Ten years ago this week, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Mandatory Fun became the first comedy album to top the Billboard album chart since Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut in August 1963. The years following that triumph have been a busy time for Yankovic, marked by multiple world tours, a stint as the bandleader on Comedy Bang! Bang!, the recording of “The Hamilton Polka,” and the release of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a brilliantly twisted biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe that racked up many awards, including an Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie.
One thing he didn’t do was give any contemporary pop songs the “Weird Al” treatment. That finally changes today with the release of “Polkamania!,” a brand new polka medley that makes up for lost time by mashing together hits of the past decade by Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, Adele, Olivia Rodrigo, Lil Nas X, and others.
“There’s just so many songs that I probably should have taken a stab at over the past ten years,” Yankovic tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “And for whatever reason, I let them go by the wayside. This is my chance to correct my past errors and at least do a lot of those songs polka-style.”
Polka medleys are a “Weird Al” tradition going back to his 1984 album “Weird Al Yankovic” in 3-D, on which he crammed bits of 13 songs — including “My Generation,” “Hey Jude,” and “Every Breath You Take” — into a zany four minute and 20 second polka. They’ve appeared on every album since that time, but Yankovic turned to other pursuits after the release of Mandatory Fun in 2014.
Creating “Polkamania!” required Yankovic to reacquaint himself with the Top 40. “Over the last 10 years, my radar isn’t as strong as it used to be in terms of pop singles,” he says. “I don’t follow the charts as slavishly as I did prior to 2014. So I figured that any song that I, as an old guy, was still very familiar with, that’s got to be a big hit song. So I just went down the list of all the Number One Billboard songs of the last 10 years, and I picked a dozen that I thought were the most memorable.”
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The landmark 1994 Supreme Court case Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. held that parody songs are legally permissible under the doctrine of fair use, meaning that Yankovic doesn’t technically have to seek permission of artists before recording their music. But he’s always done so anyway to maintain good relations, and avoid awkward public spats.
The polka medleys are slightly different situations. “Unless you get a specific permission, you have to pay the full publishing rate for every song in the medley,” Yankovic explains. “If I didn’t get a deal from everybody, that would mean that I would lose a lot of money every time somebody bought a copy.” To make the medleys viable, artists have to agree to take a smaller royalty congruent with whatever percentage of their song is in the medley. Publishing companies are likely to balk at such a request, so Yankovic and manager Jay Levey appeal directly to the artists. “They actually think it’s cool,” Yankovic says, “and they like the idea of being in a Weird Al polka medley.”
Taylor Swift had no objection when he turned “You Belong With Me” into “TMZ” on 2011’s Alpocalypse, and she had no problem with “Shake It Off” appearing in the new polka medley. “Thankfully, she has a great sense of humor,” Yankovic says. “Her management was very, very cool, and I was very happy to get that. Once Taylor Swift signed on, I was like, ‘Okay, well, we’ve got a medley now.’”
From the very beginning, he knew that Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 hit “WAP” had to be a part of the song. The famously G-rated artist has a long history of taking risqué songs like “Closer,” “The Humpty Dance,” and “I Touch Myself” and finding clever ways to make them child-friendly. “I remember I was on a walk late by myself one night,” Yankovic says, “and I just thought, ‘How am I going to actually do that polka-style and make it family-friendly?’ Then I thought of the sound effects [like a cat’s meow in place of the word “pussy”], and I was like, ‘Okay, that’s going to work.’”
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The only problem was getting Cardi B to sign off. When he didn’t receive any feedback from the initial outreach, he turned to his friend Jamie Lee Curtis, who happens to know Offset, Cardi B’s husband. “Jamie Lee Curtis and I made a video together,” Yankovic says. “We said, ‘We would love for your song to be in the polka medley,’ and sent it to [Offset] and then he got ahold of somebody else, and he got it figured out. But I had to make a special video with Jamie Lee Curtis to get their attention.”
The only artist who proved to be unreachable was SZA. “We wanted to include ‘Kill Bill’ because we thought that’d be really funny as a polka, and we didn’t get a no, but we just got no response,” says Yankovic. “It was very odd. And I know her agent. We went through several angles just to get an answer from her, and we were not able to get as much as a yes or no.” (On the extreme other end, getting his friend Lin Manuel-Miranda to sign off on “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” required just a quick text.)
Once the song — which also features bits of Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next,” Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” Ed Sheeran’s ” Shape of You,” Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” “Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” — was finished, Yankovic turned to an all-star crew of animators and filmmakers to create a video. The list of collaborators includes Bill Plympton, Liam Lynch, Jarrett Heather, British animator Cyriak, and A24’s Hazbin Hotel creator Vivienne Medrano.
The release of “Polkamania!” is likely to raise hopes in the “Weird Al” fan community that a full-fledged parody song will surface in the near future. And even though he teased the possibility of one-off parodies back in 2014, he says that his mind has changed pretty significantly in that regard.
“I’m at a point in my life where I feel like I want to just try new things,” he says. “I mean, I’ve been following the same formula for four decades, and I want to get more involved in feature films and TV, and I love voice acting. I want to still keep doing music, and I still love touring, obviously. But doing new parodies just… I don’t know. I’m not ruling it out, but it’s just not my focus anymore.”
Yankovic has been off the road since the second incarnation of his Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, which centered around deep cuts and non-parody songs from his back catalog, wrapped up in March 2023. It was preceded by his Strings Attached symphonic tour. He’s very tight-lipped when asked about future touring plans, but says he will be hitting the road again at some point.
“That is very much being talked about, and barring unforeseen circumstances, it will happen in the future,” he says. “But I can’t confirm when exactly yet.” Will there be a theme to it, like the previous couple of tours? “It’s a little bit of a theme,” he says.
He hasn’t performed his 1988 Michael Jackson parody “Fat” since 2016 even though it was a staple of every single tour up until that point. For a multitude of reasons, he’s not sure he’ll ever do it again. “On one tour in particular, those documentaries had just come out and people were kind of upset about that, and I didn’t want to make people uncomfortable,” he says. “But now it’s more that it feels like it’s a bit dated in several ways, and I’ve done it over 1,000 times on stage.”
“I don’t know,” he continues. “It’s a big fan favorite. I don’t personally think it’s offensive because I think it’s all about body positivity. I know a lot of people would say it’s in bad taste at this point, and it is very cumbersome to wear that costume on stage. That probably is not going to make the set list for the next tour, but I’m not going to rule it out entirely sometime down the line.”
He’s also not willing to rule out a follow-up to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. The 2022 film was successful beyond his wildest hopes, opening up Hollywood doors that have been closed to him since UHF stiffed at the box office in 1989. “I’ve kind of made a joke that I release a movie every 33 years, like clockwork,” he says. “But I’d like to think that now that I’ve got a movie under my belt that actually got good reviews and seems to be very popular and is, in fact, award-winning, that’s opened a few doors to me. I can’t really talk about what’s in development, but we’re going to try for some more feature films.”
Spoiler Alert: Radcliffe’s “Weird Al” character dies in a blaze of gunfire at the 1985 Grammys at the end of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, but that doesn’t mean a sequel is impossible. “I can’t confirm or deny, but it might be the first biopic ever with a sequel,” he says. “It could be a zombie movie. Who knows?”
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A Broadway musical is also in the realm of possibility. “We’re thinking about it,” he says. “We’re having conversations. I actually did get to make my Broadway debut earlier this year as one of the producers for Gutenberg! The Musical! So that was a lot of fun.”
One thing he can say is that fulfilling the terms of his record contract in 2014 has given him a wonderful sense of freedom. “It’s nice not owing anybody anything or have that over my head,” Yankovic says. “And it’s nice not to have to ask permission, because when I was under contract or a record label, if somebody said, ‘Hey, do you want to plan my album?’ or ‘Hey, do you want to do this with me?’ I’d have to say, ‘Well, let me ask my record label first.’ And now I can do whatever I want to do.”
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Publish date : 2024-07-19 10:03:56
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