Few things gall me more than poorly contextualized reporting. Even when it pertains to something relatively unimportant like pop music. Or something even less important like parodies of pop music. 

I published a post a week ago about “Weird” Al Yankovic in the Digital Age, about how his lifeblood, an album of songs, is pretty much beside the point by now. Not exactly a revolutionary statement. A week after Mandatory Fun has been in release, multiple publications announced that the record has reached heights the parodist has never before seen, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard album charts. The stories made it seem like it’s his greatest career achievement.

Which is wonderful…except it’s more of a case of the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. From what I can gather, the tens of millions of Youtube views for his barrage of accompanying videos translated into somewhere between 75,000 and 110,000 albums sold during the debut week. A couple of other numbers to consider:

• His best-known album, 1984’s “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D, went platinum (at least one million sold) but never ranked higher than 17 on Billboard’s U.S. album chart. No. 17! I can’t find the week-to-week breakdown, but I imagine he approached his current No. 1 sales in some seven-day periods.

• Just three years ago, before her own album sales tanked, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way sold 1.1 million albums in its first week.

Let me point out that I’ve always loved “Weird” Al, both for his (sometimes) oddly detailed lyrics and for putting out an album entitled Straight Outta Lynwood nearly two decades after that made sense. But his reaching the top of the Billboard charts in 2014 isn’t a sign of great triumph but rather an avoidance of complete disaster.

In a long-tail world, even No. 1 is a relative term.•