Thread: Weird Al Yankovic

11:00 am ET
Jul 21, 2014
‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Wraps 8 Days of Videos With ‘Mission Statement’

“Weird Al” Yankovic wraps up his eight-day string of video releases with “Mission Statement,” which premieres today on Speakeasy.

The song, from Yankovic’s new album “Mandatory Fun,” is in the style of Crosby, Stills & Nash (think “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” or “Carry On”). The song features Yankovic harmonizing with himself on lyrics constructed of corporate jargon, like “operationalize our strategies” and “leverage our core competencies,” while the animated whiteboard video depicts a live-action hand that is drawing illustrations to go with the words.

http://vevo.ly/zTDyrD

http://vevo.ly/zTDyrD

“I wanted to do a song about all the ridiculous double-speak and meaningless buzzwords that I’ve been hearing in office environments my entire life,” Yankovic says by e-mail. “I just thought it would be ironic to juxtapose that with the song stylings of CSN, whose music pretty much symbolizes the antithesis of corporate America.”

Yankovic tapped TruScribe to make the video, which took about 10 months to complete, says Eric Oakland, chair and chief innovation officer of the Fitchburg, Wis., company. Yankovic had a “pretty clear” idea of what he wanted, Oakland says, and the agency’s artists worked together to flesh out the singer’s concept. “We hadn’t done anything like that before,” Oakland says. “We had done long-form, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, but to be lyric heavy—music creates a mood that you have to match, too.

Though Yankovic doesn’t always know whether the artists he’s parodying hear his versions, Graham Nash certainly did. Yankovic said in a recent Reddit AMA chat that when he ran into Nash last year in New York, Nash asked when Yankovic was going to record a parody of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Yankovic wrote, “I whipped out my iPhone and played ‘Mission Statement’ for him. Instant request! (He loved it, BTW.)”

Yankovic has already released videos for the “Mandatory Fun” songs “Word Crimes” (a take on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”), “Tacky” (a spoof of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”) and “Foil” (a parody of Lorde’s “Royals”).

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/...ent-exclusive/

America’s Stupid and Self-Obsessed Capitalist Culture, Perfectly Lampooned by ... Weird Al?
Why the nerd comic might be the most relevant artist of the moment.
July 30, 2014

Remember Weird Al Yankovic? That geekmeister from the '80s who did hilarious parodies of pop hits? He’s back, and critics are calling him one of the most relevant voices of the moment, one going so far as to pronounce him “America’s greatest living artist.” His new album, “Mandatory Fun,” just rocketed to the top of the Billboard 200 on its debut week — the first parodic album ever to do so.

Looks like something’s percolating in pop culture, revealing our growing discontent with America’s twisted brand of capitalism. Is it any wonder? We know we’re lied to. We know we’re manipulated. We get that the country is stuck in airtight self-obsession. So we’re starting to gravitate toward artists who confront our slow-boiling anxiety. If death-obsessed pop siren Lana Del Rey (whose “Ultraviolence” album topped the charts earlier in July) is the zombie bride of capitalism, Weird Al is the court jester.

Maybe we really need him just now.

Who is this guy, anyway?

Raised on Mad Magazine and encouraged by his parents to learn the accordion, Weird Al cut his comedic teeth on Dr. Demento's radio show in the late '70s and early '80s, where he began to conjure catchy parodies of songs like “My Sharona” (“My Bologna”) and “Another One Bites the Dust” (“Another One Rides the Bus”). If you’re Gen X, you remember gleefully sharing and savoring these tunes along with your Cheetos during lunchtime.

Eventually he grabbed the national spotlight with his 1984 monster hit “ Eat It,” a parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” A hero to sci-fi nerds and to every kid burdened with an inner bullshit detector on high alert, Weird Al became a crusader against clichés and an antidote to the toxic inanities of pop culture.

Somewhere along the way, he started moving beyond simply goofy and spoofy to something deeper. Obesity, grunge rock, the Amish — there was no sacred cow he would not poke. He held up a funhouse mirror to our foibles. By 2006, he was introducing a younger generation to his comedic gifts with the hit “White and Nerdy,” a send-up of the hip-hop song “Ridin,'” in which he portrays a Dungeons & Dragons-playing science dork with dreams of bling and hangin' with the gangstas.

Off the Charts

Comedians typically get less cred than other artists, but that doesn't make them any less essential to us. With “Mandatory Fun,” Weird Al takes his rightful place among those who have explored our strained relationship with the American dream, forcing us to grapple with its contradictions and disappointments. From Charlie Chaplin up through the Yes Men, Russell Brand and Stephen Colbert, these clear-eyed tricksters have connected us to our pain and channeled our collective revulsion.

Why does Weird Al stick to comedy? His answer, in typical fashion, mocks the question and inverts its logic. “There's enough people that do unfunny music,” Weird Al once said. “I'll leave the serious stuff to Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline.”

For his most recent blockbuster album, Weird Al cleverly used social media to market and grab viral attention, releasing eight videos on YouTube one at a time. More than 46 million people watched. Album sales surged.

In “ First World Problems,” done in the style of the Pixies, Al takes on our bourgeois obsession with comfort and consumption, while simultaneously poking fun at the indie rock preoccupations of suburban white kids who complain about their cushy lives: “My house is so big I can’t get wi-fi in the kitchen,” whines the douchey blonde kid Al plays in the video.

“Tacky,” set to the tune of Pharrell’s overplayed hit “Happy,” skewers not only the tackiness of dressing cluelessly, but wandering the Earth in a solipsistic bubble: “Nothing wrong with wearin’ stripes and plaid/I Instagram every meal I’ve had…Can’t nothin’ bring me shame.” The brilliance lies in the intimation that the happiness sold by slick pop icons like Pharrell is predicated on a state of oblivious solipsism that cuts us off from the plight of our fellow humans.

Perhaps the best song of all is the Crosby, Stills & Nash-inspired “ Mission Statement,” made for everyone who has found herself sinking in the mire of meaningless gibberish that flows through the modern corporate office. In the video, which features that annoyingly overused trope of a hand scribbling illustrations, the despair of office alienation is juxtaposed with the relentlessly upbeat buzzwords and conventions taught in MBA schools. What’s particularly resonant about this song is how Al skewers the corporate capitalism which promised us all the wonders of efficiency, harmony and prosperity, only to deliver us to Dilbert’s cubicle of despair.

In “Mission Statement,” the dreams of love and peace echoed in '60s folk tunes have congealed into a nightmare in which we can’t escape capitalism’s relentless propaganda. Instead, we're brought to a kind of posthuman wretchedness in which we are forced to speak in the tongues of the market's abstract gods.

As students of the human psyche know, the line between humor and horror is often thin. Weird Al gets us to laugh when we might ordinarily scream. Lighthearted though he may seem, there’s a deeply moral theme in “Mandatory Fun,” about how capitalism’s servants — narcissism, greed, vulgarity, and all-around douchiness — have to carry out its orders to beat us into a pulverized pulp of compliance.

He gets our number because he does what we all yearn to do: He bites back.


http://www.alternet.org/culture/amer...ooned-weird-al

Obama - the Dali Lama - and The Pope ....

Watch 'Weird Al' Yankovic Try to Save RadioShack in New Holiday Commercial
By Chris Payne | November 12, 2014

Can "Weird Al" Yankovic save RadioShack from 21st-century competitors Best Buy and Amazon? Maybe!

At any rate, the Shack recently shared a great new commercial for this holiday season featuring the singer-comedian, who's riding high off a super-successful 2014 album cycle. In the clip, Al breaks into song to attend to RadioShack customers, at least momentarily preventing them from running off to Target.



According to Weird Al's musical sales pitch, RadioShack's electronic toys are "for girls and boys and even cousin Bob, who's 43 and lives at home." And don't even get him started on batteries!

"Weird Al" released the album Mandatory Fun in July, which earned him his first No. 1 on the Billboard 200, with 104,000 copies sold in its first week (according to Nielsen SoundScan).

http://www.billboard.com/articles/ne...ebook_20141112