Saturday, February 21, 2009

WEIRD AL IS SOMETIMES FUNNIER THAN YOU: Bob (2003)



From Wikipedia...

"Bob" is a song and video by "Weird Al" Yankovic, from his 2003 album Poodle Hat, made up entirely of palindromes. The palindromes are arranged in rhyming verses such as the following:

Madam, I'm Adam
Too hot to hoot
No lemons no melon
Too bad I hid a boot
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Warsaw was raw
Was it a car or a cat I saw?

"Bob" is a "style parody", performed in a style resembling that of Bob Dylan. The music resembles many of Dylan's twelve bar blues songs (particularly Bob Dylan's "115th Dream" and "Subterranean Homesick Blues"); each verse includes ten bars of singing followed by two instrumental bars, with no chorus. The title of the song, "Bob," is also a palindrome.


The song's video is a parody of Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" segment of the film Dont Look Back. In the video, Yankovic stands in an alleyway holding cards with the palindromic lyrics, and also one saying "(Harmonica solo)" (an allusion to the video for the INXS track "Mediate", itself a homage to "Subterranean Homesick Blues", in which the last cue card reads "Sax Solo"), and at the end holds one saying "???" (Dylan's last card in the original video was "What?").The film uses a grayscale color scheme. Yankovic wears a wig to look like Bob Dylan, and the only other characters are two men in the background without any dialogue. These men are played by band drummer Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz and Yankovic's manager Jay Levey (in Dylan's original, one of the two men in the background is poet Allen Ginsberg).

"Bob" is the only song on the Poodle Hat album with a video. After Eminem denied Yankovic permission to parody his song "Lose Yourself" with a video for "Couch Potato", the "Bob" music video was filmed for an Al TV special that aired on VH-1 ten days later.



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