured Destruction-tinged holiday song that is both catchingly cheery and, for “Weird Al”, extremely nefarious at the same time. The latter enjoyed mild radio airtime for over a decade in successive holiday seasons until the unfortunate events of 9/11, when the term “Ground Zero” took on a new definition in American vernacular. Despite this, “Christmas at Ground Zero” still remains one of his most popular originals.

However, unless your a big fan, you don’t come to the “Weird Al” show for originals. You come for the clever parodies of the biggest songs you’ve been hearing on the radio or, at the time when they still did this, seeing the music videos on MTV. That’s where the rub lies with this album: the parodies were too late, too pedestrian, too specific, and just based on a shitty song.

The lead track on the album, “Living with a Hernia,” tackles James Brown‘s “Living in America” from the Rocky IV soundtrack. But the original song was nearly a year old, and the pace of music in the mid-80s was insanely fast. By the time Al’s cover was released, people forgot about the original, or didn’t care. That’s not to say it is bad– like all of his parodies they do a GREAT job of mimicking the original.

The next parody to come up is “Addicted to Spuds.” Taken from the Robert Palmer hit track “Addicted to Love.” For Al’s part, he adapted the parody into one of his regular go-to devices: food. In this instance, the humble potato. It isn’t his cleverest lyricism but then again, it doesn’t help that the original track, while a hit, is actually an incredibly dull song. I was, and still am, of the belief that the only reason “Addicted to Love” was such a hit was based on the music video itself…

…allow me to digress: the video literally consists of Robert Palmer looking like he just got back from doing a line off of a toilet in the bathroom of his Wall Street stock brokerage, singing in front of a band of vapid-expressioned, skinny white women with bright red lipstick, hair slicked back, all dressed in tight black long-sleeve shirts, short black mini-skirts, with each oddly gyrating their hips and bodies in a mimicry of dance (out of sync with each other) while pretending (badly) to play their instruments… and this was the epitome of sexy for 1986!!!

Ahem… sorry about that. So where was I? Oh, yes, so the original isn’t really even that good in the first place. The video just has women in it.

Next up is an underrated parody which, to this day, I still think is one of Al’s best. Sadly it relies very much on the culture at the time and most people who grew up in the 90s or later have no idea what the hell it is about. That song is “Here’s Johnny,” parodied from the catchy El DeBarge song “Who’s Johnny.” The original track features in the sci-fi/comedy Short Circuit although the song, as written, has nothing to do with the film (which made for even stranger music video which DOES try accomplish some sort of tie-in).

So why didn’t it stick the landing for most people? Unlike many of his parodies, Al wrote this one with specific subject in mind. Namely about Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show sidekick who was pretty much useless except for announcing Johnny at the beginning of the show, and laughing when someone said something funny. In that sense, fans of The Tonight Show might have appreciated it, fans of El DeBarge might have appreciated it, and definitely fans of both WILL appreciate it. But outside of that, it is too specific for an audience to understand the humor. Unlike timeless classics like “Eat It,” or the medical hijinks of “Like a Surgeon,” once Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show and put Ed McMahon out of a job, each passing year moved this song further and further into irrelevance.

That being said, going back to that “WILL appreciate it” part above, it does (did?) a very good job of skewering Ed McMahon’s role on the show, but also just how adorable and goofy he was anyway.

The last parody on the album, “Toothless People,” is just bad. But that’s because it is based on a really shitty song Mick Jagger did, “Ruthless People,” as the title track for the film of the same name (also really bad). Jagger personally gave Yankovic permission to cover the song and, even though the original flopped, Al thought it would be an insult not to do the parody after having been given the green light. C’est la vie.

So after a string of hits, “Weird Al” went and put out an album that’s considered, by the industry’s standards and perception of his work, a flop. It didn’t sell as well as others and was eclipsed in 1998 by his best-selling album Even Worse. Maybe he was burned out, releasing an album each year straight for four years. Maybe it was just a bad crop of songs to parody. Maybe he just couldn’t get permission to parody the bigger hits of the year?

Polka Party! isn’t a bad album, really. The originals have some standouts and many of the tracks show up on later Greatest Hits albums. It could be that it just doesn’t have the cohesiveness of earlier or later albums.

Maybe… just maybe, the music industry punished him for putting a bunch of punks on the cover.

That’s gotta be it!