PANDEMIC PARODIES GO VIRAL
Meet the ‘Weird Al’ Yankovics of our social distancing era
COVID-19 is, put simply, a “super bad virus.”
This silly, if accurate, phrase rolled round Daniel Matarazzo’s head as he began writing a coronavirus-themed parody of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the earwormy tune from Mary Poppins.
The Philadelphia-based freelance music director normally spends his days helping with local musical theatre productions, often helming the piano behind the scenes. But suddenly, his New Jersey-based father and stepmother had the virus, and all his work through April was cancelled. He needed to do something.
“I just had all this time on my hands, and I thought, ‘What do I do with it?’” Matarazzo said.
So he completed the phrase: A super bad transmittable contagious awful virus.
Then he tossed in some good advice.
Now back in 1918, influenza had its run
But half their docs were busy overseas with World War I
Today we have mass media and scientists to say
If you don’t want this virus, well then stay six feet away!
It’s super damn important that we practice isolation
’Cause we’re asymptomatic while it’s in incubation
We’ll overwhelm our hospitals if there’s not mitigation
It’s super damn important that we practice isolation
If you don’t do it then we’re all gonna die, if you don’t do it then we’re all gonna die ...
Although his aim was only to cheer up his friends and family, the song grew legs. Soon enough, nearly 1.5 million people had watched it on Twitter, millions more on Facebook and hundreds of thousands more on Youtube. Comments began pouring in from around the world, including a particularly affecting one from a respiratory nurse.
“She said she played the song before her and her team started on a very long shift. They were just dancing around the room to it and laughing,” Matarazzo said. “I was really touched by it.”
His song is just one of many pandemic parodies that have trended on the internet since coronavirus became part of our daily vocabulary. From the new parodies by the Youtube-famous Holderness family to a British clan’s quarantine-flavoured version of One More Day from Les Miserables, these are new takes on an old art, turning popular tunes into melodic bemoanings of the inconveniences we’re all collectively experiencing and offering brief moments of joy to cut through the anxiety, sorrow and boredom.
“There’s a sense that we’re all in this together, albeit in a surreally lonely and isolated fashion, and making light of this tragedy can be cathartic and liberating,” said Nathan Rabin, a music critic and author of two books about Weird Al Yankovic.
“Being able to laugh at the things that would otherwise make us cry ... can make this unprecedented crisis a little more endurable, and there’s always the soothing comfort of these parodies being rooted in songs we already know and love, that have already been part of the soundtrack of our lives.”
Their authors have become the
Weird Als of the coronavirus. And while the grandmaster of parody songs himself hasn’t participated — save for repurposing his classic tune One More Minute as a social distancing anthem on The Tonight Show — the most successful parodies have all the trappings of his best work. The key, Rabin said, is “tapping into something big and relevant in the culture, but (also taking) the time to get the details right.”
Those sorts of details made Claire and Mel Vatz’s take on Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound so successful.
“I’m sitting here in isolation, waiting for the vaccination,” sing the Pittsburgh couple, a speech pathologist and lawyer by day:
Stock market’s down, the stores are closed
Retirement plans are surely hosed
Toilet paper’s running low
It’s a good thing I don’t have to gowe’re all homebound
How long will we ... still be homebound Like Matarazzo, the duo fostered no grand plans of breaking the internet. The rhyme of “isolation” and “vaccination” hit Mel, who sat down with Claire and banged out the lyrics in a day and then recorded it for their family and friends.
Two days later, they began receiving messages from people in Israel, Germany and Australia, and even non-english-speaking relatives in Italy.
Mel chalks up the success to the fact that their parody “hit some common themes of what everyone was feeling. And it’s just a real pleasant and sort of calming song.”
“This is a very scary, anxiety-provoking time, and I really think it’s important to stay positive,” Claire said. “Even in the worst of things, if you can maintain your positivity, you can overcome any terrible things.”
Some pandemic parodies were crafted by Youtube veterans specifically to go viral, usually doubling as educational.
The Holderness family (known for their song Christmas Jammies) released the practical 20-Second Parodies for Handwashing and Songs for Social Distancing before shifting to more observational-comedy parodies in a series called Tunes to Fight Gloom. Pinkfong!, the Korean children’s entertainment brand that first brought Baby Shark into our lives, refocused that song on handwashing instead of marine life. Chris Mann turned Madonna’s Vogue into Stay Home Vogue, an anthem to the merits of flattening the curve. And Youtuber Hollens penned and performed the aptly titled The Epic Hand Washing Parody.
Throughout the highly produced video, the classically trained vocalist transforms everything from Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy to Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off to, of course, Lil’ Nas X’s Old Town Road into 20-second odes to proper technique.
“I had been fighting with my fiveyear-old, trying to get him to wash his hands properly,” Hollens said. He had seen some Tiktok videos touting the right way to clean, and he thought he’d never even washed his hands that thoroughly. “So if a 40-year-old father hasn’t been able to do it the right way, and I can’t get my son to do it at all, I think we can do something here that can entertain and teach people.”