I remember an interview where Al was talking about his early career. Madonna asked him “When ya gonna do ‘Like a Surgeon’”? They talked about it, and she said “But only if I can be in the video.” Al, who was MUCH less popular than Madonna at the time, couldn’t say “Okay!” fast enough.
And then they fell madly in love. Madonna was a terrible influence on Al, leading him to a life of debauchery and selfishness, which culminated down to Columbia, where he was involved in a shootout with Pablo Escobar... or so his autobiographical movie told me.
A few weeks ago, I think I read (here on Lemmy!) that he regretted his beef. In fact, I think he said he thought his managers gave him bad information to cause the beef.
Before that I didn't even know there was any, so please don't think me any kind of expert on the topic.
I never really get the point they're trying to make in these comic parodies (if there is any), which makes it less meaningful to me if people eat the onion.
They're usually a parody of shitty Ben Garrison political cartoons, but artists are expected to crank out more and more content and this guy has found his niche. So you eventually start getting some that aren't really a parody of anything; except maybe his own work. Although this one is specifically about parodies... I'm just gonna step away before this gets too meta.
I haven't exactly been to a large number of big concerts in my life, but still I have to say that Weird Al's was the best. It was late 90s. He played every one of his hits in costume and nailed it every time. For the finale, he buried the front rows (I was in row 2) in fake bubble snow while playing Christmas at Ground Zero. It was gloriously ridiculous. 10/10 experience. Hardest working man in showbiz. UHF was a documentary. (I still haven't seen the new movie. I really should get on that.)
The biopic? It's good. Not as funny as it could have been, but Radcliffe is amazing and you learn many interesting facts about Al (like the steamy relationship with Madonna).
Music royalties are weird. Somebody that understood it way better than me explained it probably better than I will. From what I remember there is basically a performance, lyrics, and music portion. So when an artist covers a song they only get the performance part. The original artist gets the other two parts(assuming the music/lyrics weren’t written by somebody else). Since Al is redoing the lyrics he gets the performance and lyrics part but he’s still sticking money in the original artists pockets for the music portion. Most artists are plenty happy to have Al use one of their songs.
If you think this is true and that creating entirely new lyrics to a song that are both coherent and also funny isn't a talent, I'd like to hear your parody song. Oh not to mention actually playing an instrument and being able to sing well.
I write parody lyrics all the time, they are childish and incredibly vulgar.
Like the time I off the top of my head changed the lyrics to "I want to break free" to "I want to fuck Steve" and serenaded my buddy Steven. I made it through most of the song with it being pretty close.
I said "I need to write that down" and Steve was like "Nah, spontaneously that shit was funny. Writing it down would just make it weird" I was inclined to agree.
It's the law that you can make fun of famous works of art for comedy, social commentary, parody, and just to make fun of them.... Which is very interesting. It's interesting that that was decided and made a law.
Kind of iffy to post this outside of that context, IMO. Maybe some of the other works from this author are more obvious, but it's really hard to recognize this one as satire if you don't already know it.