Spot-on spoofs by Yankovic
The veteran parodist’s welcome brand of humor is on display at the Hollywood Bowl.
“When the going gets weird,” gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson once said, “the weird turn pro,” and no one has shown over time greater aptitude at professional weirdness than “Weird Al” Yankovic.
The Lynwood-reared pop music parodist par excellence reached yet another milestone in his astonishingly long-running career with the first of two weekend performances Friday night at the venerable Hollywood Bowl.
The booking itself demonstrated the continued upward arc Yankovic is on nearly 40 years into his career. His L.A. tour stops in recent years have taken him from the 2,700-seat Pantages Theatre to the 5,800-seat Greek and now the pair of shows at the 17,500-capacity Bowl, where he returned Saturday. (His tour also stops Aug. 2 at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara.)
Yankovic’s brand of humor is particularly welcome in these unusually weird times, if just for the wit in his transformative reworkings of pop hits across the stylistic spectrum.
His ability to remain au courant defies the very notion of the “novelty” record tradition of which he has become the world’s preeminent practitioner. Such predecessors as Spike Jones, Allan Sherman and Dickie Goodman enjoyed comparatively brief moments in the sun.
The accordion-wielding antihero, who surfaced during the rise of punk rock in the late ’70s — his first hit, “Another One Rides the Bus,” came from a live-inthe-studio performance during his apprenticeship with L.A. radio host Dr. Demento — has not just survived but thrived through the successive reigns of ’80s dance pop, new wave, hair metal, grunge, boy band pop, indie rock, hip-hop and today’s R&B-pop amalgam.
Much of his success stemmed from his equally inspired parody pop videos — casting himself in the early days of MTV as a Nerd Universe counterpart to Michael Jackson in sendups of “Beat It” (“Eat It”) and “Bad” (“Fat”). Onstage, he re-created his paranoid conspiracy theorist in “Foil” (lampooning Lorde’s “Royals”) and a take-no-guff parishioner of “Amish Paradise” (Coolio’s “Gangsta Paradise” by way of Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise”).
Extending that approach to live performance, his show tweaked conventions and clichés of the rock and pop concert tradition.
Midway through the set, which used the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra under conductor Thomas Wilkins to great effect, Yankovic and his band abandoned the electric instruments and amplifiers and sat at the center of the stage for unplugged renditions of “Eat It,” “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “I Love Rocky Road” and “Like a Surgeon.”
The segment began with a bluesy acoustic guitar intro that invoked Eric Clapton’s signature unplugged rendition of “Layla,” doubling down on the parody of his original arrangements.
Between songs, spaces that Yankovic used to switch costumes, videos projected on the Bowl’s screens recounted his broad infiltration of pop culture over the years, touching on his cameos or references to him in such TV shows and movies as “Friends,” “The Simpsons,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “King of the Hill,” “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” and others.
Beyond the wacky humor, there’s a deeper facet of Yankovic’s music, one that helps explain his longevity. Yankovic earned his college degree in architecture, and it’s easy to see his skill at disassembling pop songs and rebuilding them through his own twisted vision.
Turning Don McLean’s “American Pie” into a “Star Wars” paean “The Saga Begins,” Yankovic doesn’t simply refit it with a new story line. He also replicates McLean’s rhyme scheme with intricate interior rhymes and cadences that reveal staggering smarts: “We started singin’ / My, my, this here Anakin guy / May be Vader someday later — now he’s just a small fry / And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye / Saying soon I’m gonna be a Jedi.”
Perhaps his most impressive reworkings of other artists’ hits — which arguably elevate them over the originals — are “White and Nerdy,” which recasts Chamillionaire’s rap hit “Ridin’ Dirty,” and “Word Crimes,” the retake on Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’ “Blurred Lines.”
“White and Nerdy” could serve as Yankovic’s doctoral thesis on the joys of nerd culture: “There’s no killer app I haven’t run / At Pascal, well, I’m Number 1 / Do vector calculus just for fun.”
“Word Crimes” toasts regard for spelling, syntax and usage, an otherwise unimaginable theme of a song from “Mandatory Fun,” Yank ovic’s latest album, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 pop album chart upon its release in 2014.
“Don’t be a moron / You’d better slow down / And use the right pronoun / Show the world you’re no clown / Everybody wise up!”
In an age in which bullying is a major concern on school campuses, Yankovic offers a shining alternative for success for the often socially awkward part of society from which he emerged.
His career champions the outsider, the misfit, the portion of the populace referenced in the climactic scene of the 1984 cult classic film “Revenge of the Nerds,” when super-nerd Lewis informs the jocks who’ve been bullying them: “We have news for the beautiful people. There’s a lot more of us than there are of you.”
Yankovic too is about inclusion, not divisiveness. And maybe that’s not so weird after all.
A cappella male vocal group Straight No Chaser opened with a 40-minute set of sharply arranged songs, touching on a variety of eras and genres, including their Stevie Wonder medley of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and “I Was Made to Love Her,” through Radiohead’s “Creep.”