My Weirder Al Playlist (4 of 4)

Hipster edition.

No proper Weird Al projects are really that obscure: his fan base and the man himself have kept his work in the public eye over the years. But out of my favorites, these next few get the least exposure. Let’s kick things off with one that could’ve appeared in The Journal of Wordplay.

How can I not love the most palindrome-centered mainstream song ever made? “Bob” is at once a bit of nonsense poetry that sends up the pretensions of Bob Dylan and other folk rockers—but in the loving just-for-fun style that’s the Weird Al trademark—and a string of rhyming palindromes set to music in the palindromic year of 2002.

I’ll be curious to find out what my mom thinks of this one, as she is not a Bob Dylan fan. Most of us hear some affection in Weird Al’s imitations, but they may also work if you want to read them as takedowns. (I know she loved his “First World Problems.”)

The video of “Your Horoscope for Today” is a recent animation of a song from the Weird Al vault. Like a lot of Weird Al songs, it balances a careful external structure with freewheeling improv energy. The twelve zodiac signs (the ones we use for horoscopes, anyway—Ophiuchus never really caught on) subdivide into three groups of four. Assigning two lines for each results in three eight-line stanzas, and each line has its own joke. The song’s bridge, an extra-long couplet, underscores the absurdity of horoscopes in general.

Getting people to recognize that obscurity has been a pet cause of mine, especially when I did some work for search engines. At times, I get a bit sour about how much stock people put in this and other forms of magical thinking, sometimes with consequences much more serious than an early morning’s diversion. But Al, as usual, reminds us all to see the funny side.

Also, the rhythm of “Horoscope” is as lively as they come.

The last musical number on my list is a complete album, and it can’t be found on YouTube at present. But it does appear on archive.org, so go here if you want to experiece Weird Al and Wendy Carlos’s version of Peter and the Wolf.

Carlos is a composer and conductor best known for scoring The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and Tron. This project sticks close to the original purpose of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 Peter and the Wolf—using a child’s story and instrumentals to lead children into the world of classical music. Rounding out the album is an update of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, some comedy music from the nineteenth century.

Like a lot of Wendy Carlos’ work, it’s hard to get a hold of a physical copy of this since her distribution company went under, but some secondhand markets have it for $32, last I checked. If you have young ones in your life—and I have a few through friends and family—it might be a worthwhile investment. And as a one-of-a-kind creation, it can be enjoyed at any age.