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I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert last night. For those who are unfamiliar with his work, Weird Al is an American comedy/novelty singer, known best for his parodies of popular songs, although he also has a large body of non-parody original comedy songs. I assume that there is a large overlap between the users of this sub - at least those who grew up in America or Canada - and the kinds of people who would be fans of his work. And there definitely is a specific “type” of person to whom Weird Al has always appealed, which is what this post is about.
While the concert itself was a wonderful time - on this tour, Al is only performing his non-parody songs, without the frenetic costume changes and multimedia content for which his live shows used to be known, so this was definitely a “for the hardcore fans only” kind of experience - I was taken aback by something I experienced during the opening act. A stand-up comedian named Emo Philips opened the show. Philips’ onstage persona is an oddball autistic type, and his material is generally self-deprecating, ironic, and full of absurdism and clever wordplay - very much in the same vein as the style of humor that appeals to Weird Al’s fans. The first thing Philips said that raised an eyebrow for me was the statement, “I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who wasn’t bullied.” This got a relatively positive vocal response from the crowd. Then a bit later, he started talking about COVID. “How many people in here have a vaccination card?” (Wild applause and raised hands.) “Now, be honest, how many people here have a fake vaccination card?” (Some scattered hoots and raised hands.) “See, those are great, because you get to have the vaccination card and you can still die of COVID-19!” (Raucous laughter and cheers.) My brother and I, both right-wing COVID skeptics, shared an exasperated look, but the joke sure seemed to kill with this crowd. Later in the set, Philips made some more political comments and jokes, basically along the lines of how “you Californians shouldn’t let anyone make fun of you for being from this state, because they’re just all extremely jealous and resentful.” Now, I am well-aware that comedians play to their crowd, and that this stuff all could have just been naked pandering to the local sensibilities; maybe when he does a set in Tulsa, he tells mocking jokes about COVID paranoia and the scourge of Californian transplants. Still, I found it extremely odd that he would get political at a Weird Al concert - Al’s music is decidedly non-political and infamously inoffensive - and, moreover, that he predicted (correctly) that this type of material would do so well with this crowd in this context.
However, after the show, I reflected on this, and I concluded that it’s not surprising at all. I bet if you took a poll of the political affiliation of the audience at a Weird Al concert in any venue around the country, no matter how deep-red, the results would show overwhelmingly left-of-center. You would get a lot of open SJ progressives - I certainly saw a number of individuals in the crowd whose dress, demeanor, and mask-wearing marked them as MSNBC devotees - and almost certainly the farthest-right you would get would be “both parties are crooked, throw the bums out” apathetic centrism. The demographics of this crowd were overwhelmingly - quite possibly exclusively - white, middle-class, college-educated, and above-average IQ. Even above those reliable correlates of Blue Tribe affiliation, though, there was an additional set of selection effects that would skew the politics of this particular fandom.
Al’s oeuvre - not only his music, but also his cult-classic film UHF and his various other comedic endeavors - is clever, self-deprecating, absurdist, full of obscure cultural references, and, well, weird. His parodies generally take mass-culture popular works, strip them of their cultural context, and transfigure them into absurdist comedy songs totally disconnected from - and appealing to a very different audience from - the source material; many of Al’s parodies, especially his parodies of hip-hop songs, introduced the original songs to an audience who would otherwise have had no engagement with the pop-culture apparatus that generated them.
This sense of being outside of the mainstream, and of only engaging with it in an ironic, deconstructive, and alienated way is a key element of his appeal; this phenomenon is probably best exemplified by his song “White And Nerdy”, a parody of the rapper Chamillionaire’s hit “Ridin’”, which became an anthem for his socially-awkward (and overwhelmingly white) fan-base. I would wager that nearly everyone in that concert venue last night considers himself or herself “an outsider”. Not in any concrete demographic/“identity” sense - fre if any of these people qualify as a member of a recognized “marginalized community” - but in the sense of belonging to a fictive identity centered on personality traits and aesthetic preferences outside of, or in opposition to, “normie” culture.
Decades before the Marvel ascendancy catapulted “nerd culture” into the mainstream, Al cultivated a following among genuine weirdos and the socially maladroit. Even though they’re no longer truly “outcasts” in any important material sense, their internal self-image is still tied to their sense of being simultaneously victimized by and superior to the people who comprise the “normal” or “mainstream” culture. This affective orientation is a central component of leftism in an atavistic, visceral, pre-political sense. People with that orientation, of course, also tend to gravitate strongly toward leftism in the political sense.
There is also an additional component to Weird Al’s music - a slightly “darker” side, if you will - that tends toward poking fun at certain characteristics of what might be considered natural outgroups for the people to whom he appeals. I recall, years ago, reading a thinkpiece - I believe it was in Slate, but I don’t care enough to check - in which the author argued that Al’s song “Word Crimes” (a parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, in which Al assumes the character of a pedantic grammar-Nazi taking the listener to task for making various common grammar/spelling errors) reveals the elitism and “punching down” that underlies much of his work. His popular parody song “Fat” is another great example of this; it’s the type of casual mockery of fatness which would be deeply taboo in most mainstream-media circles today. There is certainly an element of mockery in some of Al’s work, and it all tends to target people who are low-IQ, low-class, and physically unappealing.
While it is indeed odd for a fandom full of self-proclaimed weirdos and outcasts to find such enjoyment in the mockery of other ostensibly subaltern identities, I don’t actually think there’s much of a contradiction there. While being fat, poor, uneducated, and lacking in middle-class cultural capotal are all markers of an “outsider”, they’re markers of a very different kind of outsider than the modal Weird Al fan. They’re the qualities that a middle-class nerd would associate, on a conscious or subconscious level, with the Red Tribe. Never mind what any empirical data say about which identity groups are most likely to be poor, fat, and stupid; in the mind of an urban white nerd, when you say “imagine a fat and stupid person” the mental image conjured is always a conservative rural white. And if you have built your identity around finding ways to be different from, and superior to, that class of people, you will find your prejudices well-reflected in the Democratic coalition. Is it actually true that a white jock is more likely to bully you than a member of the black underclass? Certainly not - unless you don’t know any underclass blacks, and the white jock is the only thing remotely like an enemy that you have any experience with. That doesn’t matter, though; what matters is whom you identify with, or more importantly whom you identify in opposition to, that’s determinative of your political tribe.
I often ask myself, “Why were you a leftist when you were younger. What about it appealed to you?” And the inescapably obvious answer is that it provided me with an outlet to express my sense of contempt for, and superiority to, regular run-of-the-mill non-nerdy white people. It was pure atavistic chauvinism that led me to identify with the “nerd culture” of the time - which had not yet become fully commercialized at that time - and with pseudo-“outsider” figures like Weird Al Yankovic. I was lamenting to my brother that if my political views were somehow made known to those in that room, many if not nearly all of them would want to see me hounded out of the room and banned from any venue they expect to attend in the future. I might be an outsider - in a much more important material sense than whatever these people still think marks them as outsiders - but I’m an outsider of the wrong kind, and there’s probably no longer any room for me in the coalition of the fake, self-indulgent, marginalized-in-their-own-heads community that comprised the people in that room last night.
My experience in youth politics tells me that there's nerds in basically all political movements, though the mainstream ones are probably less nerdy than the fringe ones - people from the right-wing populist youth org certainly gave often huge nerd vibes, as did many of the far-leftists I have the most experience with. Politics is a very good avenue for people who didn't have social acceptance in their youth and were left traumatized by it to seek for that social acceptance, often very directly in the form of votes. Likewise, it contains a huge amount of interesting and exciting data and potentials for speculation to geek over - you can even turn political data geekery into a career, like Nate Silver and David Shor have done.
It's also true that all political nerds like calling their political opponents nerds. The whole "soyjack" thing the extremely online right-wingers keep portraying the left as surely is a huge nerd stereotype in all the various ways.
I think this is just a specific instance of the more general statement, "nerds are low status." In any context where there's an identifiable "us" vs. "them," attacking your opponents' status is at least an obvious secondary objective, when it's not a straight win condition.
Even in the zeitgeist of the past several years, where "nerd stuff is cool," it's always struck me as not "nerds are cool," but "the stuff nerds built is cool; it's ours now."
I think your last point is spot on. The people who have flooded nerdy hobbies aren't actually nerds, it's just that normies finally realized those things are actually cool/fun. And to make matters worse, the nerds are now getting pushed out of their own spaces. Because it turns out the normies still don't want anything to do with nerds, so now that they're in our spaces they want us out.
It reminds me of the bittersweet ending of Happy Feet, the movie about a penguin who can’t sing, but compensates by tap-dancing.
At the climax, Mumble shows all the other penguins how to dance, and they all pick it up pretty quickly. Now he not only can’t sing, his only contribution to penguinkind is something no longer unique to him.
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My own experiences with school bullying (taunting to the point of tears, flinch-teasing, verbal bullying), though never physical, were free of politics. However, though it was the Popular Kids and Sports Kids I expected to tease me (because American entertainment made me expect it), it was actually the everyday kids, and sometimes my fellow nerds. The Cool Gamer and his buddies stole my box of 1.44” floppies twice.
American entertainment also told me to look for outsiders as my natural friend group. What I got was a series of bad friends who were outsiders for a reason: they were toxic. The Island of Misfit Toys is as fictional as Rudolph the Inspiringly Disabled Reindeer.
Conformity to tribal norms is valued across all three tribes; it’s just that uniqueness is a norm of the Grey Tribe: liking geeky and nerdy things, dressing in reference-laden clothing, taking being kept outside the Red Tribe’s inner circle as a badge of honor. As a kid with autism, I also heavily enjoyed Robin Williams’ weirdness, and his death hit me so hard because he was the first person to tell me it was okay, and even good, to be weird. Having attended Weird Al’s Poodle Hat, Running With Scissors, and Straight Outta Lynwood tours in Albuquerque, I felt as accepted as I am at sci-fi conventions and game stores.
As a Grey Tribe Christian from a Red Tribe church, I never consciously sought to feel superior, and when I notice it’s a motive of mine, I deconstruct it to not feel it. What I crave is acceptance of my whole self: my truth-seeking, logic-loving, nerdy self. And I find it at Weird Al concerts. I don’t want to analyze it away.
This can be true, but I do not like to push it all onto them. The people who are freaks and outcasts of society are that way partly because of their own choices and partly because society did it to them.
Some are genuine social retards in the sense that they simply cannot comprehend that their own behavior is bad -- while others use that excuse to continue their shitty behavior. Without seeing in their heads I cannot tell.
One was a lapsed Catholic with bipolar paranoia who evaluated literally every bad, unpleasant, or unfortunate event in his life, no matter how small, as if God were trying to judge him on something he should already have figured out.
One had Borderline Personality Disorder because he was a victim of childhood emotional and physical abuse by a Vietnam vet alcoholic father.
One was a person with autism and an iq of 86 whose perseverative interest is tirelessly manipulating and wheedling other people into giving her everything she wants.
One was a person with autism and an IQ of 145 who had been instrumental in hardening satellite microchips against cosmic rays, but whose wife had left him because of his biological anxiety attacks, which gave him psychological anxiety attacks too.
When I realized my only role in their lives was to be “the good friend,” the Linus to their Charlie Brown, I left each one in turn. I’m now in a recovery group for codependency, and doing much better, but they cost me the two decades I could have spent raising a family.
Public school failed me by not having a friendmaking curriculum. I aim to change that.
My life followed a remarkably similar trajectory, down to the amount of time lost and the conclusion that family was absolutely not going to happen. I wasn't even interested in trying. I have a family now anyway.
Where there is life, there is hope.
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Man, am I the only person left alive who went through the stereotypical jocks vs. nerds thing? I'm getting the feeling everyone is conspiring to convince me it was all a dream.
I'll give you that one. Even at the time, I remember thinking "you guys are cool, but howcome everyone here comes from a broken home, and seems to have a drug or alcohol problem?"
My experience with jocks (students who participated in the school's sports teams) is that they were perfectly nice, friendly people. Not as smart as me, but then again I wasn't as athletic as them.
Virtually all trouble (bullying, fighting, stealing, class disruption, etc.) was caused by underclass kids. And, yes, they were mostly black.
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My high school was in a military town. While we did have folks that might fit the definition of a jock, there was no dominant jock clique, and jocks were distributed pretty diffusely throughout many friend clusters. There was also a great deal of kids that had just arrived last year and would be leaving the next, and didn't have the time to develop strong cliqueish ties.
I witnessed one instance of physical bullying during all of high school, and as far as I know it didn't recur. The bully didn't get any positive or negative reinforcement, those of us around just kind of stared because this was strange and like something from a TV show.
I also can't recall any instances of serious nerd teasing, and being fairly nerdy, I think I would've been a target. My friends and I would tease each other about all kinds of things, but there wasn't anyone enforcing non-nerdy norms.
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More of my teasing was in elementary, where those groups hadn’t yet coalesced. Ironically, I was in track & field (100y dash + long jump) and T-ball at the time, so technically, I was jock as well as nerd.
In middle school, I had the distinct displeasure of being picked literally last every time we had captains picking teams in PE, so by that point, it was closer to true. But in high school, the jocks were in such a different social class, I barely even interacted with them.
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My school was small, in a deep red, rural area so probably different enough from the norm, but outside of a few very physically gifted kids, like the 300 lb guy who'd started on the offensive and defensive lines all his years, or the son of a former major league pitcher who wasn't too bright, the jocks were most of the advanced tracked kids, too.
Our math olympiad team included two very nerdy guys, one very nerdy girl (our schools only national merit finalist) the head cheerleader, a starter on the basketball team, and me who lettered in 2 sports.
I went to a relatively large suburban California high school, and noticed the same thing. Most of the popular kids were also jocks and most of the actually outstanding athletes were also honors students, and a fair number also acted in the school musicals. The fact they were likeable and good at everything and possessed the social confidence to effortlessly pass between groups was why they were popular.
The vast majority of the bullying I saw, experienced, and (shamefully) participated in was intra-clique. You were far more likely to be humiliated by the only-slightly-more-socially-adept-than-you nerd attempting to gain status within the small group of friends you played video games with than some chad in a letterman's jacket. They were too busy bullying the fat kid on the football team to pay attention to the nerds.
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At small rural schools, there's often not much else more interesting to do than athletics and AP classes, and classes are small enough for teachers to actually teach the material. Unless there's a "real" ambient culture of thinking learning is dumb and for poofters (seeing a black guy on TV occasionally doesn't count), so you don't see as much segregation of academic performance, athletics, and popularity.
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Weird Al is a master of parody (e.g. "Like a Surgeon," a parody of Madonna's "Like a Virgin"), but where he really shows off his talent is in his "non-parody" songs, because they fall into a related category: pastiche. Where a parody takes an original work and exchanges some of the words, keeping much of the structure but telling a different story, pastiche takes as its baseline another artist's style, and builds the rest of the variant work from the ground up. Done well, the pastiche sounds like a lost work of the original artist, but (often, in Weird Al's case) with a comic twist (e.g. "Mission Statement," an excellent send-up of Crosby, Stills, and Nash's body of work).
Parody is simple enough, assuming you're sufficiently clever with words, but pastiche--especially pastiche across many musical subgenres--is what marks out Weird Al as a generational musical talent. It doesn't hurt that he's much beloved by his fans as a genuinely sweet and humble person.
So the current tour has stuff like "Velvet Elvis" and "Dog Eat Dog"?
I noticed years ago that a lot of his non-parody songs ended up as "random stream of conciousness" lyrics. It felt like the constraints of parody forced him to work harder, with better results.
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Perhaps my first thought about many identity-left people when I've spoken to them has been "Why are the things they like and find entertaining so weird". It was like peering into a mindset and a type of culture that was entirely alien to me and that I still don't feel like I understand well on a base level, and this might be the first comment which I've seen acknowledge that the tastes of many people in the left are extremely distinctive and reek of an attempt at social signalling (to others, as well as to themselves).
A huge portion of their entertainment shares these ironic, deconstructive, absurdist characteristics you mentioned, sometimes with a very heavy dose of blink-and-you'll-miss-them references most of which exist primarily to confer insider/outsider status. The same goes for many of the memes they enjoy, which are these weird maximalist parodies of memes that kill my brain and seem almost exclusively like an assessment of whether one exists on a sufficiently high level of irony to understand the joke or not. Quite honestly, my level of disdain for a good amount of this kind of entertainment is off the charts, and I can't imagine anyone enjoying it or engaging with it on any real level. My disdain for it is not inherently because it's "nerdy" or exists outside of the mainstream - there are many strange cult pieces of entertainment I very much enjoy, probably more than the vast majority of mainstream entertainment - but rather because the types of entertainment I'm referring to don't seem to serve much of a purpose outside of denoting those who consume them as being an outsider. There doesn't seem to be much genuine love or vision behind the piece of work itself.
As you note this attitude also jives with the general viewpoints of the woke left, too. Their entire political worldview exists in opposition to any stable or traditional cultural structures, and continues to do so even after these cultural structures bend to them. They see themselves as being politically ascended in some sense, having "realised" that the overarching culture is intractably patriarchal and white supremacist, and thus they have to take it upon themselves to educate the unwashed masses about how everything they do perpetuates prejudice because of their superior understanding of social dynamics. Red-tribers especially are portrayed as being reactionaries, which is a very meaningless term in my opinion (since opposing change isn't inherently negative) but in the Blue Tribe the implication is that any pushback against the supposedly unequivocally positive changes they want to implement exists simply out of ignorance or fear.
The particularly notable thing to me is that much of these leftists' sense of being an outcast who looks down upon the normies can persist long after their viewpoint and sense of aesthetics become culturally entrenched. That type of self-aware, absurdist, deconstructed entertainment has become fairly widespread, but these creators and their audience do still try to portray themselves as being on the cultural fringe, the very same way wokesters think of themselves as being counter-culture revolutionaries despite their beliefs basically being the dominant view within the mainstream at this point. They would think of me as being part of the cultural hegemony and them as being outside of it despite the fact that the very opposite is true. They're perpetually able to look down upon the mainstream, even when they are the mainstream.
Could I ask you to name some names regarding what's popular with the woke?
In my last brush with the New Orthodox Woke during the start of the pandemic, the stuff being pushed was Infinite Jest, Waiting for Godot, Blue Velvet, and anything Southern if it was to do with a black person, ideally a black person who had been lynched. Also, they keep saying they love D&D, but then refuse to play because the setting contains racial prejudice.
I do think there are certain things which are pretty appealing in a widespread manner. However, when you see the types of entertainment that does have a huge skew where the fanbase appears to primarily be of one political tribe, it's very notable how distinct they are.
I wasn't going to bring up specific examples because I think any specific discussion will invite some very vehement disagreement by people who happen to enjoy anything I lambast, but here we go.
So I used to be pretty involved in music communities, and a genre with one of the most overtly woke fanbases I can think of is PC Music/hyperpop (the most notable of these artists being SOPHIE). Example here. For those who are unaware of what this is, it's basically an ironic/post-ironic caricature of pop music which exaggerates every single one of the criticised elements of pop. The aesthetic of their music and music videos and entire public image exemplifies sterility, artifice, almost sickly cuteness and has a very strong undertone of cynical parody to it - basically nothing about it sounds genuine, and I think that's the point. Another factor that also probably helps to attract leftists is that a huge proportion of the artists making PC Music are part of the rainbow community.
Other artists that have a bit of a strange outsider aesthetic, even those I like, also tend to have a primarily leftist fanbase. I can testify to being kicked out of an Autechre discord server after expressing wrongthink once during a political conversation (which I did not start). While I enjoy their music quite a lot myself I can also testify that a huge amount of their fans are extremely woke and also tend to be quite the pretentious type.
Then there's games. I'm currently watching a friend play through Disco Elysium (a game with a fairly strong leftist bent to it that kind of plays out like a postmodern novel) with a group of other left-leaning friends. It's got style in spades, and I don't doubt that care was put into this, but at the moment my perception of it is that it's a pretty slow and artsy game which I can't help but regard as being quite difficult to like. It comes off as a bit of an unfocused mix of political satire, philosophical musings and absurdist nonsense all of which don't really blend into the murder-mystery narrative well. My opinions might change later, but I'm not too optimistic about that.
For film, I’ll just refer to a huge portion of A24’s output. Their films resonate with that same audience, the type who like artistic slow burns.
There are more I could include, but these are the first few examples that come to mind. And it's not even that they're always bad, either. It's just that in most of these cases, the people who consume them are often the type who tend to like distinguishing themselves from the normie crowd, and who see themselves as being part of a distinct, unique, subversive subculture that is new and revolutionary, one which is simultaneously aesthetically superior to and yet ignored by the normies. There's a certain amount of elitism that comes with the territory which doesn't seem to have been nearly as prominent in OG nerd culture.
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I like weird stuff, but I don't consider myself that far to the left. I guess political lean could proably be weakly predicted by tolerance for weirdness in media (I say weakly because the more esoteric parts of the right (such as the Dissident Right) seem to be...well, rather strange).
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So, I do want to make it abundantly clear that I am a genuinely passionate decades-long fan of Weird Al’s work, and if you’re accusing him specifically of lacking a sense of love and vision, I think that accusation is baseless. I’m intimately familiar with the world of pretentious, artificial status-signaling art you’re referring to, but I cannot stress enough that Weird Al’s work, like his life as a whole, has always been characterized by a palpable sense of joy and authenticity. The people in that room last night were, overwhelmingly, not there to impress anybody or signal status. Al’s work is far too lowbrow and affable to appeal to genuinely pretentious “artsy-fartsy” people, and being a Weird Al fan carries no cultural caché. He’s basically only respected by a) comedians, who largely revere him both for being a legendarily nice and wholesome human being, and b) Gen X and millennial white nerds who wouldn’t enjoy an arthouse film or post-modern novel any more than you would.
Your points as a whole are astute and absolutely well-taken, but I cherish Weird Al too much to let anything I’ve said give the false impression that he himself is a sneering progressive MAGA-hater. I’m confident that his personal politics are standard-issue Gen X California liberalism, but he’s certainly not shoving that down anybody’s throat, and he happily plays to audiences in Red states and Blue. I’m just saying that his work carries a set of implicit themes that naturally appeal to a subset of the population to whom culturally-left politics also appeal, whether or not he has any conscious intent for that to happen.
I did pick up on that and am not accusing Weird Al specifically of anything (I wouldn't be able to, anyway, since I am not familiar with him or his content whatsoever). For my part, I'd also like to clarify that there's content I enjoy myself that shares some of the deconstructive/absurdist characteristics which appeal to the cultural left, but the ones that appeal to me are those that seem to have more substance and where the creator has something to say outside of dead-eyed detachment. It's the stuff that seems entirely hollow and alienated that I have a serious disdain for and exemplifies all the worst things about that kind of aesthetic.
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To be fair, Phillips certainly panders to the crowd. In Calgary, he apologized to us for Californians getting lost on the way to Texas and ending up in Calgary.
I love how half a continent is united in their dislike of Californians who move to their area.
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This is a brilliant analysis. But why does this make you right wing now? Is it literally just the trope about being left when young and right when old?
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