page_title: Polka Party!
section_title: Originals
hierarchical_section_title: Polka Party! / Production / Originals
caption_attribution_description: Horseshoe tavern, Toronto, May 13, 1978
context_page_description: Polka Party! is the fourth studio album by "Weird Al" Yankovic, released on October 21, 1986. The album was produced by former The McCoys guitarist Rick Derringer. Recorded between April and September 1986, the album was Yankovic's follow-up to his successful 1985 release, Dare to Be Stupid. The album's lead single was "Living With a Hernia", although it was not a hit and did not chart.
  The music on Polka Party! is built around parodies and pastiches of pop and rock music of the mid-1980s, featuring direct parodies of James Brown, Mick Jagger, El DeBarge and Robert Palmer. The album also features many "style parodies", or musical imitations that come close to, but do not copy, existing artists. These style parodies include imitations of specific artists like Talking Heads, as well as imitations of various musical genres like country music.
  Peaking at No. 177 on the Billboard 200, Polka Party! was met with mixed-to-negative reviews and was considered a commercial and critical failure. Despite this, the album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording in 1986. Polka Party!
context_section_description: On April 22, 1986, Yankovic began recording three new original songs for his next album: "Don't Wear Those Shoes", "One of Those Days", and "Dog Eat Dog". Although "Don't Wear Those Shoes" is an original composition, Yankovic admitted that the intro was inspired by the style of The Kinks. Lyrically, the song is a plea by the singer to his wife not to not wear certain shoes which he cannot stand. "One of Those Days" is a song detailing horrible things as if they were everyday annoyances. Each horrible thing escalates up to global annihilation while more mundane annoyances pop up at different times.
  "Dog Eat Dog" is a style parody of the Talking Heads. Described as a "tongue-in-cheek look at office life", the song was inspired by Yankovic's past experience of working in the mailroom and traffic department at the Westwood One radio station. He noted, "At first I thought [the job] was kinda cool that I had a phone and a desk and a little cubicle to call my own, but after a while I felt like my soul had been sucked out of me." The song features a line directly parodying the Talking Heads song "Once In a Lifetime": "Sometimes I tell myself, this is not my beautiful stapler/Sometimes I tell myself this is not my beautiful chair!" This mirrors a similar line in the Talking Heads song: "You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house/You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife".
  On April 23, Yankovic recorded "Christmas at Ground Zero". The song, "a cheery little tune about death, destruction and the end of the world" was the result of Scotti Brothers Records' insistence that Yankovic release a Christmas record. After Yankovic presented the song to his label, they relented, because it was "a little different from what they were expecting." After the song's release, some radio stations banned the record, a move that Yankovic attributes to "most people [not wanting] to hear about nuclear annihilation during the holiday season." Following the September 11 attacks, when the general term "ground zero" was co-opted as a proper name for the World Trade Center site where two of those attacks took place, the disturbing lyrics caused this song to be banned largely from radio. Yankovic wanted the song to receive a video, but due to budget reasons, his label did not agree. Yankovic, however, directed one himself which was mostly made up of stock footage, with a live action finale that was filmed in a run-down part of the Bronx, New York that "looked like a bomb had fallen on it." 
  The final original that was recorded was "Good Enough for Now", a country music pastiche about how the singer's lover, who, while not the best, will do for now.
caption: Yankovic's song "Dog Eat Dog" served as a style parody of Talking Heads (pictured).
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