Weird Al: The Book [Hardcover]

Nathan Rabin (Author), Al Yankovic (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 25, 2012

The undisputed king of pop-culture parody, “Weird Al” Yankovic has sold more comedy recordings than any other artist in history, receiving three Grammy Awards (and 14 nominations) in the process. The man behind classics such as “Eat It,” “Amish Paradise,” and “White & Nerdy” performed in more than 100 cities throughout North America, Europe, and Australia in support of his latest (and, to date, highest-charting) album, Alpocalypse. At last the time has come for a comprehensive illustrated tribute to this icon of the American humor landscape. Covering more than three decades of hilarious songs, videos, concert performances, and his life story in words and pictures, and featuring an introduction, lists, tweets, and photo captions from Yankovic himself, Weird Al: The Book is the ultimate companion piece to an extraordinary career.

Praise for Weird Al: The Book:

“Part biography and part pop culture museum, Weird Al: The Book is a treat.… A gorgeous look at Yankovic’s life.”

—Huffington Post

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Based in Chicago, Illinois, Nathan Rabin is a film and music critic and the head writer for The Onion’s A.V. Club. Al Yankovic lives with his wife and daughter in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Abrams Image; 1 edition (September 25, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1419704354
• ISBN-13: 978-1419704352
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 1 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #52,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #78 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > History & Criticism
  • #96 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Parodies

More About the Author

I am a very old young man with a brutally funny, unwisely candid memoir to pimp and a message to spread throughout the world. That message: buy my book. Seriously. It's an awesome book and if it doesn't sell I'll have to go back to being a hobo.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but could be better September 30, 2012

By GLG

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Weird Al has had a very long and interesting career, longer than 95% of the people he's parodied over the years, so it only stands to reason that he's have a fairly interesting story to tell. This book isn't that, and if you buy this on a whim hoping to find that, then don't bother. To begin you'll need to separate the books into two parts, the written portion, and the visual portion. The visual portion is top notch, featuring many rare and previously unseen photos spanning Al's career over four decades. The written content however is where this book falls flat. It reads more like a snapshot or synopsis of his career, something you'd expect to see on VH1 or E!, not in a book. It's almost written like a Wikipedia entry, short on details, and heavy on extended metaphors and descriptive paragraphs that add nothing to the book, and only serve to pad out the pages. Now granted, I won't say I didn't learn anything from reading this book, even as a long time Al fan there is a lot of new information here, but there is also a lot that is rehashed. It almost seems as though the written portion was cobbled together from common knowledge, publicly available resources, and maybe a handful of notes provided by Al. This is disappointing, because I know someone who's had as long and distinguished a career as Al has must have more stories to share, more insight to give, and a better and more personal story to tell. Unfortunately Al is blunt about the fact that he has no interest at all in writing an autobiography, so this book may be the closest thing we ever get. So for what it is it's fine, very good even, but I can't help but wonder what could have been.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Thanks, Dr. Demento! September 27, 2012

By Donovan X

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Al did us all a favor by hiring Nathan Rabin to "do the heavy lifting" and write the bulk of this book. The general prose is a well done narrative of the the Weird Al rise to fame. Despite his apt writing ability, that alone would have made for yet another so,so celebrity biography worthy of 3 stars. Al embellishes heavily with wit and, well, weirdness that fans and by-standers can both appreciate; in captions to the many great pictures or little blurbs placed randomly throughout. His classic humor coupled with the many, many great pictures gets 5 stars from this long time fan. I also appreciate his obvious gratitude to the godfather of "weird" music, Dr. Demento. So a rating of 4 stars overall. If you just want a quick Al biography, look it up on the web. If you want great Weird Al photos and humor, definitely consider this book.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars It's What's Not in a Book You'd Expect to be When it's Called Weird Al the Book That Lets it Down November 23, 2012

By James N Simpson

Format:Hardcover

Weird Al The Book, unfortunately probably will appeal more to those who are not huge "Weird Al" fans and maybe who just appreciated his music from time to time who want something interesting to read. For huge fans who have bought everything he ever released, and even a t-shirt or two, gone to his concerts and followed him on his website weirdaldotcom and more recently as fans on various social media, there's really not much new here. In fact the book reads as if Nathan Rabin (this isn't an autobiography, Weird Al tells us in the introduction he never has had any interest in writing one), has just surfed a lot of websites, and researched printed articles from over the years and compiled that information. It doesn't seem as if he had too many in depth interviews with the man himself. Al, and to a large extent, his drummer Jon Schwartz, have obviously been involved in adding a lot of photographic imagery, fan art, twitter captions, scanned letters as well as little I'll call them word bites, by Al every now and then such as Little Known Facts About Me or Last Will and Testament, that are very funny. But the body of the book itself just for the most part reads like a career achievement commentary, an albumography if you will, with the odd interruption when Al's career took another path for a while such as making the movie UHF, Weird Al show and the like, although we don't go into much depth at all with those and there's no behind the scenes stuff at all. But even if we except Weird Al The Book as simply that, there's gaping holes, for example Rabin never mentions Al's children's audiobook project with Wendy Carlos (there's a picture of it in the Discography at the back), even though it was nominated for a Grammy.... That being a totally different album to his usual style would have been interesting to read why he did that, what challenges doing that was like, is there a reason he never did another of these again?

It's really the funny captions and stuff provided by Al and Bermuda (Jon Schwartz) that lifts this book to a higher entertainment level and gives it any of a worth owning quality. Al tells us in his word bites interesting advice or inside looks at his life like "Sometimes when I'm at home and nobody else is around, I like to dress up in men's clothing." Or "You can use lemon juice to get the goat's blood out of the drapes." Although whoever in the publishing company put this book together did it in a very annoying way. If you're reading Rabin's text (which will take you a couple of hours to read from page one to the end) often it ends midway through a sentence on one page, then you've got to turn past a number of photos, song lyric pages and other pages before you read the end of that sentence. Surely this book could have been formatted better, the book probably would have only ended up being a page or two longer if the text ended a paragraph earlier on each page when the last complete sentence did. Sometimes Rabin will talk about something, like the cover art of The Food Album with Al's body being picked dry by a large monster devouring him being a protest by Al at the way Scotti Bros was treating his career with the constant release of best of albums. But then we don't see an image of that album on the next pages or even in the book at all. Ruben's text sort of reads like he is writing for a cable music channel lets look at the career of this artist documentary, and that he's just going to include enough content to cover the major songs, major albums, and stages of Al's career but can only have enough stuff to fit into an hour long broadcast less any time for commercials. Ruben never even mentions stuff like Weird Al was the voice of Wreckgar a transformer who transformed into a garbage truck and other not commonly known aspects of his career, let alone tells us how they came about or what doing those was like for Al.

Apart from an interesting look into Al's life as a child, then teen years trying to get his stuff broadcast on the Dr Demento show with cunning plans of vote rigging by him and his school mates, we don't venture outside his professional career at all which is really disappointing. Even when his parents died that's just summed up with what happened to them and a paragraph or so that he decided to escape into his live concerts that and the following nights. The book barely mentions he's married or has a daughter, a bit of an insight into at home life, funny stuff that occurs as a father, funny or daunting stuff every guy faces in the stages of dating and ultimately asking his wife to marry him. Life hurdles or anything like this is not in this book at all. Some funny, heart warming or interesting stories from forming or touring with the band (and Rabin doesn't even mention the other band members, there's the odd photo with them all but no info).

What is inside by Rabin you'll mostly find in the DVD commentaries, on Weirdaldotcom, Weird Al's Facebook page and other journalist interviews, and the important thing to note is, you'll find a lot more in those places than in this book. To be fair I did learn a little from what is in this book, such as coloured mash potato was used instead of ice-cream when they filmed I Love Rocky Road, the fact that he drove around to every music store to beg them to sell Another One Rides the Bus on consignment. I didn't know all the Dr Demento teenage Al stuff and there was the other odd Al tidbit or two, although some of these are on photo captions provided by Al and not Rabin's text. But for the most part, I had the thought is that all he's going to tell us, I already knew that. Rabin certainly never asked Al any hard questions like what do you now think of former co-stars like OJ Simpson, Michael Richards and do you think that impacts the desire of people to watch UHF, The Naked Gun movies or anything like this.

If you have been following Al's career it's not Rabin's music career biography of Al that would be a reason to buy the book over say just borrowing it from your library. The full page (and the book is quite tall at 29cm or 12 inches and 21cm wide) cover art high resolution imagery as well as other photographs are a nice aspect to own. There are also a couple of songs from each album who have a full page piece of artwork with that song's lyrics. Although I would have liked to have seen lyric pages for all or at least all the ones that were released as singles. Fan art including tattoos fans have had injected onto themselves. Stills from some of his film clips as well as the Weird Al show and UHF and other films Al has starred in. The most important reason is the word bites by Al, Twitter feed captions, and comments on various photographs, they are what bring fresh "Weird Al" humour for you to experience. Not as good as it could have been but if you're a fan, you're still going to want to own it. Read more ›

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully Weird May 31, 2013

By Polka-Dot

Format:Hardcover

A great view into the "weird" world that is Al's! Awesome pictures and little extras make this an interesting read. Highly recommended!

5.0 out of 5 stars FUN book for all Weird Al fans... and who's NOT a Weird Al fan? May 30, 2013

By Linda M. Parker

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Been a Weird Al fan since 1978. (Yes, that's not a typo -- before he had any big record contracts! And yes, I'm THAT old.) I didn't necessarily learn anything new about Al in this book, because I'm such a fangirl, but I love the book. Great layout, pictures, fun writing. What more could a fan want? If I could talk my husband into it, this would be our coffee table book.

Well, perhaps not.

Still, for true fans, this is a must-have. Now all I need is a few grandchildren so I can start buying Al's children's books.... :)

5.0 out of 5 stars Weird Al: The Book May 21, 2013

By Bob Voyten

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Awesome!!! No Weird Al lover should be without one!!! All the pictures and information you'll ever need about the King of Musical Comedy!!!

5.0 out of 5 stars Very cool! April 22, 2013

By Mason Koen

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Even for a hardcore enthusiast of Al, you're sure to find something you've never seen or known from this book. The pictures are great and eclectic; my personal favorite part were the concert pictures (if you haven't been to a show, go!). There are entries for many of Al's endeavors and details that are very intimate with Al's experiences (although you won't be getting a glimpse of all those sordid relationships that everyone in Hollywood collectively shares). One of my favorite things about the book was that it was almost entirely written by a fan! Al played a few roles in this book's words, but largely the book is told carefully by Nathan Rabin, with a keen sensibility for Al-related trivia. Overall, I'm very happy about buying this fantastic addition to my bookshelf and Weird Al collection.