Songoftheday 5/10/18 - It's so unintelligible I just can't get it through my skull, It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss with all these marbles in my mouth...
from the album Off The Deep End (1992)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #35 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 2
Today's song of the day comes from musical parody king "Weird Al" Yankovic, who had scored a big pop hit in the spring of 1984 with his take-off on Michael Jackson's "Beat It", "Eat It". The album it came from, In 3-D, sold over a million copies, as did his follow-up the next year, Dare To Be Stupid, whose lead single "Like A Surgeon" (a play on Madonna's "Like A Virgin") nearly made the top-40 at #47. Then came Polka Party!, which didn't do as well (#177 on the albums chart), but then returning to Michael Jackson with his "Fat" parody, Yankovic again made it back to the top-40 on the albums chart with another million seller in Even Worse. Climbing on that momentum, Al filmed his movie UHF, which was really meant to sell him to mainstream America, but the movie (and related album) tanked.
After a three-year break from studio recording, Yankovic re-emerged with a single that riffed off the new rock scene, taking Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and playing off the fact that it was so hard to tell the lyrics (in fact, the band put the lyrics of it on their single for "Lithium" since everyone needed it). The result, "Smells Like Nirvana", was such a ringer for the classic that people responded to, with even rock radio stations playing the single. As for the music video, he did a nearly perfect shot-by-shot redo, though including farm animals and Dick Van Patten in the mix...
"Smells Like Nirvana" became Yankovic's second top-40 pop hit in America in May of 1992. The song also climbed to #35 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, the record reached #4 in New Zealand, #24 in Australia, and #38 in Sweden. It was also a minor hit in Canada (#48) and the UK (#58). A second single from Off The Deep End, an original called "You Don't Love Me Anymore", landed him at #26 in Canada. The album would earn Al another Grammy nomination, this time for Best Comedy Album, losing to PDQ Bach's classical comedy.
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Here's Al rockin' it out on the Arsenio Hall show...
Up tomorrow: Canadian diva-in-the-making reprises a Bond song.
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