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Still Weird After All These Years Even though it’s his job to knock “flavors of the month” off of their pedestals with razor sharp wit, a unique musical mind and a loyal band that can cover everything from alternative and hip hop to zydeco and surf rock, "Weird Al" Yankovic is one of pop music's nice guys. He always seems friendly in press interviews, even when he's been asked the same question 100 times by 100 different reporters. He's stuck with the same band for 25 years and developed kinships with some of the musicians he's satirized. And he never does a song without first getting the original musician's permission, even though the Supreme Court would surely side with him on parody grounds in the case of "The People vs. Alfred Matthew Yankovic." "I just don't want to go stepping on anybody's toes, especially with rappers," Yankovic said by e-mail. "It's nice to know I won't be involved in a drive-by." But during the recording of his 12th and most recent album, Straight Outta Lynwood, Al decided to release a rogue single anyway, and not because the original artist wouldn't give him his blessing. The "suits" wanted the song pulled at the last minute. Yankovic turned British crooner James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" into "You're Pitiful," a ballad about pathetic men who "never had a date/that you couldn't inflate." He said the song was supposed to be released as a single for the album on June 27 and Blunt was fine with it. Atlantic Records wasn't as amused. "I got a call from Atlantic and they told us they were not fine for releasing it as a parody single," he said. "They felt it was too early in Blunt's career and didn't want it to focus on 'Beautiful.'" Yankovic wasn't amused either. "I wasn't happy about it because I had the release date all set and parodies are topical. I agreed to wait and hopefully put out the song sometime in the future; a few months went by and it turned out that the right time was never," Yankovic said. "It pushed back the release of the album, so I decided since the artist was OK with it and the suits were doing something without the artist's best interests, I decided to put it up on the Internet, and within a few days, it was a viral worldwide hit." He felt Atlantic not only treated him unfairly, but also Blunt. "I mostly feel bad for James Blunt, since ultimately all Atlantic really did was prevent him from receiving any royalties from the parody," he said. "I haven't heard from Atlantic since all this went down, so I can't say for sure what their reaction is -- but I'm guessing they're not terribly thrilled. And I've never spoken to James Blunt directly -- it was always just my peeps talking to his peeps." It's not the first time he's had trouble with a parody. Rapper Eminem gave Yankovic the green light to do a parody of "Lose Yourself" for the Grammy award-winning album Poodle Hat but denied him permission to do a video for it. Coolio famously lambasted Yankovic at a press conference at the Grammies for doing a parody of "Gangsta's Paradise" called "Amish Paradise," saying no one ever asked his permission. (Yankovic apologized for it in his VH1 Behind the Music special, saying that he never had any ill intent, and the two publicly buried the hatchet at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.) Yankovic points out that these are the only major problems he's had with an artist he's parodied in the last decade, and if an artist has a problem with a parody, he doesn't do it. Yankovic laughed when asked if he thinks pop music has completely lost its sense of humor. "For every artist or record label that causes some kind of controversy, many more welcome it," he said. "I wouldn't [say] these artists are losing their sense of humor." In fact, some of them see having one of their hits put in Yankovic's blender as a badge of success. For his new album, Yankovic re-did rapper Chamillionaire's "Ridin' (Dirty)" into a glorious gangsta exploration of Caucasian geekiness with "White and Nerdy." Chamillionaire was so proud of being a target for Yankovic that he includes an MP3 of it on his MySpace page. "He was saying incredibly nice things about me in the press saying -- and I didn't know this -- but he said I can 'flow and spit,'" Yankovic said. Yankovic's new album also features a parody of Green Day's "American Idiot," called "Canadian Idiot," about those beer-swillin' hockey nuts to the north, and a parody of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet," called "Trapped in the Drive-Thru," a song that he said he had to cover because he thought it was "wonderful, brilliant and ridiculous all at the same time." He also recorded some "style parodies" on his new album, original songs done in the style of other artists such as Rage Against the Machine, Brian Wilson, Sparks and Cake, and a polka medley covering Franz Ferdinand, the Black Eyed Peas, 50 Cent, Modest Mouse and Kanye West because "my fans would riot in the streets if I didn't do a polka medley." He said the only challenges of doing a direct parody are timeliness, humor and getting the original's artists blessing, but the style parodies he records from the ground up are harder. "I have to analyze an artist's body of work, determine the musical and lyrical idiosyncrasies, compose an original composition in that style, make demos, rehearse with my band, flesh out the arrangement, make more demos and then go in the studio to record it, where a thousand other decisions will need to be made," Yankovic said. "When I'm doing a direct parody, all I really need to do is hand out CDs to the guys in my band and say, 'Here. Learn this.'" One of the style parodies satirizes the MP3 song swapping fiasco with a head swaying charity single aptly titled "Don't Download This Song," which he put on www.weirdal.com and his MySpace page for people to download. He said despite warnings in the song that people who download this song "Might go to jail like Tommy Chong," he doesn't have a stance on the issue. "There are many people who take the song title ironically and think I'm a RIAA-bashing rebel and many who take it at face value and think I'm some kind of a pro-RIAA corporate tool," he said. "In actuality, I do think the RIAA has been a bit too heavy-handed in their response, and that they've overreacted by prosecuting and making examples of people who were basically just sharing a few files on their computers. I don't think that people who illegally download songs should be treated like criminals -- unless, of course, they're illegally downloading 'Weird Al' Yankovic songs, in which case, of course, they should be handcuffed and tortured." The bigger personal problem Yankovic has with peer-to-peer music sharing is the comedy songs that are wrongly attributed to him. The Not Al Page lists more than 100 songs that have wrongly identified him as the author. "It doesn't bother me so much when I get the credit for somebody else's song if it's good, but more often than not, I get my name attached to a lot of cheap, bad vulgar stuff and that really doesn't do my reputation any favors," he said by e-mail. It concerns him because he prides himself in making fun of artists without ripping them to shreds, and he believes it's one of the chief reasons he's been able to making a living at it for more than 25 years.
"I've been attacked by
critics who think it can't be satire without it being mean or hurtful.
That's just not what I consider funny," he said. "I think I can get the
point across without being mean."
Danny Gallagher is a
freelance writer, humorist and reporter living in Texas where the state
fair sells fried Spam to toothless people next to the biggest ball of
twine in Minnesota. His Web site is
www.dannygallagher.net. |
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