Oh, Midnight Star: Al in the age of AI

I was in middle school in the mid-1980s and spent a lot of time being picked on for being a weird nerd. Kids are exceptionally cruel. But I had some escapisms: comic books, old monster movies, and popping a cassette of a “Weird Al” Yankovic album in my boombox. Al was hilarious and he knew what was up.

It’s very hard to pick a favorite of his songs, of course. I should maybe choose “Lasagna” (his parody of Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba”), because that’s the song me and a few friends, dressed as Italian stereotypes, won our school lip-synching contest with. Or maybe “Smells Like Nirvana”—Waukesha County Fair security had to break up a mosh pit of five nerds when Al ripped into that one. (Sorry.)

If I had to choose a favorite, though, I think it would be “Midnight Star,” from Yankovic’s seminal 1984 album In 3-D. The song works for me on a number of levels. First, the music is an absolute ’80s banger. The guitar strums, the twinkling keys, the backup vocals—it just has that flush, full ’80s sound.

The subject of the song, though, taps into another love I had in my youth: laughing at tabloids. It made a boring trip to the grocery store slightly amusing for a few moments. Waiting “in the express lane with my 12 items or less” was a lurid spread of celebrity trainwrecks, trashy gossip, implausible diets, and freaks of nature. They were a mirror of the ugly American, spotlighting our unique brand of laziness (“Eat jelly donuts and lose 20 pounds a day”) and cures for the desperate (“You can learn to cope with stress / And you can beat the IRS”) but what I really loved was the not-even-trying-to-be-plausible headlines of the Weekly World News.

The Weekly World News was a tabloid that tried to stand out with headlines about sumo-wrestler-sized cats, extraterrestrial presidential advisors, and terrifying encounters with the mutant “Bat Boy” (a cousin to Al’s lyric about the “Incredible Frog Boy?”) A story about a “man born without a head” would fit right in, as would a headline like “The Ghost of Elvis is Living in My Den.” If I had a couple spare dollars from mowing lawns, you better believe I was buying a copy. I can still smell the cheap newsprint.

I think another reason I still love the song now is the same reason it might be confusing to a younger listener: it gives me nostalgia for a simpler, pre-digital world. I’m not saying the ’80s were better by any means, but it felt like blatantly ridiculous untruths were better contained to the grocery store racks. Now, it’s omnipresent—everything, everywhere is saturated with ridiculous, fake content. The world is a Bizarro place where reality is inside out, and I mean that in an AI apocalypse way, not an Alpocalypse one.

I just scrolled through my Facebook feed: crappy AI-generated flyers and profile pictures, disinformation bots spreading falsehoods, fake reels and stories and posts. Facebook heard that I watch superhero movies, so there’s a ton of fake movie news memes, and oh no… what’s this? A story about Al on a Facebook page called “True Stories.” It says it’s a “science website” and has 218k followers. But it looks like Al got Midnight Starred here, because it reports on how Al’s father died when he was 16, but a devastated Al found the strength to go on to college. The story is from just another garbage AI content machine. Al’s parents tragically died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 2004, when he was 45. This might seem like a trivial piece of misinformation, but multiply this false “fact” by a billion and you can see how we’re hurdling toward a future where nothing is true.

Al, by the way, made headlines when he revealed he turned down “a nice pile of money” to be a “poster boy of AI,” saying “I’m not a fan.” That’s because he knows that true weirdness comes from the heart, not a computer. What was once the novelty of the tabloids—beautifully curated weirdness—is now saturated across the digital world. By today’s standards, the Midnight Star would be seen as quaint. With so much misinformation, disinformation, fraud, and threats of an AI Doomsday, is there any hope for our future?

Oh Midnight Star, I wanna know, I wanna know…