Music / UHF - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and Other Stuff

"We got it all on UHF!"

UHF — Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and Other Stuff is the sixth studio album by "Weird Al" Yankovic, released in 1989 through Rock 'n' Roll Records in the US and in conjunction with Scotti Bros. Records and Attic Records abroad. It features songs and some audio snippets from Al's Cult Classic film UHF. And other stuff.

It was Al's last album to be produced by Rick Derringer. All of his albums since have been self-produced.

Tracklist:

Side One

1. "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*"^note The lyrics of "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" set to the tune of Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing."
2. "Gandhi II"
3. "Attack Of The Radioactive Hamsters From A Planet Near Mars"
4. "Isle Thing"^note Parody of Tone-Lōc's "Wild Thing"
5. "The Hot Rocks Polka"
6. "UHF"

Side Two

1. "Let Me Be Your Hog"
2. "She Drives Like Crazy"^note Parody of Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy"
3. "Generic Blues"
4. "Spatula City"
5. "Fun Zone"
6. "Spam"^note Parody of R.E.M.'s "Stand"
7. "The Biggest Ball Of Twine In Minnesota"

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We trope it all on UHF.

• Animated Music Video: "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*," recreating the visuals from Dire Straits landmark computer-animated video for "Money For Nothing."
• Bizarre Taste in Food: The Family from “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota” have some strange culinary preferences, happily chowing down on potato skins, pickled wieners, rhubarb pie, pickled wieners, chocolate soda, and more pickled wieners throughout their three-day journey.
• Brick Joke: Bernie the hitchhiker in "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota".
• Camera Abuse:
  • Fist-pumps the screen and cracks it in his parody of Billy Idol in the video for "UHF".
  • In the music video for "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*", Al tries to follow the camera when it does a rapid-fire sequence of continuously changing angles, until he gets so fed up that he grabs the camera to stop it from moving.
• Car Song: "She Drives Like Crazy".
• Does Not Like Spam: Averted when he sings about the Trope Namer in "Spam"; he pokes fun at it for being Mystery Meat, but seems to be genuinely pleased with its versatility.
• Drives Like Crazy: The Trope Namer. In fact, the trope's name originally consisted of the full song title before the first word was lopped off to make it more unisex.
• Easily Impressed: The narrator of "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" is so overcome with emotion at seeing the ball of twine that he bursts into tears, and considers it the best place he's ever visited.
• Epic Rocking: The six-minute long mini-Rock Opera "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota."
• Even Beggars Won't Choose It: In "She Drives Like Crazy", the subject's driving is so poor that even hitchhikers will refuse to ride.
• Face on the Cover: "Weird Al", as taken from the poster for UHF.
• Fading into the Next Song: More like "Record Skipping" into the next song with "Let Me Be Your Hog" skipping into "She Drives Like Crazy".
• Food Songs Are Funny: "Spam".
• Girls With Mustaches: Seen on the women parodying those found in Robert Palmer videos in the video for "UHF". See Parody Assistance for more details.
• Instrumentals: "Fun Zone".
• In the Style of:
  • "UHF" — The Jacksons' "State Of Shock"
  • "The Biggest Ball Of Twine In Minnesota" — Harry Chapin (specifically "30,000 Pound of Bananas") and Gordon Lightfoot
• Just Eat Gilligan: Weird Al references the trope namer in "Isle Thing".
  He'd mess up every rescue
  Man, that first mate was illin'
  If I was one of those Castaways
  I think I'd probably kill him
  • Al also invokes this later in the same song when talking about The Professor:
    She said, "That guy's a genius"
    I shook my head and laughed
    I said, "If he's so fly, then tell me why
    He couldn't build a lousy raft"
• Longest Song Goes Last: The album ends with "The Biggest Ball Of Twine In Minnesota" (6:50)
• Lucky Charms Title: "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*" includes an asterisk in the name for unspecified legal reasons; Al pokes fun at this in the DVD commentary for UHF.
• Medley: "The Hot Rocks Polka," consisting entirely of songs by The Rolling Stones. Until 2018's "The Hamilton Polka", it would remain the only polka medley he'd done to feature songs from a single music act (not counting Alapalooza's "Bohemian Polka", a polka arrangement of "Bohemian Rhapsody").
  • "It's Only Rock 'n Roll (But I Like It)"
  • "Brown Sugar"
  • "You Can't Always Get What You Want"
  • "Honky Tonk Women"
  • "Under My Thumb"
  • "Ruby Tuesday"
  • "Miss You"
  • "Sympathy for the Devil"
  • "Get Off of My Cloud"
  • "Shattered"
  • "Let's Spend the Night Together"
  • "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"
  • and "Ear Booker Polka" by Al Yankovic
• Miniscule Rocking: "Let Me Be Your Hog", coming in at 16 seconds. Reportedly, Al only wrote it because he couldn't license "Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas for the scene in UHF where Uncle Harvey is in his pool.
• Notice This: In Al's mini-parody of George Michael's "Faith" video, Al's video for the Title Track features him in the same outfit with the words "Look at my butt" where the original had the word "Revenge."
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Averted with "The Biggest Ball Of Twine In Minnesota". There are, in fact, bigger balls of twine in other states. ^note  That said, it was the Guinness World Record for the biggest ball of twine in the world at the time the song was written and would remain so until 1994; and to this day, it remains the world's largest ball of twine made by a single person.
• Parody Assistance:
  • A segment of the "UHF" video parodies the video for Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love", with Al in the middle of a group of women (with Al's trademark glasses and mustache) miming playing to the song. The women? The same ones from Palmer's video. Yes, really.
  • Mark Knopfler and Guy Fletcher from the Dire Straits performed the guitar and synths on "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*", which was apparently the one condition on which they would allow the parody. It still end up sounding a bit different from the original since they performed their parts more in line with how they had grown accustomed to doing it in concert over the four years since the song was first released.
• Parody Commercial: "Gandhi II" and "Spatula City", taken straight from the film, are this. Additionally the title track, UHF, is written like a television station jingle.
• Record Needle Scratch: One acts as a transition between the deliberately brief Let Me Be Your Hog and She Drives Like Crazy.
• Record Producer: The last of Al's albums to be produced by Rick Derringer.
• Riddle for the Ages: Al poses a few interesting questions about the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota:
  What on earth would make a man decide to do that kind of thing?
  Winding up 21,140 pounds of string?
  What was he trying to prove? Who was he trying to impress?
  Why did he built it? How did he do it? It's anybody's guess!
  Where did he get the Twine? What was going through his mind?
  Did it just seem like a good idea at the time?
• Severely Specialized Store: "Spatula City".
• Shout-Out:
  • Like the song it parodies, "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*" interpolates The Police's "Don't Stand So Close to Me" in its intro.
  • To The Outer Limits (1963) in "UHF".
    Don't you know that we control the horizontal? We control the vertical, too.
  • The music video for "UHF" is loaded with parodies of popular music videos and concert films from the '80s, plus Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles (hey, wave 2 of Beatlemania was already in full swing by the end of the decade). They are, in order of first appearance:
    • Guns N' Roses - "Welcome to the Jungle"
    • George Michael - "Faith"
    • Robert Palmer - "Addicted to Love"
    • Prince and the Revolution - "Let's Go Crazy"
    • Talking Heads - "Once in a Lifetime"
    • Peter Gabriel - "Sledgehammer"
    • ZZ Top - "Legs"
    • Billy Idol - "White Wedding"
    • Prince and the Revolution - "Baby I'm a Star"
    • The Beatles - "Your Mother Should Know"
    • INXS - "Mediate" (itself a Whole-Plot Reference to "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan)
    • Randy Newman - "I Love L.A."
    • Prince and the Revolution - "When Doves Cry"
    • Billy Idol - "Rebel Yell"
    • Talking Heads - "Girlfriend is Better" (specifically the live performance depicted in Stop Making Sense)
• Something Blues: "Generic Blues".
• Special Guest: Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits plays the guitar on "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*".
• Title Track: "UHF."
• Trashy Tourist Trap: "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota." Not so much "trashy" as just exactly as interesting as a huge ball of twine, but the humor really comes from the narrator's excitement and amazement over it.

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