“Weird” Al Yankovic

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“In A Long-Tail World, Even No. 1 Is A Relative Term”

July 23, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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.•

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“I’m Feeling Like This Is Probably My Last Conventional Album”

July 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his 1983 Police parody, “King Of Suede,” “Weird” Al Yankovic sang an ode to mom-and-pop stores, to the last time mail-order catalogs and video arcades would matter, to the moment just before the whole world could fit into your pocket, disappear there. It was a sweet, nostalgic and sad song, released on a vinyl album which was sold in record stores and counted down by Casey Kasem. More than three decades later, Yankovic is releasing his latest send-ups as an album, a format that’s largely lost its groove. He’s his own mom-and-pop store now, in danger of closing. From “The Winter of Weird Al,” Steven Hyden’s Grantland piece about the parodist’s precarious place in the new normal, where the 45s and 78s have vanished into the 0s and 1s: 

“‘Is the album dead?’ is an old canard that comes up regularly in very thinky think pieces each time another mediocre quarterly sales report is released. But as it pertains specifically to musical parody albums, the format truly does seem to be operating on dial-up speed in a breathless, web-oriented universe. At least the Lonely Island and Tenacious D are known for original material, which makes buying their albums seem sort of worth it. But Weird Al subsists solely on the rapidly staling bread of pop-culture ephemera. He might have benefited from the record-label system for much of his career, but his music was proto-viral back when the Internet was just an idea hypothesized by Weird Al–loving Poindexters.

In the past, Weird Al’s timing was perhaps his greatest asset. Right when the culture seemed to be tiring of a particular song or artist, the Weird Al parody would appear. It was the sign of an artist reaching ‘we love you, but we also can’t stand you’ stardom. But that timing now seems rather, well, sluggish, and this has caused Weird Al to drift back into a crowded field. Now that the release of Mandatory Fun completes Yankovic’s record contract, it seems wise to explore more expedient alternatives.

When I asked Yankovic if it still made sense for him to make albums in the future, he was eager to steer the conversation back to the record he had already made and was trying to promote. But in spite of the hemming and hawing, he was pretty clear about what’s next.

‘I don’t want to draw any hard lines in the sand, because I’d like to leave all my options open, but I’m feeling like this is probably my last conventional album,’ he said.”

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