Ladies and gentlemen, Weird Al Yankovic is at it again. You've probably heard of the world's most famous song parodist unless you were raised by a pack of hyenas or something, but it may surprise you to find out that he's "still around". Yep, he never went anywhere. The once curly-haired, Hawaiian-shirt wearing goofball who hit it big with novelty spoofs of some of America's most popular songs may not be as visible on multiple forms of media as he was back in the days when he tried his hand at movie-making and a short-lived TV show. And maybe some of you have grown accustomed to his shtick since the days when we first noticed him for a well-timed riff on Michael Jackson or Madonna, and think that he has no new jokes to tell. I'd be lying if I said that the humor had "matured" in any way since... well, since ever. But he still makes me laugh. I still love hearing what clever rhymes and zany pop culture phenomena get matched up to popular songs that I either love or hate. And despite how Al's "original" material often gets viewed as his lesser, skippable stuff, I've enjoyed a good deal of his work in that department, too. So I always look forward to seeing what he's up to.

Al's first album since the slightly disappointing Poodle Hat was just released this week, and in a strange move, it spoofs an album title from several years back without actually parodying the artist who he got it from. Straight Outta Lynwood, which pays respects to Yankovic's Southern California hometown and pokes fun at N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton, might just be the most consistently funny set I've heard from him yet. As expected given the state of modern music, hip-hop and urban music dominate the songs that he chooses to rip on this time around (and for the first time, he's covering several that I had never even heard of prior to hearing his version, though I'm not exactly up on the old Top 40 these days), but some well-timed rock and pop parodies slip in as well. The "originals" on this album turn out to be fairly solid "style parodies" for the most part, paying respects to influences both vintage and contemporary. There's only one such song that I can't really get into this time. The three forms of humor that I appreciate least - bathroom, gross-out, and dark humor - appear in smaller quantities here, making a little more room for the clever rhymes, self-deprecating declarations of geekiness, and even occasional sly social commentary that make me enjoy Weird Al. (What? Social commentary on a Weird Al album? Don't take it too seriously. It's mostly on the level of, "Wow, we really are that dumb sometimes.") It won't seem like a radical change to most people, and it isn't, so it won't really win a lot of new fans. But he's doing what he does best after a needed course correction when too much of his previous album went south.

Of course, as we all know from the Coolio and Eminem debacles of years past (respectively, the record label gave the OK for a parody even when the artist didn't, and the artist OK'ed a song parody but forbade Al to make a music video in the hopes of protecting his "image", while turning around and mercilessly thrashing the image of another musical artist in one of his own videos), Weird Al's endeavors to lampoon popular music haven't been without their legal struggles. This time around, said struggle actually prevented the parody that was to be Lynwood's lead single from even appearing on the album. The artist in question, James Blunt, actually gave Weird Al the go-ahead to do a send-up of his ubiquitous "You're Beautiful", so Al went through with it, but then Blunt's record label gave him the old cease-and-desist. Not wanting to make a label war out of it, Al decided to leave the song off of the album, but make it a free download. I'll still discuss the song in this review, since it should rightfully be on the album, but do be aware that it isn't actually there.

Frustrating legal red tape aside, Lynwood is still a winner. There are two, maybe three tracks that I'll skip when not in the mood, but it's funny nearly from end to end, and I think the majority of its songs hold a good deal of replay value (which is rare for novelty or comedy-oriented musical acts) simply because the music is well-played and fun to listen to. Maybe I'm just a dork; your mileage may vary. But I'll make my case as I go through the album song by song.

White and Nerdy
Shopping online for deals on some writable media
I edit Wikipedia
I memorized Holy Grail really well
I can recite it right now and have you ROTFLOL...
I have no idea who rapper Chamillionaire is, nor did I know his song "Ridin'" was a hit until I found out Weird Al would be parodying it, but I do know that Chamillionaire liked this parody enough to feature it on his MySpace. According to Wikipedia (hey, I've just mentioned two websites that were name-dropped in the song!), the original song is about the cops doing racial profiling or something, so I guess it's fitting that the parody is about the "gangstas" rejecting Weird Al's wish to be a member of their ranks because he's too "white and nerdy". Of course, there'd be no comedy here if the stereotype weren't totally true, and while we've heard the nerd shtick (particularly the Star Trek jokes) from Al a million times, it's the way that all of the geek culture references fly by at warp speed that makes this one a winner. The man's got an uncanny ability to follow the flow of a rap song even when it's very quick and tongue-twisting, and to be able to do this and be funny at the same time is no small task. It's a hilarious song with a highly amusing video to boot, and the only thing I can really complain about is its short length, which can't be helped since that's apparently how the original went, too.

Pancreas
My spleen just doesn't matter
Don't really care about my bladder
But I don't leave home without my pancreas...
This "original" song, a stylistic homage to Brian Wilson (and also They Might Be Giants, according to a friend of mine) isn't as funny as some of the originals that show up later, but at least if Weird Al's gonna sing about bodily functions, they don't directly relate to eating and going to the bathroom this time around. He's simply singing an ode to an oft-under appreciated organ, which at first closely imitates the Beach Boys's "God Only Knows", and the morphs into several sections of highly layered Wilson-esque silliness. The lyrics aren't all that funny, which leaves the fact that all of this is about the pancreas to be the main source of the humor, but he's definitely done a swell job with the arrangement, even if this one proves to be a bit of a speed bump which would probably play better in the album's back half.

Canadian Idiot
Sure, they got their national health care
Cheaper meds, low crime rates, and clean air
Then again, well, they got Celine Dion...
Aw yeah! Weird Al picks a great rockin' song to do his perverse bidding with, this one of course being Green Day's "American Idiot". Nothing like taking a protest song about the gullibility of the American people and the trigger-happiness of the government, and turning it around into a silly farce that mocks, and proposes that we attack, our northern neighbors. As South Park proved, they're a fun target to pick on for completely uncalled-for reasons - some Canadians may be offended, but the song is just as much a sideswipe at our own society as it slyly points out some of the things that they do better, disguising them as things to be fun of (such as "They leave the house without packin' heat, never even bring their guns to the mall.") The instrumentation and production are a little tinnier than Green Day's version (that whole album is pure ear candy to my ears), but it's not enough to majorly detract from the song. This one's another bona fide winner.

I'll Sue Ya
I sued Coca-Cola, yo
'Cause I put my finger down in a bottle
And it got stuck!
I sued Delta Airlines
'Cause they sold me a ticket to New Jersey
I went there, and it sucked!
Supposedly, this one's a "style parody" based on the protest-oriented rap-rock of Rage Against the Machine. The music doesn't sound anywhere near formidable enough for that comparison to really fly with me, so I'm gonna compare it to someone more lightweight and immature, such as Limp Bizkit. That style works well for a song which basically brags about doing stupid stuff and then suing various people and companies because it's really all their fault. Some of the things Weird Al comes up with are pretty dumb, but others slyly mock some real-life frivolous lawsuits that have caused us all to stop and wonder whether people could really be that stupid and unable to accept the consequences of their own actions (suing McDonalds for not warning you that coffee is hot, for example, which Al mocks by saying he spilled a Frappucino in his lap, "And brrrrrr, it was cold!") He even gets a funny jab in at Ben Affleck, who is generally a great target for merciless insults. The drawback here is that the vocals can get rather grating due to his attempt to mimic the impish machismo of several rap/rock vocalists, and the chorus and bridge are fairly repetitive, which exhausts the best of the jokes by the time the song is half over.

Polkarama!
The album's requisite ploka - which is the track that appears on every album where Al strings together snippets of lyrics from various radio hits of the past three or four years into an accordion-laced, dorky dance number - doesn't have a theme to it like "The Angry White Boy Polka" did on the last album, and thus far, it's probably the polka I've enjoyed the last, since I recognize the fewest songs. Again, that's probably due to the dominance of rap and R&B in the Top 40 these days, but whatever, if he parodied a bunch of indie rock, fewer people would really get the joke. Among the lampooned artists that I recognize here are Coldplay (including a humorous accordion riff on "Speed of Sound"), Modest Mouse, The Killers, and Kanye West. (Oh, and there's "The Chicken Dance", which starts the whole thing off. That gave me flashbacks to a DJ at our wedding who failed to follow our instructions on what not to play... but anyway.) A few of the songs are juxtaposed in funny ways, and of course there's the occasional lyric that sounds a bit naughty, making the juxtaposition with such a goofy style of music all the more amusing, but for the most part, it all seems a bit random.

Virus Alert
It will translate your documents into Swahili
Make your TV record "Gigli"
Neuter your pets, and give your laundry static cling...
Ever get those Emails telling you that there's a nasty virus coming your way and you'd better delete the offending message post haste? OK, now, have you ever gotten a funny forward lampooning these virus warnings and telling you all sorts of ridiculous, implausible things will be done by this virus to you and your loved ones? This song basically takes all of that and puts it into song form, using the cheesy attempts of 80's-style "new wave" music to sound futuristic. It's a comedic match made in heaven, as a rubbery beat gets your morning workout going, and Weird Al's vocals follow the quick, faux-dramatic piano lines, and a little guitar fanfare pops out every now and then just to accentuate the urgency of the matter. (You gotta love that he mentions your TV recording Gigli, as if that's some sort of horrific malady. Man, that's two times that he's insulted both Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez within the last few albums... which is totally called for!) As with most of Weird Al's songs, this one is a "list" of various funny and unrealistic situations, but the formula provides laughs from top to bottom, so I ain't complaining. (I wish I could pinpoint the exact artist being spoofed here... I want to say Devo, but that can't be it, since he already did that with "Dare to Be Stupid". It's somewhere in that ballpark, though.)

Confessions Part 3
I borrowed your Chapstick from you without asking
I tried out your nose hair trimmer too
And by the way, your diamond ring is cubic zirconium
I killed your goldfish accidentally, just replaced it with another one...
What is it with R&B singers and their belief that their accounts of sordid romantic affairs need sequels? (Oh sure, like the over-the-top prog rockers I listen to never write bloated and unnecessary trilogies and sagas of other indeterminate lengths.) Weird Al decides to beat Usher to the punch here, by offering us a sequel to his "Confessions Part 2", which basically further gives a girl reasons to hate him. Confessing to an affair wasn't enough, now he's got to smoothly croon about various disorderly bad habits and other things that are really T.M.I. There'sa teeny bit of gross-out humro here, but for the most part, I find it pretty funny. He's right in observing that this whole "Lay it on the line, warts and all" approach to songwriting doesn't exactly constitute a believable apology. And the very existence of sequels to such songs is mocked when he comments that he's gonna need at least a Part 4 to finish up his list.

Weasel Stomping Day
All the little girls and boys
Love that wonderful crunching noise
You'll know what this day's about
When you stomp a weasel's guts right out...
This might be the one track on the record that is truly done in poor taste. Thankfully, it's short, mixing the zany brevity of songs like "The Weird Al Show" and "Harvey the Wonder Hamster", and combining that with a cheery holiday choir to commemorate a fictional holiday apparently celebrated in the deepest, most melanin-deficient reaches of northern Europe, where men, women, and children of all ages stomp on weasels. No, really, that's the whole joke. It's about one step away from dead baby jokes on the scale of poor taste, but I do find the choral style to be amusing, and he gets in one wry comment near the end - "It's tradition, that makes it okay!" I'd skip this one on most days, but at least I get that one chuckle.

Close But No Cigar
And she was everything I've dreamed of
She moved right up to #1 on my list
And did I mention she's a world famous billionare
Bikini supermodel astrophysicist?
Now here's a left-field surprise. I've heard Al pay tribute to classic pop and rock artists, and spoof passing musical fads in his style parodies, but I really never knew he was such a big fan of Cake. The ironic, post-everything frat rock band best known for the mid-90's hit "The Distance" gets a pretty good impersonation here as Weird Al goes off on a bunch of funny details about girls he met who were out of this world, except for some miniscule nitpick that caused him to dump each one on the spot. Taken on its own, it's only marginally funny (though I do like the references to horseshoes, hand grenades, and government work as things where it's OK to just be "close" and not get it exactly right), but the musical doppelganger-ing is what really makes it a blast. The funky bass line, the background shouts, that infernal off-key trumpet, and whatever that rattlesnake sound is that always shows up in Cake sounds are trotted out in full force here, and I don't know how many casual listeners will get it, but it's as least as amusing as Weird Al's take on the Mighty Mighty Bosstones when he did "Your Horoscope for Today" a few years back. (Though I should note that he doesn't quite have John McCrea's deadpan vocals down, but that's forgivable.)

Do I Creep You Out?
I like to feel the warm spot on your chair
Sometimes I drool, and usually I stare
My precious one
I saved that gum that you threw in the garbage...
I'm kind of "eh" about this one, since I don't know the original song, and either that or some really good lyrics are required to really make a Weird Al song worth it for me. If you're into American Idol, then you're probably familiar with the song "Do I Make You Proud?", which apparently helped to make Taylor Hicks a star. I can't stand the show, personally, but part of me is proud of Taylor for having such a non-standard image compared to the mindless pop star factory that the show ends up being, and actually winning over enough fans to trump the competition on the show's fifth season. For my money, though, this brief power ballad - which Weird Al turns into the icky ramblings of an obsessed stalker - isn't really the right vehicle to showcase Taylor's "soulful" style, so those who never watched American Idol aren't going to really recognize who Al is making fun of here, since he only gets into the "grit" of it later in the song. The music is just kind of bland, and while I definitely agree that Ameircan Idol is a cultural trend that deserved having a joke fired at it, the joke isn't that funny in the end.

Trapped in the Drive-Thru
"You can have unlimited refills for just a quarter more"
I say, "Great, except we're in the drive-thru!
So what would I want that for?"
Oh come on, you knew this was coming. There are few men in the modern music business with such delusions of grandeur that they deserve a thorough butt-kicking as much as R. Kelly does. His seemingly never-ending soap-set-to-music known as "Trapped in the Closet" likely had humorists nationwide scrambling to see who could parody it the fastest. So Weird Al might be a bit late on this one, but it's fitting that he'd turn it into the album's requisite long, rambling, and ultimately pointless "marathon" track (the successor to "Genius in France" and the uncanny fan favorite "Albuquerque"). Since the music's a slow R&B ballad and Weird Al's attempt to emulate Kelly's vocals causes him to sound really nasal and abrasive at times, ten minutes of this can be tough going, even if a lot of the pointless detours and non-sequiturs in the plot of the song are kind of amusing. The story is basically that he and his wife having nothing in their fridge to eat, so they decide at the last minute to hit up the drive-thru, which turns out to be a major ordeal. It has its moments, but like the really long songs for past albums, I can't see the humor really sticking past two or three listens. This is another one that I'll probably almost always get the urge to skip.

Don't Download This Song
Oh, you don't wanna mess with the RI-double-A
They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R
It doesn't matter if you're a grandma, or a 7-year-old girl
They'll treat you like the evil, hard-bitten, criminal scum you are...
When reviewing Poodle Hat, I noted that online file sharing had become a big deal since the release of Running with Scissors, and while that's a practice I normally support, I did worry that some people might use such services to hear Weird Al's songs just once, and never buy the album, so I said exactly this in Al's defense: "If you really are a fan of Weird Al's stuff and you know you're gonna keep it around to listen to again and again, then please show your support and buy the album. Otherwise he might just have to write a song about you, set to the tune of one of your favorite songs, on the next disc, if he ever gets around to recording one at all." Well, it was only a matter of time, and this one might not be set to the tune of any song in particular, but it does mimic multi-artist "charity" songs such as "We Are the World", as Weird Al satirically pleads with us to not put ourselves on that slippery slope by downloading mp3's from the Internet. (Just so you know he's kidding, you can legally download this one for free at www.dontdownloadthissong.com.) What seems to be an appeal on behalf of mega-millionaire artists with bloated pockets really seems to be a sideswipe at the RIAA for carrying out some fairly ridiculous lawsuits against unlikely perpetrators, and you just have to love how he threatens you with going to jail and even burning in hell to such an uplifting tune. There's an amusing animated video for this one on the song's website, as I've heard there will be for pretty much all of the originals on this album, which is a first for Weird Al. It's a great way to finish off an album that falls just short of being comic genius.

You're Pitiful
Your homemade Star Trek Uniform
Really ain't impressin' me
You're sufferin' from delusions of adequacy...
As I said earlier, this song isn't on the album for legal reasons, but I wanted to talk about it since I'm glad that somebody finally gave this utterly inane excuse for a love song by James Blunt the pimp-slapping it deserved. (Seriously, it makes me sad for the state of our society when I think about how much women who don't pay any attention to the lyrics swoon over this song just because the chorus says a girl is beautiful. Come on, it's the biggest stalker song since The Police came up with "Every Breath You Take", except that was actually an interesting song that had something other than total cliches in it!) Alright, so Weird Al's version isn't really all that hilarious, stooping mostly to simple insults directed at a friend who is a total loser instead of finding something more witty to say. The funniest thing here is probably when Weird Al makes fun of the beginning of the song, where Blunt sings the first line and then stops and waits and starts over. It's a good musical imitation of the original (I actually wouldn't be surprised if Weird Al had substituted a ukulele for the high-strung acoustic guitar, but I can't tell the difference), but in general I think it's harder to make ballads as laugh-out-loud hilarious as it is with rockers and rap songs. Oh well, nice try. It's free, so I ain't complaining.

I guess everyone has a different sense of humor, and those who aren't as into parodies/spoofs of pop culture trends, and smarmy puns and things like that might find Weird Al to be a bit too childish for their tastes. But for what it's worth, I still chuckle at most of the tracks on Running with Scissors a good seven years later, and I think this one'll have a lot of replay value for me long after the fads of its time that Weird Al has mocked here have faded from public awareness. That's the good thing about Weird Al's better songs - a lot of them outlive their cultural context and remains funny years down the line, probably because he stays out of the realm of pointed commentary on up-to-the-minute events (which is hard to do when you only get an album out every three to four years anyway). Straight Outta Lynwood might not win its way straight into most people's CD players, but at least give "White and Nerdy" and "Don't Download This Song" a try (since those can be readily heard for free) before you write Weird Al off as nothing but a novelty act.

Oh, and if you did download the album, don't feel bad, you probably won't really get sued. That's what I did. I'll be buying it shortly.

ALBUM WORTH:
White and Nerdy $2
Pancreas $.50
Canadian Idiot $2
I'll Sue Ya $1
Polkarama1 $1
Virus Alert $1.50
Confessions Part 3$1.50
Weasel Stomping Day $0
Close But No Cigar $1.50
Do I Creep You Out? $0
Trapped in the Drive-Thru $.50
Don't Download This Song $1.50
TOTAL: $13
(If "You're Pitiful" had been included, this amount would increase by $1 to a total of $14.)

Website: http://www.weirdal.com

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Hanging With Friends