Alapalooza

Alapalooza

"Weird Al" Yankovic

Scotti Brothers Records, 1993

REVIEW BY: Christopher Thelen

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 09/27/2002

For every career high that parody king "Weird Al" Yankovic hasexperienced, there has been an equal low. For the smash success of"Eat It" and the In 3-D album, there was a flop like Polka Party! For a commercial comeback like Even Worse, there was the commercial failure of UHF. ("Close Personal Friends Of Al", please take note: Isaid commercial failure, not creative. Insulting this cult filmis like making jokes about Mother Teresa in church.)

Yankovic experienced another career peak with Off The Deep End, his sixth full-length release (notincluding the soundtrack to UHF or any best-of collections). But one year later,Yankovic's creativity hit the wall with Alapalooza, an album which proves to be an incredibledisappointment.

Lacking a lot of the creative spark behind both parody andoriginal numbers, this album feels rushed, almost as if Yankovic'srecord company demanded he push something out to capitalize on there-direction of attention to his career. Bad move. Most of theseideas come off less than half-baked, lumbering worse than thedinosaurs which are mocked on the album's cover.

Now, I won't say that a parody of Jurassic Park was a bad idea - nor can I fully faultYankovic for choosing "Macarthur Park" as the song to base hisparody on. But to his younger audience, the original song will beabout as foreign to them as a bar of soap was to Pig Pen in the"Peanuts" comic strip.Even if the actual parody had some realsubstance to it, Yankovic could have overcome this obstacle andcreated something memorable. If only this were the case; it reallydoesn't sound like Yankovic's heart is in this one.