Music Friday: Happy Birthday, "Weird Al" Yankovic!

Keith Chaffee, Librarian, Collection Development,
Weird Al Yankovic

Musical comedians don't tend to have long careers. Political satirist Tom Lehrer retired after about a decade; folk-singer parodist Allan Sherman's moment in the spotlight lasted for two years. So what are the odds that an accordion-playing clown would still be going strong after more than 40 years? "Weird Al" Yankovic was born on October 23, 1959, and his mix of song parodies and polka medleys has been getting laughs for decades.

Yankovic had his first accordion lesson at the age of 5, and was just as precocious academically. He started kindergarten a year early, skipped the second grade, and graduated from high school two years early as valedictorian.

Yankovic was studying architecture at California Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo when he gave a tape of his songs to Dr. Demento, who hosted a weekly radio show of comedy and novelty records. Dr. Demento began playing his music, and the career of "Weird Al" was launched. His earliest parodies, released on small independent labels, began to get national attention, and in 1983, his first album, "Weird Al" Yankovic, was released. It gathered those earlier successes—"My Bologna," "Another One Rides the Bus," "I Love Rocky Road." The new single, "Ricky", a parody of Toni Basil's "Mickey" became an MTV hit, and Yankovic quit his day job.

The 1984 album In 3-D gave Yankovic his first big hit when he reached #12 on the charts with "Eat It," inspired by Michael Jackson's "Beat It." The album also introduced one of Yankovic's trademarks—a medley of recent pop hits, with their original lyrics instead of parody lyrics, performed as polkas, complete with accordion solos, yodel breaks, and goofy sound effects.

Weird Al at the Grammy Awards

Weird Al Yankovic leads the style parade, wearing a bold print tie and pink tennies. He said it was a night for "generic fashion", [February 26, 1986]. Photo credit: Anne Knudsen, Herald Examiner Collection

In 1989, Yankovic ventured into movies with UHF, playing the manager of a small-town TV station. It gave him the chance to extend his parodies beyond music to the cliches of TV commercials, game shows, soap operas, and other formulaic programming. The movie wasn't very well received by audiences or critics, though it has a loyal cult following, and the soundtrack album features an all-Rolling Stones polka medley.

In addition to the polka medleys and the parodies of specific songs for which he is best known, Yankovic does write original songs, though even they are usually parodies of a sort, meant to be imitations of the general style of particular singers or bands. The title song from the 1985 album Dare to Be Stupid was an imitation of Devo, for instance, and "Trigger Happy" is a song that the Beach Boys might have written if they'd grown up with shotguns instead of surfboards.

Under current copyright law in the United States, Yankovic is free to record parodies without permission, but it is his policy to always ask permission of the original songwriters/performers. He says that he is rarely turned down, and that most people see it as a mark of success to be parodied by Yankovic. There are exceptions; Prince refused several requests, and Yankovic couldn't get the ok for an all-Led Zeppelin polka medley. Some singers have denied rights to specific songs for various reasons. Michael Jackson thought that the message of "Black or White" was too important to be trivialized as "Snack All Night," and vegetarian Paul McCartney didn't want to see "Live and Let Die" turned into "Chicken Pot Pie." Yankovic occasionally performs such no-permission songs in concert, but has never recorded them.

Yankovic's career has been unusually steady. He has had exactly one top forty hit in each decade since "Eat It" in the 80s—the Nirvana parody "Smells Like Nirvana" in the 90s; "White and Nerdy," based on Chamillionaire's "Ridin'," in the 00s (his biggest hit ever, reaching #9 on the charts); and "Word Crimes," inspired by Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," in the 10s. In recent years, he's begun taking advantage of the speed allowed by digital distribution to release songs in smaller batches, while whatever song he's parodying is still on people's minds. Several of those songs are collected in the digital-only release Internet Leaks.

He's also found other unusual ways to promote his music. Yankovic introduced his most recent album, 2014's Mandatory Fun, by releasing a new video every day for eight days. The publicity those videos generated helped to make Mandatory Fun his first #1 album, an unexpected feat after forty years and fourteen albums.

In addition to the albums linked above, the rest of Yankovic's albums are available for streaming or download at Freegal.


 

 

 

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