Understand that I’m a big “Weird Al” Yankovic fan. There are easily bigger fans, but I do enjoy his parodies and even his original songs that parody song styles. “One More Minute” is one of my favorite Weird Al songs, and it’s about all the personal mutilation he’d rather do to himself than supposedly spend time with his new ex. Being a dark comedy song doesn’t bother me.
Being a dark Christmas song, however, will.
And it’s not parody that bothers me. Just this week I added an Irish drinking song about not giving Guinness to a reindeer to warm them up, or at least Santa’s magic flying reindeer that can talk. You’ll find other parodies in my “BW Yule Log” playlist. I can allow for a bit of silliness. This is supposed to be as much about having fun as honoring our Savior’s birth.
It’s just something about Al’s two Christmas songs, “Christmas At Ground Zero” and especially “The Night Santa Went Crazy” where the accordion legend and I have to part ways. In the continued spirit of “don’t get me wrong”, I’m not even saying you are a bad person if you make it part of your Christmas music playlist. Nothing wrong with the songs and I don’t think Al is trying to attack the holiday or the Christ child or anything extreme like that. It’s just for me, while amusing on their own, they don’t really put me in a festive spirit because of how dark they are. Let’s go over them and I’ll explain.
I couldn’t find a version that wasn’t karaoke or otherwise lacked the “music video” look. I’m not even sure the best I could do (lyrics over video of atom bomb warning videos) will be up forever, which means I’ll lose even this. I don’t like video distracting from the lyrics in this feature.
That aside, I could almost put this on the Yule Log playlist. It’s a silly little tale about someone dropping the bomb on presumably the US at Christmas. There’s nothing necessarily evil about it. Weird Al’s just…being Weird Al. In the end though, I’ve discredited songs in the past for not feeling especially festive even under good intentions. “Feed The World” comes to mind, and it’s one of the reasons this article series came into existence. It’s harmless, but not the festive feel I’m looking for. I don’t even know if the album it came from, Polka Party, came out around Christmas, though I’m sure it will suddenly be a Christmas album if it did even though this is the only song about the holiday.
I’m a little less kind to “The Night Santa Went Crazy”, from the Bad Hair Day album. Again, I don’t think he’s trying to ruin Christmas cheer or anything. It’s just the idea of Santa on a murder spree and killing our childhood Christmas heroes…doesn’t work for me.
I’m not going to lie. Part of my inner child dies when I listen to this song. It’s just so unnecessarily violent and now in that reality Christmas is ruined for a lot of children, plus all the dead reindeer and elves? I’m not comfortable with a Christmas song I can’t play in front of kids…and the drunk reindeer and that time Grandma got run over are perfectly fine to me. I even like the cartoon special. Maybe I’m the weird one.
So as much as I like ya, Al, I can’t play you at Christmastime. There’s the whole rest of the year when I’ll enjoy most of your songs, but you really got to get over this violent holiday thing. You know, like the original holiday you made up.
Maybe he just has holiday issues?
BW Media Spotlight 