Since yesterday, Lady Gaga has given her blessing for "Perform This Way" to be included on Weird Al Yankovic's upcoming album. Reports differ on who started the fracas, but in any case the matter is settled.
I'm glad she approves, as the song is a funny one that reminds me of Al's "Smells Like Nirvana" in the way that it makes fun of the stylistic tics of the artist in question.
Showing posts with label Weird Al. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weird Al. Show all posts
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Gah!Gah!
Andrew Sullivan doesn't much care for Lady Gaga's new single and its Catholic League-baiting, nor Gaga herself:
This latest "diva" is a costume in search of musical innovation. And what's dismaying about this latest stunt is not its bravery (ha!) or its wit (please) but its dumb derivative barrel-scraping predictability. Madonna was sometimes prey to this, but a song and video like "Like A Prayer" actually did assert a form of spirituality that challenged a church grown stale. It had its moments. Gaga is a pale, plagiarizing echo of this. There's a particularly irritating appropriation of gay culture for general consumption, perhaps guiltily over-compensated by Gaga's crashing every gay rights event known to man. Perhaps this happens with every civil rights movement. In the end, the outsiders raid the insiders and give it back to them at 0.99 cents on iTunes. And I sure wouldn't stop anyone on this well-trodden path.
The appropriation of the gay rights movement doesn't much bug me; it's a generational thing, I suspect. Growing up in the shadow of of the AIDS epidemic instead of in the midst of it will do that. But the mistake here is in trying to take Gaga at all seriously. She's a disposable pop star making disposable--and so, so danceable--pop music, and she makes no apologies for it. Her gay rights activism is, like Glenn Beck and right wing paranoia, a happy marriage of conviction and commerce.
Gaga's calculated absurdity and queer audience cultivation have until now kept her ever-present in the public consciousness. But the two approaches are fundamentally at odds: the former is cool and cynical marketing, the latter impassioned and earnest. So when she birthed (hatched?) to the world "Born This Way," a gay pride anthem steeped in hip-shaking synths and Madonna homage (if not outright theft), one had to ask, "Is she serious?" It's the Shepard Fairey contradiction.
"Judas" has the opposite problem. Best interpreted as another bad romance song--it's cast from the same mold, right down to the chorus 'WhoooOOOOooooOOOOaaaa' and Gaga name-dropping in the babbley opening--the manufactured controversy of its provocative lyrics and Easter video release date smacks of trying too hard to get attention (her detractors would probably say it's been so all along). This happened to Marilyn Manson a decade ago and, more recently, to Sarah Palin. Eventually they pushed the boundaries farther than they could reach.
This is hardly the end of Gaga's career, and perhaps these latest missteps are just a hiccup. But I find it telling that one so aware of how the music industry operates would to refuse to allow Weird Al Yankovic to use his spot-on parody "Perform This Way" as the lead single off his next album. Such an honor is reserved for those who have "made it," which no one doubts Lady Gaga has. But where does go from there? One has to wonder how a figure whose public existence is premised on deconstructing the glittering ephemera of pop music, will grapple with her own eventual destruction.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Download These Songs?
(This is a long post. About Weird Al Yankovic. Because I can do whatever I want on my blog.)
Weird Al Yankovic has been more sensitive than most popular musicians to the changes in the media landscape over the past decade. Like all of them, he has had to figure out how to deal with online piracy. The industry, though concerned about the rise of Napster, was still doing well in 2000, and so Running With Scissors was a “conventional” album, without any extra features. By 2003 Napster was dead but a multitude of file-sharing programs sprung up in its place, and so Weird Al’s Poodle Hat included some, remixes, photos, and home videos to encourage people to buy the CD. 2006’s Straight Outta Lynnwood continued this trend by including on the other side of the disc a DVD with a 5.1 mix of the album, karaoke tracks, and high-quality videos for five of the songs, animated by some major names like Robot Chicken’s Seth Green and Ren & Stimpy creator John K. (It also had for its last song a delicious “We are the World”-style track called “Don’t Download This Song.”) The album went gold, so he must have been doing something right.
But along with rapid technological changes—in some ways, because of them—Weird Al has also had to contend with the atomization of the pop culture landscape. Few groups command the attention that Madonna and Michael Jackson did at the beginning of Al’s career, which makes for an almost complete dearth of targets for parody that a general audience would recognize; the fact is, there hardly exists a general audience anymore. And with the rise of YouTube and internet memes, pop culture is moving faster than before, increasing the challenge Al has always had, parodying the songs of yesteryear and trying to keep it timely.
Success has been more mixed on this front. Poodle Hat included a Backstreet Boys “I Want it That Way” parody about Ebay that was years too late, and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” redone as “Couch Potato,” was amusing, but it covered familiar ground (there’s a whole Weird Al compilation album about TV-based songs). Straight Outta Lynnwood was a much stronger album, even though the most recognizable song parodied (“American Idiot,” which became “Canadian Idiot,” natch) was by a 15 year-old pop-punk group. It helped that all of the songs, even the artist-stylistic parodies not based on any single song, had very particular targets to focus the lyrics’ silliness.
Since then Al has decided to release his music exclusively online, often on a track-by-track basis, the better to capture the zeitgeist of the week. Internet Leaks, which I only just found out a few days ago even though the songs have all been out for a year or more, is an online EP of five songs put out over the past couple years, put together in anticipation of a full album that is supposed to be released this year (last year?). I hope Al is saving the best tracks for the album, because the material here is all over the place.
As a song about being poor in the midst of the present economy, “Whatever You Like,” conceptually, has potential, and there are some funny likes (“Yo my wallet’s fat/Full of ones/It’s all about the Washingtons”). But the structure of the original song, also called “Whatever You Like” by T.I. (who?), straightjackets it with too many repeated phrases where there could be rhymes, and the name-dropping of things like HBO and Kinko’s is distracting.
“Craigslist” covers a lot of the same territory as Ebay, strange items to buy and sell online, and so is lyrically disappointing. But the song is a stylistic parody of the Doors, and a pretty good one too. Al does a surprisingly good Jim Morrison and the band does a pretty spot-on replication of the group’s signature keyboard-guitar mixture—Ray Manzarek guest keyboards!— and this ends up being enough to make it entertaining.
“Skipper Dan,” about a failed actor, is the best song of the five. The name-dropping here is almost exclusively movie- and theatre-based, which makes for some unexpected and funny rhymes: “The critics, they used to say/I was the new Olivier.” The bounciness of the music—a riff on Weezer, according to Wikipedia, final authority on everything—also makes for a nice contrast to the lyrics’ dourness. Bonus points for mentioning Speed the Plow.
The remaining two songs are throwaways. “CNR,” a White Stripes take-off, is about a man’s impressive accomplishments, sort of like Chuck Norris but merely randomly silly instead of reality-bendingly ridiculous. “Ringtone” doesn’t have much anywhere to go lyrically–no one likes Al’s ringtone—and as an attempt at mimicking Queen musically, it lacks the group’s lush song construction and Freddy Mercury’s camp theatricality.
Weird Al is at his best when he picks topics that either everyone is familiar with (Star Wars Episode 1 mashed up with “American Pie” for “The Saga Begins” is probably the best example), or that are at least specific enough that the ridiculousness and scattershot references come naturally (think nerd culture mixed with gangsta rap tropes in “White and Nerdy”). Too often here he just reaches for the goofy, such as CNR’s “He trained a rattlesnake to do his laundry,” that isn’t grounded in anything. This is, as mentioned, harder than ever to do, but in a world of Lady Gaga and Twilight—imagine, “Stokerface”!—it’s certainly not impossible. I’m still looking forward to the album.
Weird Al Yankovic has been more sensitive than most popular musicians to the changes in the media landscape over the past decade. Like all of them, he has had to figure out how to deal with online piracy. The industry, though concerned about the rise of Napster, was still doing well in 2000, and so Running With Scissors was a “conventional” album, without any extra features. By 2003 Napster was dead but a multitude of file-sharing programs sprung up in its place, and so Weird Al’s Poodle Hat included some, remixes, photos, and home videos to encourage people to buy the CD. 2006’s Straight Outta Lynnwood continued this trend by including on the other side of the disc a DVD with a 5.1 mix of the album, karaoke tracks, and high-quality videos for five of the songs, animated by some major names like Robot Chicken’s Seth Green and Ren & Stimpy creator John K. (It also had for its last song a delicious “We are the World”-style track called “Don’t Download This Song.”) The album went gold, so he must have been doing something right.
But along with rapid technological changes—in some ways, because of them—Weird Al has also had to contend with the atomization of the pop culture landscape. Few groups command the attention that Madonna and Michael Jackson did at the beginning of Al’s career, which makes for an almost complete dearth of targets for parody that a general audience would recognize; the fact is, there hardly exists a general audience anymore. And with the rise of YouTube and internet memes, pop culture is moving faster than before, increasing the challenge Al has always had, parodying the songs of yesteryear and trying to keep it timely.
Success has been more mixed on this front. Poodle Hat included a Backstreet Boys “I Want it That Way” parody about Ebay that was years too late, and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” redone as “Couch Potato,” was amusing, but it covered familiar ground (there’s a whole Weird Al compilation album about TV-based songs). Straight Outta Lynnwood was a much stronger album, even though the most recognizable song parodied (“American Idiot,” which became “Canadian Idiot,” natch) was by a 15 year-old pop-punk group. It helped that all of the songs, even the artist-stylistic parodies not based on any single song, had very particular targets to focus the lyrics’ silliness.
Since then Al has decided to release his music exclusively online, often on a track-by-track basis, the better to capture the zeitgeist of the week. Internet Leaks, which I only just found out a few days ago even though the songs have all been out for a year or more, is an online EP of five songs put out over the past couple years, put together in anticipation of a full album that is supposed to be released this year (last year?). I hope Al is saving the best tracks for the album, because the material here is all over the place.
As a song about being poor in the midst of the present economy, “Whatever You Like,” conceptually, has potential, and there are some funny likes (“Yo my wallet’s fat/Full of ones/It’s all about the Washingtons”). But the structure of the original song, also called “Whatever You Like” by T.I. (who?), straightjackets it with too many repeated phrases where there could be rhymes, and the name-dropping of things like HBO and Kinko’s is distracting.
“Craigslist” covers a lot of the same territory as Ebay, strange items to buy and sell online, and so is lyrically disappointing. But the song is a stylistic parody of the Doors, and a pretty good one too. Al does a surprisingly good Jim Morrison and the band does a pretty spot-on replication of the group’s signature keyboard-guitar mixture—Ray Manzarek guest keyboards!— and this ends up being enough to make it entertaining.
“Skipper Dan,” about a failed actor, is the best song of the five. The name-dropping here is almost exclusively movie- and theatre-based, which makes for some unexpected and funny rhymes: “The critics, they used to say/I was the new Olivier.” The bounciness of the music—a riff on Weezer, according to Wikipedia, final authority on everything—also makes for a nice contrast to the lyrics’ dourness. Bonus points for mentioning Speed the Plow.
The remaining two songs are throwaways. “CNR,” a White Stripes take-off, is about a man’s impressive accomplishments, sort of like Chuck Norris but merely randomly silly instead of reality-bendingly ridiculous. “Ringtone” doesn’t have much anywhere to go lyrically–no one likes Al’s ringtone—and as an attempt at mimicking Queen musically, it lacks the group’s lush song construction and Freddy Mercury’s camp theatricality.
Weird Al is at his best when he picks topics that either everyone is familiar with (Star Wars Episode 1 mashed up with “American Pie” for “The Saga Begins” is probably the best example), or that are at least specific enough that the ridiculousness and scattershot references come naturally (think nerd culture mixed with gangsta rap tropes in “White and Nerdy”). Too often here he just reaches for the goofy, such as CNR’s “He trained a rattlesnake to do his laundry,” that isn’t grounded in anything. This is, as mentioned, harder than ever to do, but in a world of Lady Gaga and Twilight—imagine, “Stokerface”!—it’s certainly not impossible. I’m still looking forward to the album.
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