The same is true of “Headline News.” It’s one of the only songs in Al’s oeuvre that has the same chorus as the song that Al is parodying, which finds Al singing in a register lower than he ever has before in a successful attempt to replicate the oceans-deep croon of Crash Test Dummies frontman Brad Roberts.Īs “Headline News” draws to a close, Al pulls out all the stops. Instead of words in its chorus, “Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmm” substitutes noises, namely strangely hypnotic humming. Crash Test Dummies frontman Brad Roberts sings in a bass-baritone so low that it almost sounds like he’s doing a goofy fake voice to amuse friends. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” is one of the goofier products of the Nirvana-fueled Alternative Rock boom of the early to mid 1990s, a borderline novelty song full of additional novelties. Al’s tongue-in-cheek spin through the top tabloid tales of the day is consequently the product of an earlier era. We’ve changed a lot in the quarter century since the release of “Headline News.” We’ve evolved and de-evolved, made great social progress and regressed egregiously. Happy” in what is perhaps not the most sensitive moment of his career. Bobbitt was similarly the subject of a sympathetic film, in this case a documentary that portrayed her not as the tabloid cartoon of the public imagination who lopped off her cheating husband’s penis in a fit of rage but rather as a passionate, dignified immigrant who was viciously raped and sexually terrorized by a dead-eyed sociopath until she was moved to take violent action against the instrument of her abuse, which Al refers to as “Mr. Harding was the subject of a high-profile biopic starring Margot Robbie that depicted the controversial skating champion as the troubled victim of abuse, first from her mother and then from husband Jeff Gillooly. Fay, alas, is still widely seen as a doofus who ran amok in Singapore and then was punished viciously and disproportionately for his youthful transgressions but Harding and particularly Bobbitt are seen in a vastly different light these days.
In the decades since the single’s release our understanding of two of these curious, sordid figures, these walking punchlines, has shifted tremendously.
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