- Al Yankovic, doing something weird
There was a time when just about everybody in the United States was on the same page, culturally speaking. Let’s call that time “The ’80s.” The pop stars at the top of the charts — Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson — were universally recognizable. You could hum their biggest hits. And so could your mom, even if she didn’t like the lyrics.
You can’t say that about 2010’s pop-music environment. It’s all about niche markets these days: metalheads listen to metal, country fans listen to country, and hip-hop fans listen to hip-hop. There’s very little crossover and even less consensus. This pop-cultural atomization makes life hard for performers whose job is to find common ground through comedy, like “Weird Al” Yankovic, whose career blossomed in the ’80s.
“When I was starting out, the mainstream hits were pretty well delineated,” recalls the pop satirist, who plays Taste of Cleveland this weekend. “You knew who the superstars were, you knew what the big hits of the day were. Now, with all the genres and subgenres and compartmentalization of our culture, there are still major stars, there are still hit songs, but I don’t think they’re as easy to recognize as they were 15 or 20 years ago.”
Still, Yankovic has managed to stay on top of things. Two of his biggest recent hits (“White and Nerdy,” a takeoff of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty,” and a parody of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like”) have spun off hip-hop, rather than pop music. Technology has been on Yankovic’s side too. His 2008 EP Internet Leaks, a collection of songs originally released one by one on YouTube and iTunes, includes “Whatever You Like,” which debuted while the original was still at the top of the charts.
“The whole iTunes distribution system allowed me to be a lot more topical than I would have been conventionally,” says Yankovic. “With ‘Whatever You Like,’ I was able to go from concept in my head to having it for sale on iTunes within two weeks.”
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2010.