AL REMAINS WEIRD, RELEVANT
Song parodist Weird Al Yankovic has become a star in his own right
Weird Al Yankovic’s life hasn’t always been one big polka party. Some of his records have flopped; some of his spoofs have failed to find their marks; and he has fallen offstage while performing in his fat suit — “It’s probably better than not having any kind of cushioning,” he muses, “but it wasn’t that funny to me.”
Now, however, as he tours the world behind his No. 1 album, Mandatory Fun, and brings his high-production show to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, one question arises: Is the accordion-wielding parodist now a pop star himself?
“Well …” he laughs, on the phone from his tour bus, “I hesitate to answer, because evidence would dictate that that’s probably true. I like to be the guy on the outside of the inner circle, poking fun at the people on the inside.”
Yankovic has skirted the edges of stardom before, as in 1984, when his Michael Jackson parody, Eat it, became a worldwide hit — even outselling the original in Australia. But it was always hard to believe he’d truly break through; in the lead-up to Mandatory Fun’s release, his record label, RCA, denied him the budget to make videos. Undeterred, he approached web portals from Funny or Die to The Wall Street Journal’s site and offered them exclusives if they’d fund the promotional clips. The results, including parodies of Iggy Azalea’s Fancy (as Handy) and Pharrell Williams’s Happy (as Tacky), went viral, and helped make Mandatory Fun the first comedy album to top the U.S. charts since 1963.
“It is one of those things I didn’t allow myself to ever want, because I thought, ‘That’s never going to happen,’” says Yankovic, in a voice much mellower than his adenoidal singing yelp. “And then the Grammy (for Best Comedy Album) was amazing. The fact that I got to perform a big production number on the prime-time Emmys” — he spoofed Game of Thrones and Mad Men themes — “was insane. The things I’ve been allowed to do in this last year … the only word I can think (of) is ‘surrealistic.’”
Yankovic’s initial success grew out of an early-’80s pop music monoculture where hits such as Beat It and Like a Virgin (which Yankovic spoofed, at Madonna’s own suggestion, as Like a Surgeon) remained hugely popular for long stretches of time. Since then, he says, “The cycle of popularity in general is a bit faster, but there will always be things that still somehow grab the zeitgeist.”
While Yankovic himself mourns the death of rock music as a commercial force — “it’s not like it was when I was growing up, and that’s sad for me” — the planetary embrace of pop, and the ubiquity of songs such as Blurred Lines (which he spoofed as Word Crimes) has made it easier for his parodies to find traction.
Yankovic still favours rock for his pastiches, or imitations of the style of other artists: First World Problems, which takes off the Pixies’ spiky sound, casts him as a whining member of the One Per Cent who complains about forgetting his gardener’s name. Yankovic aims to take the privileged down a few pegs. “That’s known as punching up,” he says. “You try to deflate bubbles of pretentiousness. When I first got hooked on Mad magazine” — an issue of which he guest-edited in April — “as an 11-yearold kid, that was what appealed to me: standing up to authority figures and demystifying the adult world.”
Yankovic has long lampooned his own status as a guy who is White and Nerdy (as in the title of his 2006 hit); this strategy seems particularly fitting now, with gender and race such hot-button topics. “Punching down, in many cases, is perceived as being actually violent. I’m very self-aware, and as a result, a lot of my humour is very selfdeprecating.”
Crucially, he also celebrates the music he parodies, recreating the sounds of the original tracks in the studio and then live; in fact, some fans discover him through artists that they love whom he has parodied. “Primarily,” he says, “It’s the comedy that would have people coming back.”
And back, and back: Yankovic has superfans who follow him on tour and even get inked with his face and trademark cascade of brown curls. “I’m obviously very flattered, and it also puts extra pressure on me. When somebody’s got your image permanently tattooed on their skin, you don’t want to put out a horrible album and make them go, ‘Oh, why do I have Al on my butt?’”
Yankovic says that, in fact, he’s giving up recording albums; he calls Mandatory Fun “a nice mic drop.” He wants to keep up with the pace of pop culture and release parodies and pastiches more quickly as singles, when they’re topical. At 55, he plans to speed up, not slow down, and indeed, he seems nearly ageless. But surely the older he gets, the harder it will be to parody a youthful star onstage?
“Well, you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit more,” he says. He has a cameo in the Neflix series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, “a prequel to a movie which came out 15 years ago, and (the actors are) 40-yearolds playing teenagers. At a certain point, that’s probably going to be part of the joke with me.”
You try to deflate bubbles of pretentiousness. When I first got hooked on Mad magazine as an 11-year-old-kid, that was what appealed to me: standing up to authority figures and demystifying the adult world.
WEIRD AL YANKOVIC
EXPLAINS THE ATTRACTION OF MAKING PARODY SONGS