The last time that “Weird Al” Yankovic seemed to enjoy cultural relevance as a parody artist may simply have been the last time that you were twelve years old. For me, that puts it at his album “Bad Hair Day,” from 1996, which featured the song “Amish Paradise,” a broadly funny repurposing of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” the then omnipresent single by the rapper Coolio. Sample Yankovic lyric: “At four-thirty in the morning I’m milkin’ cows / Jebediah feeds the chickens and Jacob plows … fool.” After hundreds of gleeful after-school listens, the original version of the song was entirely devoured. (Sorry, Coolio.) “Bad Hair Day” sold more than a million copies in the United States.
If you are a decade or so older, Weird Al’s moment would have been in 1984, when he had a No. 12 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart with his Michael Jackson parody “Eat It.” A decade younger, and it would have been his even bigger hit “White and Nerdy” (No. 6, 2006) based on the hip-hop song “Ridin’,” by Chamillionaire—which the rapper, flattered to have received the Weird Al treatment, credited with helping his original song to win a Grammy. “I thought I’d have to grow up and be an adult,” Yankovic recently told the New York Post. “That hasn’t happened yet.” Which is to say, we get older but he stays the same age—goofy, juvenile, exuberant, and proudly uncool, a gawky guy with a perm and a nasally, insistent voice, whose tastes run toward geek humor and polka.
Yet Yankovic’s longevity cannot be ascribed to the fact that the world turns over a new batch of dorky teens each year. He’s endured in the YouTube age, where parodists, many of whom surely grew up on Yankovic’s shtick, now need only an idea, a few friends, and some editing software to take their shots at the big names in music. He has more than three million followers on Twitter, and “White and Nerdy” has millions more views than the hit song that inspired it. This week, Yankovic has managed to blitz the Web with news of his latest album, “Mandatory Fun,” thanks largely to a promotional campaign which has him releasing a new video each day for eight days straight. On Monday it was “Tacky,” a joke on Pharrell’s “Happy.” On Tuesday, it was “Word Crimes,” in which Yankovic offers grammar lessons to the tune of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” Today, it’s a Lorde parody. Later this week will come riffs on Iggy Azalea and the Foo Fighters, among others.
Fans of Yankovic point out that he has outlasted many of the musicians whose work he’s sampled over the years (M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” became “I Can’t Watch This”). But his biggest hits have always relied on their timeliness (an M.C. Hammer song wouldn’t make much sense today), and his songs, like much of the pop he has skewered, haven’t aged especially well. His most durable parody, “Smells Like Nirvana,” off of a 1992 album with a great cover, remains funny more than twenty years after it came out because it is specifically about the song that it mocks, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” as well as about the disaffected commercial posturing that parts of the grunge scene came to represent. In the fake video, there’s an older guy in a suit rocking out in the audience, and a bald man has the words “This Space for Rent” on the back of his head. Kurt Cobain’s lyrics were perhaps not as hard to understand as Yankovic’s joke suggested (“It’s hard to bargle nawdle zouss ??? / with all these marbles in my mouth”), but his version nonetheless captured something essential about the Nirvana song: that it was culturally vital, a little self-important, and that it would make some people a lot of money.
His newest parodies lack that sharpness. In “Handy,” he turns Iggy Azalea’s current No. 1 hit, “Fancy,” into a song about a pompous repair man (“First things first I’m a craftsman / remodelling is my only passion”). Many of Yankovic’s songs feature this style of oddball narrative; he is not always, or even principally, a social satirist. (His Lorde sample on the new album turns her smash hit “Royals” into “Foil,” a song about tin foil.) Yet “Fancy” is massively popular and much discussed, and using the music to such a narrow end seems like a wasted chance. Azalea herself is a curious and polarizing figure, a tall, blonde Australian who moved to Miami before she turned sixteen, and who has adopted a persona that samples Dirty South rappers, Nicki Minaj, and Gwen Stefani. “Fancy” is catchy, brazen, and ridiculous—perfect pop—and it seems to demand not only that people listen to it but that they form an opinion about it. (Its music video is already a parody, of the nineties movie “Clueless.”) Yet Yankovic’s take has little to do with the song whose music it borrows; it’s as if it only exists to contain the line “I got ninety-nine problems but a switch ain’t one.” Or, to take a less generous view, Yankovic’s use of “Fancy” might be mere opportunism—any lyrics would be worth listening to when introduced by those addictive, now famous synth notes.
“Word Crimes,” meanwhile, is likely to be shared a lot on Facebook by the kinds of people who worry about the Oxford comma or gag at the sight of dangling participles. But “Blurred Lines,” the song on which it is based, has already been the subject of numerous parodies in the past year, for its odd video and clueless use of hashtags, and, more importantly, for its creepy and ominous sexual implications. One such parody, by Bart Baker, which more or less accuses Robin Thicke of being a sexual predator, has received twenty-four million views on YouTube. Compared to that, Yankovic’s grammar lesson seems pretty mild.
Of course, Yankovic wouldn’t write a song like that. He has never been a particularly angry or divisive social critic—his recurring themes about Americans’ addiction to television and lousy food and consumerism often seem more loving than scolding. After all, it is that very popular culture that has given Yankovic his ideas and furthered his career. And he has rarely risked offending musicians. He is well known for asking permission to use songs, even though fair-use laws would likely protect him from being sued. (In June, TMZ spotted him in Colorado, backstage at an Iggy Azalea concert, asking her if he could use the music to “Fancy.”) His one well-known beef was with Coolio, who claimed that he’d never given the O.K. for “Amish Paradise,” but they later patched things up. Yankovic seems naturally sunny and earnest, and, by this point, he’s an industry insider, with Grammy awards and platinum albums of his own. He’s also a genuine musician; he works with a band to recreate the music he samples, and his recurring polka Top Forty remix compilations are gamely, if maddeningly, performed. He’s not going to torch Robin Thicke or Iggy Azalea, and it is perhaps this good humor that continues to set him apart from the droves of other parodists online.
Among the new songs,“Tacky” is the closest that Yankovic gets to the Nirvana parody. While it doesn’t take a swipe at the incessant joyfulness of Pharrell’s big hit “Happy,” it does use its manic, upbeat vibe to introduce a series of funny images (“lovely pink-sequined Crocs”) and an underlying critique of modern “me” culture, with the repeated mantra “Bring me shame, can’t nothin’.” It’s something when Weird Al, the man who brought us “Like a Surgeon” and “Polka Face,” is calling us shameless.
