Posted on 10/02/2023 6:29:18 PM PDT by Ciaphas Cain
In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by anybody, ever.”
Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody, “Beat It.”
This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.
This was a terrible idea and I regret everything.
(Excerpt) Read more at waxy.org ...
This might interest you.
Dare to be Stupid !
My Fav !
I can’t think of any Weird Al song that I don’t prefer to the ‘original(?)’. Even without the comedy, the guy has a great voice and is a great musician IMHO
Weird Al’s lyrics still roll through my head instead of Madonna, Queen, MJ, etc.
LOL! When my son was seven years old, he swore that Nirvanna stole from Wierd Al. He was adamant. I had to show him that the wierd Al song was called, “Smells like Nirvana.”
Same here. We’re pretty lucky, no? A different, and more wonderful, time.
To his credit, Kurt Cobain actually laughed off the parody. Other people like Coolio were livid though. Al wanted to do a parody of Lose Yourself by Eminem and was told no. A lot of the artists didn’t like Al.
Don McLean heard his kids play Weird Al’s “The Saga Begins” so many times that it was making him almost mess up whenever he performed “American Pie”.
Eminem allowed Al to parody “Lose Yourself”. Al’s version “Couch Potato” is the first song on the Poodle Hat album. What Eminem didn’t allow though was a parody video. Al regretted that, he said it could have been one of his best videos ever. But he honored Eminem’s request.
Al even used the same video director, word is Kurt gave him the number.
Pinging you two (and I got Laz’s name right this time :-)
Nothing better than a parody. Like the Bee.
I want him to do a song “look what they did to my thong, mom”
Al said Cobain arranged for them to have the whole set from the original video, access to original actors, etc. not sure he ever got that degree of cooperation from anyone else.
Actually, I’ve seen and heard many times that Wierd Al is very careful to make sure people are OK with his parody. Coolio was an exception; his label said yes without checking with him.
Weird Al is one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. He had a pretty good band backing him up.
I grew up on MAD magazine’s song parodies - starting from the early 1960s
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