...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!
"Weird Al" Yankovic (Music)
- 7 statements
- 0 feature instances
- 8 referencing feature instances
| "Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | label |
"Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | |
| "Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | page |
WeirdAlYankovic | |
| "Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | comment |
The reigning king of Song Parody, Alfred Matthew Yankovic (born October 23, 1959), is an American musical humorist with a career spanning over 40 years.Sometime in 1966, a door-to-door salesman stopped by the Yankovic household offering either guitar or accordion lessons; according to Al, his parents figured that "the world needed one more accordion-playing Yankovic" (the first being polka legend Frankie Yankovic, to whom Al is not related), and young Alfred received his first lesson the day before his seventh birthday. As a teenager, he became a fan of Los Angeles-based radio host Dr. Demento, known for playing wacky novelty songs. Al began recording his own humorous songs in his bedroom with his accordion and mailing them to the good Doctor, who played them on the air; according to Al, Demento appreciated the novelty of a geeky teenager with an accordion thinking he was "cool". Al's first songs included "Belvedere Cruising" (an original ode to his family's car, a 1964 Plymouth Belvedere) and "Dr. D Superstar", a parody of "Jesus Christ Superstar" rewritten to be about Dr. Demento.When Al went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to earn an architecture degree, he began performing his songs at the campus coffeehouse and worked for the school's radio station as a disc jockey, where he picked up the nickname "Weird Al". Sometime before he was kicked off the station for refusing to follow various airplay rules, he went across the hall into the men's bathroom with his accordion and recorded a parody of The Knack's "My Sharona" entitled "My Bologna", which became one of the most popular songs on The Dr. Demento Show in the following weeks. Knack frontman Doug Fieger turned out to be a fan of "My Bologna", and got the song released as a single on Capitol Records under a short-term contract.Al scored another minor hit in 1980 with "Another One Rides the Bus" (a parody of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust") and decided to pursue a career in music, feeling that architecture wasn't really his calling. After a modest start (including a disastrous gig opening for Missing Persons), Al and his band released his first album on Scotti Bros. Records in 1983, then hit it big with his second album thanks to "Eat It" (a song and music video parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It") peaking at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.While his career has had various peaks and valleys, Al has been fully committed to the comedy genre since the beginning, with most of his albums during the '80s and '90s going platinum. Much of his early success has been attributed to the use of music videos to spread awareness of his songs, and he continues to adapt to changes in both comedy tastes and media consumption. Al shrewdly used Viral Marketing to saturate social media with publicity for his 2014 album Mandatory Fun, and he was rewarded with that album debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 (his first number one album ever).Prior to 2014, Al usually released a new album and went on tour once every three to four years, which led John Garabedian of Open House Party to say that "every album is [Al's] comeback album, and then he goes away until the next one". After fulfilling his record contract with the release of Mandatory Fun, Al switched to fully-digital releases, giving him the opportunity to release new songs as they're completed instead of waiting until he has enough material for a full album.Unlike other parody-centric artists, Al and his band (from the second album on) stay extremely close to the original melodies and instrumentation of the song they parody. In the most extreme example of this attention to detail, "Trapped in the Drive-Thru" (based on R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet") sounds exactly like the original. Al is additionally very sympathetic to geek communities and frequently gives them recognition in his songs. His habit of using pop culture metaphors (a.k.a. "Pulling a Weird Al") led to his being the former Trope Namer for that.The popularity of Al's work eventually created Parody Displacement. In the early days of filesharing (LimeWire especially), a lot of comedy/parody songs were falsely attributed to Al. The Not Al List was created to catalog these songs and give them the proper attribution. Lots of these songs contain raunchy or offensive lyrics, and the lead vocal vaguely sounds like Al; since Al is the most visible parody musician alive, his name gets attached to them, despite having subject matter and lyrics that he would never touch. Even with the occasional dip into raunchy subtext, he still aims to be (in his words) a "more-or-less family-friendly" performer. The best way to tell if Al performed a given song is to look for music videos of them on YouTube. Take your heart medication first — wouldn't want to Die Laughing.Over his career, Al has won five Grammys altogether: three for various albums, one for a video, and one for his 2017 collector's boxset Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of "Weird Al" Yankovic. Al was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in August 2018, and in 2022, Multimorphic released Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity, a Licensed Pinball Table based on Al's works.In non-musical work, Al starred in the 1989 film UHF, and in 2022 wrote and appeared in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a 100% totally accurate and unembellished autobiographical film starring Daniel Radcliffe as Al. He also had a short-lived CBS "kids' show" in the 1990s, The Weird Al Show, and wrote two children's books, When I Grow Up and My New Teacher and Me.Al's distinctive voice has appeared in a number of cartoons, with his roles ranging from one-off gag characters, supporting roles, and even the title characters of the Animal Man Animated Adaptation and the Disney XD cartoon Milo Murphy's Law. He has been involved with the Transformers franchise for twenty years, beginning with "Dare To Be Stupid" featured in the 1986 movie soundtrack to voicing Wreck-Gar in 2007's Transformers: Animated.In 2002, Al married Suzanne Krajewski, a marketing executive, and their daughter Nina was born in 2003. | |
| "Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | fetched |
2024-03-08T22:02:26Z | |
| "Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | parsed |
2024-03-08T22:02:26Z | |
| "Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | processingComment |
Page marked to be ignored, dropping links (630). | |
| "Weird Al" Yankovic (Music) | isPartOf |
DBTropes |
The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.
Copyright of DBTropes.org wrapper 2009-2013 DFKI Knowledge Management. Imprint. - Thanks to Bakken&Baeck for hosting. Contact.
Copyright of data TVTropes.org contributors under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Copyright of data TVTropes.org contributors under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.