Everyone\u2019s Weird Al Yankovic story starts out the same way: \u201cWell I first heard him in middle school and thought he was funny!\u201d<\/p>\n
My story is no different. Weird Al is at the forefront of many of my middle school memories. Here was a guy with a sense of humor that seemingly applied perfectly to my age group. Luckily, as I have aged, my enjoyment of Weird Al\u2019s material has not diminished — which either means he creates timeless humor or I haven’t matured much beyond age 13. Maybe it’s a bit of both, since some (hell, most) of his songs are sophomoric in nature but are by no means exclusionary to adults.<\/p>\n
Today, much of what I find compelling about Yankovic\u2019s music is how well he pulls off the parodies. \u201cCanadian Idiot\u201d and \u201cWhite And Nerdy,\u201d in particular, play out as carbon copies of their serious counterparts, and yet again one needs to give serious props to Yankovic\u2019s band for nailing the various sounds.<\/p>\n
Then, of course, there is the razor sharp wit. The best example of this comes from the lead single \u201cWhite And Nerdy.\u201d On the surface, it would appear easy to mock the nerd, but how does one go about it without it sounding clich\u00e9d? Weird Al does it by combing the present day for cultural references. Wikipedia, Java Script, Minesweeper, Star Trek, a pimped out MySpace profile and the ever present ROTFLOL are all proudly mentioned as how nerdy Yankovic\u2019s character is, set to the tune of Chamillionarie’s hip-hop hit \u201cRidin.\u201d It’s hilarious.<\/p>\n
\u201cPancreas\u201d is a brilliant take on Brian Wilson, mixing Beach Boys and Wilson solo material together. This is the most impressive bit of music on the entire album. SMiLE<\/i> is not easy music to play, but Weird Al and Co. \u201ccopy\u201d it perfectly.<\/p>\n
However, the crown jewel, the song on which everything comes together, is \u201cTrapped In The Drive-Thru.\u201d R. Kelly\u2019s \u201cTrapped In the Closet\u201d bordered on parody all by itself, but Al just skewers the song, pushing it to even further hilarious heights. Yankovic has always used food as inspiration for his parodies, but I\u2019d be hard-pressed to find an example of where it\u2019s more suitable, as he sings for ten minutes about the long wait of sitting in and dealing with a drive-thru fast food place. It’s a lot funnier than it sounds.<\/p>\n
Of the original numbers, Al manages to put forth some of his best original material, period. \u201cDon\u2019t Download This Song\u201d is an absolute perfect takeoff of songs like \u201cWe Are The World\u201d but with lyrics about how downloading leads to doing drugs. Truth be told, somehow I get the picture the RIAA sees things as Al portrays them, which is scary in itself.<\/p>\n
The main problem with this disc is that since I don’t bother with pop radio, I don’t always recognize the parodies. Sometimes this is forgivable if Yankovic turns the song into a classic, but in this case the Usher and Taylor Hicks parodies just falter. <\/p>\n
And while the three aforementioned parodies and \u201cPancreas\u201d are great, much of the rest is run of the mill Yankovic, which keep this from being counted among his best work. Still, the good moments outweigh the average ones, meaning Yankovic fans will love this and newcomers will likely enjoy it as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":28523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6172],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-39984","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-weird-al-yankovic","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=39984"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=39984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}