"Word
Crimes" by Al Yankovic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
I imagine that most English teachers, descriptivists and prescriptivists alike,
would love this song and video. (They must make sure not to neglect watching
the latter, though, lest they miss too much of the cleverness.) I
used to be an English teacher myself, and then I retired and realized I no
longer had to pretend that I understood English or teaching, a minor
revelation compared to the one that told me how easy it was to admit to my
longstanding cluelessness. Pensions are wonderful financial products.
Every old person deserves a good one.
What I don't get is why Al Yankovic is "weird." True, he has very
long, very curly hair, but so do many (well, some) other men. But he also has a
wonderful talent for satire, oafish comedy, verbal ingenuity, and music, four
things I happen to love. And although he also understands how stupid some sectors of the zeitgeist
are, he is never cruel or demeaning. My very intelligent youngest
daughter doesn't care for him, but that's only because she's young (she'll come
around). In other words, Mr. Yankovic is a complete, not weird adult
-- not nohow, not no way. And in this song, his smarts and his singing talent
are on full, giddy, unweird display. If there's a song video richer in jokes (both visual and verbal, and wonderfully nonstop), can someone please direct me to it? I enjoyed this beautiful thing several times before I
remembered it was a parody, after which I had to find out which song it was
parodying. I had no idea what that song might be (because I'm no longer young
and my brain has a thicker filter between itself and its surroundings). After
some routine Internet research, I was not surprised, then, that I had never heard
of (or heard) that song -- something called "Blurred Lines" by
someone named Robin Thicke, whom I had heard of, but only in the way
you hear of famous people getting married or divorced or arrested for drunk
driving or murder or sexual assault. My online self then discovered that
"Blurred Lines" had been the subject of some controversy about its
being "rapey," which it definitely was (if my understanding of the
adjective is accurate). What a waste, because it was also so musically clever
and addictively danceable.
But holy shit (man, thy name is misogyny), Robin Thicke and all your dopey pals: that video is really rapey. But now, thanks to unweird Al Yankovic, I never have
to hear or watch it again because I get to hear its deep, lovely grooves and
riffs serving an ingenious hilarity about English grammar and usage instead of some ugly sexual vibe. When I was
a teacher of English grammar and usage, I could've used it -- it might have
helped me decide to retire from my counterfeit career earlier. (I was a fraud,
true enough, but long ago, before I knew it, I had children to support, and I
didn't know how to do anything else.)
For its just-under-four-minutes, the song is unrelentingly funny and
ass-bouncing, which is usually good enough for me, but when you consider that
unweird Al Yankovic is making fun of one kind of stupidity (hating women)
by ignoring it and then making fun of another kind of stupidity (linguistic
elitism), you get to laugh at two kinds of bullies, two kinds of dopes, two
kinds of assholes.
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