Weird Al does it again...

Okay, you think it would be easy to write a song parody.  And let's face it, there are many pretenders out there, especially in the age of YouTube.  But c'mon.  For thirty-five years, there has been one master, and that is Al Yankovic, the Weird-master.

I must work on a longer piece concerning Weird Al, but he's got a new record out, called Mandatory Fun, and as part of the promotion, he's releasing eight videos in eight days. (Not sure if we're supposed to celebrate with candles.)  The first two are out, and they are just dead-on. 

Yesterday, "Tacky,"  a parody of Pharrell's "Happy,"  came out, thanks to nerdist.com.   I'm still hypnotized by Al's pants from the opening verse.  For this track, Al had some friends lip-synch, and yes, Jack Black is last and funniest, but give props to Kristen Schaal and Al's old buddy Margaret Cho for their moves, too. What's great about the lyrics he comes up with here is that they show a man fully in touch with the pop culture of the era.  "I instagram every meal I've had," he declares. and later, "I would live-tweet a funeral, take selfies of the deceased." 

Today's release took on Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines."  It's one of those cases where the imagery of the video is almost necessary to appreciate the humor. (It helps to have an English degree, which luckily, I do.)  Where Thicke had a number of controversies associated with the song and its video, Al doesn't give us any thing but text text and more text, as he tackles internet writing, which is prone to a real butchering of the language. 

Funnily enough, some of the computer screen images he shows us take us back to Windows 95, but it makes sense because 1)it suggests that the singer is of an era before social media reduced our words to tiny characters and 2) that little joke about the "biohazard bin" next to the recycle bin is a perfect throwaway (so to speak). 

I still don't know how he does it, really.  Hell, I wrote more than a few song parodies in high school and college, some of which I'm even proud of (like my "Money for Nothing" parody that rips McDonald's), but then I grew up.  Al has made a full career and has pulled it off brilliantly.  I suppose he has an advantage in that he works with the contemporary music scene, so that his act is not all that tired. He's moved from the Knack ("My Bologna") to MJ ("Eat It" and "Fat") to Coolio ("Amish Paradise"), but even as he's done so, he's looked backward musically to stay up on the contemporary cultural scene (e.g. the Star Wars songs "Yoda" and "The Saga Begins").   And he's also given the great DJ Doctor Demento new material for decades.  (It was the good Doctor who discovered Al back in 1980.)  I'm just in awe.  Imagine if the Stones could be this inventive.  (Mick and Keith, or even Fred and Barney.)