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"Albuquerque" is the last song of "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1999 album Running with Scissors. At 11 minutes and 23 seconds, it is the longest song Yankovic has ever recorded.
| "Albuquerque" | |
|---|---|
| Song by "Weird Al" Yankovic | |
| from the album Running with Scissors | |
| Released | June 29, 1999 |
| Recorded | October 15, 1998 |
| Genre | |
| Length | 11:23 |
| Label | Volcano |
| Songwriter(s) | "Weird Al" Yankovic |
| Producer(s) | "Weird Al" Yankovic |
With the exception of the choruses and occasional bridges, the track is mostly a spoken word narration about a made-up person's life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after winning a first-class one-way airplane ticket to the city. According to Yankovic, the song is in the style of the "hard-driving rock narrative" of artists like The Rugburns, Mojo Nixon and George Thorogood.[1]
In a video on GQ where he broke down his most iconic songs, Yankovic said he had finished writing the song and needed to cut it down to song length, but then he decided "No! I'm not going to cut it down, I'm just going to do the whole thing!"[2]
Yankovic set off to write the lengthy song, considering it as a final track for Running with Scissors. The long, meandering story was not expected to be popular and instead Yankovic wanted to compose a song "that's just going to annoy people for 12 minutes", making it feel like an "odyssey" for the listener after making it through to the end.[1] Yankovic described writing the song as "free flowing," writing down a great deal of material he thought would be funny including previous anecdotes he had recorded, and trimming it down to form a lengthy "semi-cohesive story."[1] The lyrics were too long to include in the liner notes for the album (it ends mid-sentence and goes into a written apology by Yankovic), saying that the listener will have to figure them out for themselves. The full lyrics were posted to Yankovic's website.[3]
The song begins with the narrator talking about his childhood; how he lived in a box under the stairs in the corner of the basement of a house half a block down the street from a place called Jerry's Bait Shop, and how he was only served sauerkraut for breakfast every morning. When he asks his mother about this, she yells at him, stating it's good for him, before tying him to a wall and force-feeding him sauerkraut as he grows older. As he reaches 26½ years old, he swears that one day he'll leave his mother's house for a better place. One day, he hears of a contest from a radio broadcast, which consists of “guessing the number of molecules on Leonard Nimoy's butt”; he wins the grand prize, which is a first-class one-way ticket to Albuquerque, New Mexico, despite being off by three molecules.
During the flight, he is seated between two large Albanian women with severe body odor, along with a sick child behind his seat. He is forced to watch the movie Bio-Dome starring Pauly Shore while on board. While this is happening, three of the engines burn out, causing the plane to crash and explode, killing everyone on board, except for him as he followed proper safety precautions. He finds himself crawling while carrying his belongings, including a "lucky lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel", until he reaches his destination.
He checks into a Holiday Inn, taking his time to relax until someone knocks. Although he asks multiple times who's at the door, he receives no answer. When he finally opens the door himself, he's greeted by "a big, fat hermaphrodite with a Flock of Seagulls haircut and only one nostril", who rushes into his room, steals his snorkel, pushes him to fight for it back, and escapes. The narrator vows to stop at nothing until the mysterious man is "brought to justice", but first decides to buy donuts.
Upon driving to a local donut shop, he asks for many types of donuts and pastries, one at a time, only to be told each one is sold out. Finally, the shopkeeper admits that all they have is a box of crazed weasels. He purchases the box, but the weasels bite and latch onto his face. As he runs around town screaming for help, he runs into a woman named Zelda, who points out the weasels on his face. The two fall in love, marry, buy a house, and have children. One night, after Zelda asks him about joining the Columbia Record Club, he freaks out, stating he's, "just not ready for that kind of a commitment", leading to him breaking up with her.
Shortly afterward, he "achieve[s] his lifelong dream": getting a part-time job at the Sizzler, where he becomes employee of the month for extinguishing a grease fire using his own face. He then tells about an anecdote about a time he spotted his Sizzler co-worker Marty trying to carry a large sofa up a flight of stairs. He asks Marty if he needs help, to which Marty replies sarcastically, "No, I want you to cut off my arms and legs with a chainsaw!" Taking Marty literally, Al complies. Marty then remarks he was being sarcastic, but Al questions how he was supposed to know. Later, Marty earns the nickname "Torso Boy" as he is now only a torso; this anecdote reminds him of yet another incident in which a man tells him he "hasn't had a bite in 3 days". He responds by biting the man's jugular vein, thinking it would be funny, causing the man to start screaming and bleeding all over the place. Al believes some people "just can't take a joke" when they don't laugh.
At this point, Al loses his train of thought and reveals that the point he was attempting to make was his hatred for sauerkraut. He ends the song by giving advice to the listener, claiming that no matter how hard life is, there's "still a little place called Albuquerque".
At the end of the song (around 11:20, after the music ends), faint laughter can be heard in the background. As Yankovic 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."[4]
Contrary to Yankovic's belief that the song would not be popular, it was one of the best-received songs from the album, and Yankovic incorporated the song as an encore to his tours.[1] When performing this song live, Yankovic has been known to extend the song, by listing off more types of donuts, listing more names "Zelda" calls Yankovic, not telling the "amusing anecdote" at first, and even starting the song over completely after he "loses his train of thought." When performing this song live in Canada, Al is known to replace the dream job at Sizzler with one at Tim Hortons,[5] a Canadian doughnut shop. During the guitar solo of the third chorus, Yankovic sometimes introduces West eagerly, but West plays "Mary Had a Little Lamb" instead of the real solo. Yankovic acts disappointed, and West walks away acting ashamed. As of his 2022 tour, Yankovic stops the song after using the word "hermaphrodite" to acknowledge that the word was now considered a slur and that the song was a product of an earlier, more ignorant time.
In 2006, Flash cartoonist Ryan Krzak, also known by the online handle RWappin, uploaded a fan-made animated music video on Newgrounds titled Albuquerque: THE MOVIE. As of 2022[update] it has gotten over 400 thousand views,[6] and millions more views via reuploads to other sites such as YouTube.[7] RWappin also made a music video for Yankovic's song "Everything You Know Is Wrong" with the same character.[8] In 2024, Krzak animated the "Uptown Funk" portion of the official music video for Yankovic's medley "Polkamania!" using the same art style and characters as his fan videos.[9][10]
The 2004 video game Doom 3 contains a thin reference to the song - an email in one of the in-game PDAs mentions a character whose arms and legs were dismembered by the "Albuquerck Capacitor", therefore giving him the nickname "Torso Boy".[11]
As of 2024: the Flash animated version of the song exploded to popularity as an Internet meme, with 5.5 million views on Krzak's YouTube upload as of November 2024.
- List of songs by "Weird Al" Yankovic
- Shaggy dog story
- The King of Rock 'n' Roll, another song sometimes sought by this name.
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