Albuquerque (song)

"Albuquerque"
Song

"Albuquerque" is the last song (track 12) of "Weird Al" Yankovic's Running With Scissors album. At 11 minutes and 25 seconds, it is the longest song Yankovic has ever released on any of his official studio albums.

With the exception of the choruses and occasional bridges, the track is mostly a spoken word narration about Yankovic's made-up life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after winning a first-class one-way airplane ticket to the city. Though not a direct parody, the entire song mimics "Dick's Automotive" by The Rugburns so closely, it almost can be considered a direct parody. In fact, in the summer of 2006, a heated debate about this topic appeared on the World of "Weird Al" Yankovic forums, leading Al to announce that future CDs (starting with Straight Outta Lynwood) will credit the targets of each style parody, and the person who started the debate to issue a public apology to Al for causing such an event to occur.

There is also an obvious joke involving the song in the album jacket to Running With Scissors. In the beginning, it looks like a standard title header for any of the other songs on the album and the beginning of the song's lyrics are shown. However, the lyrics are cut off early, followed by this seemingly sarcastic message:

"You know what? The rest of these lyrics aren't gonna fit here. There's just no room left. What a drag, huh? I guess we didn't plan this out very well...probably should have used a smaller font or a bigger piece of paper or something. Sorry. We all just feel horrible about this. Well, I guess you'll just have to listen really carefully and try to figure out the words for yourself. Good luck."

Summary

The song begins with the narrator telling his story beginning with him as a boy living in "a box under the stairs in the corner of the basement in the house half a block down the street from Jerry's Bait Shop" where every morning his mother feeds him sauerkraut, which he hates, for breakfast of until he's 26 1/2 years old and vows to change his life. The next day, his luck gets better when he enters in a radio contest by guessing the correct number of molecules on Leonard Nimoy's butt, only to be off by three, and wins a first class, one way trip to Albuquerque.

The narrator goes on to tell about how he loves his first plane ride even thought he had to sit between two fat women with body odor, and the boy throwing up behind him, the in-flight movie Bio-Dome with Pauly Shore, the flight attendants ran out of Dr. Pepper and salted peanuts, to the plane crashing and leaving him as the only sole survivor because he followed the correct safety procedures for the crash.

He crawls from the wreckage and journeys through the countryside for three days carrying all his belongings including his "lucky, lucky autographed, glow-in-the-dark snorkel." Finally, he arrives at the Albuquerque Holiday Inn where he is enjoying the comfort of his room until a fat, one-nostriled hermaphrodite with A Flock of Seagulls haircut bursts into his room and takes the snorkel. The two engage in a fight accidentally knocking the phone of the hook. In the end, the hermaphrodite gets away with the snorkel.

Before plotting revenge, the narrator decides to buy some doughnuts at the doughnut shop only to learn that they are all out and only have a box of weasels. He then buys the weasels and they attack him and he runs out into the street and meets the love of his life named Zelda. After that they get married, buy a house and have children. They finally break up one night when Zelda asks him to join the Columbia Record Club, but he is not ready for a commitment like that.

Finally, things get better for him again when he gets a job at the Sizzler and becomes the employee of the month after putting out a greasefire with his face. This earns a lot of jealousy among the other workers and reminds him of the time he asked to help someone named Marty carry a sofa up the stairs and Marty replies by saying he'd rather have him cut his arms and legs off with a chainsaw, which he does, thus naming him "Torso Boy". Another time, he remembers that he bit a guy in the jugular vein because he said he hadn't had a "bite" in a while, meaning that he was hungry. At this point, the narrator loses his train of thought and finally stating his main point is that he hates sauerkraut. The song ends with him reminding the listener that if they are ever troubled in life that they should take comfort in knowing that there is a place called Albuquerque.

Trivia

• At the end of the song (around 11:20, after the music ends), faint laughter can be heard in the background. As "Weird Al" says, "That’s Jim West laughing - I thought it would be a good way to end the album. He’s cracking up because of the stupid chord he played at the end of the song."[1]

• In the song, the narrator's mom feeds him sauerkraut until he's 26 1/2 years old. This is a reference to Yankovic's common hiding of the number 27 in many of his songs and videos, often thought by fans to be in teasing jest. However, the song clocks at 11:25 and adding the running time up equals the number 27 (1 + 1 + 25 = 27).

• The doughnut shop scene is an obvious homage to Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch.

• In lieu of his normal DVD review of the now-cancelled Internet radio talk show 2 Sense, Spazfox narrates this song word for word in a series of segments.

• Alluded to in the 2004 movie National Treasure

Shaw: Prison.

Riley Poole: Albuquerque. See, I can do it too. Snorkel.

• On Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep, there is a flash movie called Albuquerque: The Movie, which is an unofficial video for the song. [2]

• In the computer game Doom 3, A workers audiolog recounts the tale of a worker nicknamed "torsoboy" who had his arms and legs ripped off by an "albuquerque" Capacitor.

See also

• List of songs by "Weird Al" Yankovic

External links

• http://www.wappincomics.com/albuquerque.html
• http://reywas.co.uk/yakville/yakattack/