When I Was Your Age
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“When I Was Your Age” | ||
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Song by "Weird Al" Yankovic | ||
Album | Off the Deep End | |
Format | CD | |
Recorded | June 6, 1990 | |
Genre | Comedy | |
Length | 4:35 | |
Label | Scotti Brothers | |
Producer | "Weird Al" Yankovic | |
Off the Deep End track listing | ||
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When I Was Your Age is a song written and performed by American parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic. It is commonly considered a style parody of Don Henley. In the song the narrator tells a young child how he never had it as good as he does, but takes it to exaggerated lengths: "...nobody ever drove me to school when it was ninety degrees below. We had to walk buck naked through forty miles of snow".
[edit] Notes
- "When I Was Your Age" was one of the eight songs recorded for "Off the Deep End" in 1990 (The others were "The Plumbing Song", "I Can't Watch This", "The White Stuff", "You Don't Love Me Anymore", "Trigger Happy", "Airline Amy", and "Waffle King", which was released on the "Smells Like Nirvana" single). Due to the lack of a strong lead-off parody, the album's release was delayed until a lead-off parody could be found (In this case it was "Smells Like Nirvana" a parody of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit").
[edit] Exaggerated examples
The narrator names many different examples of how bad he had it when he was just a kid, all in a rhyming fashion. They include:
- "Worked in the coal mines twenty two hours a day for just half a cent"
- "Had to sell my internal organs just to pay the rent"
- "We were hungry, broken and miserable and we liked it fine that way"
- "There were seventy three of us living in a cardboard box"
- "All I got for Christmas was a lousy bag of rocks"
- "Every night for dinner, we had a big 'ol chunk of dirt"
- "If we were really good, we didn't get dessert"
- "Didn't have no telephone, didn't have no FAX machine"
- "All we had was a couple cans and a crummy piece of string"
- "Didn't have no swimming pool when I was just a lad"
- "Our neighbor's septic tank was the closest thing we had"
- "Didn't have no dental floss, had to use old rusty nails"
- "Didn't have Nintendo, we just poured salt on snails"
- "Didn't have no water bed, had to sleep on broken glass"
- "Didn't have no lawnmower, we used our teeth to cut the grass"
- "My dad would whoop us every night till a quarter after twelve"
- "Then he'd get too tired and he'd make us whoop us'selves"
- "Then he'd chop me into pieces and play frisbee with my brain"