4 posts tagged “video”
It's a capella!
It's annoying inside joke t-shirts!
It's song parodies!
(It's originally performed by some group named Moosebutter!)
It's everything that makes me wonder if the Internet isn't just a special present just for me.
If you've seen this before because you have a degree in advanced YouTube or something, sorry. Otherwise, this is superb.
Mighty Fairly's last CD was awesome, and a mainstay in our CD player for months, so I'm really excited about this song and the next CD.
Oh, and My America is an anagram for A Racy Mime.
If anyone happens to have a link to remixed Wow Wow Wubbzy cartoons on YouTube, please send it to me. It would really make my day to see them. So please, anyone with Wubbzy season two footage, just let me know.
Anytime.
I still like listening to Weird Al Yankovic. I enjoyed reading his entry on Wikipedia. I really enjoyed reading the Onion article about his entry on Wikipedia. I really, really enjoyed reading the edits Wikipedia made because of the Onion article. Like Mr. Groznic would say, I enjoy Weird Al on a deeper level than you do. Just today, I was humming the Pancreas song from his last album. (In particular, "My pancreas attracts every other pancreas in the universe, (with a) with a force proportional to the products of their masses, and inversely proportional to the distance between them. Woo-oo-oo-oo-oo.")
More than most artists, Weird Al received a boost in popularity because of the internet. It helped him in countless (five) unique ways:
- Controversy - Any parody that found its way to a file sharing site seemed to be labelled as one of Al's. This meant that his family-friendly, apolitical image was shaken as people searching for new Weird Al music found raunchy and offensive songs. Sure, this may have cost him a few fans, but it got people interested in what Al was really recording and got people (nerdy people) talking about him again, and specifically, visiting his website to verify which songs he actually wrote.
- Content - Food and TV were getting played out, but Al wanted to reach a wide audience by singing about something everyone can identify with. What screams "mass audience" louder than the world wide web? Food and TV, but remember, he was trying to get away from that. And the great thing is that the web is always changing, so Weird Al can release a song about Ebay while it's hot and then move on to YouTube, or whatever the next big fad is.
- Connections - Since "Eat It", small clusters of fans have created newsletters and materials for Weird Al. With the web, suddenly all of these projects can be brought together in one place. Weird Al's modus operandi is to take other people's work and make them funnier, so it seems perfectly natural that he'd promote other people doing the same with his work. Now, Weird Al's official website is filled with fan-made videos, and he can link to sites he approves of. All of this fan-love is showcased, which draws other fans to create other entries, and eventually starts attracting Academy Award winning talent like Bill Plympton.
- Consideration - A surefire way to appeal to a nerd is to hide a joke that takes some work to uncover, and Weird Al does this in spades. From hiding backward messages in songs to putting easter eggs on CDs, Al tries to reward those who look a little bit longer. The best example of this is style parodies, which make up four or five songs on every album. These are really riffs on an artist's style, more than on any one particular song, and part of the challenge is to figure out which artist this song is supposed to sound like. The other part of the challenge is giving up and looking it up somewhere, and that's where the internet comes in handy. The Internet is invaluable as an answer key.
- Condoleeza Rice - OK, I guess there are just four ways.
