Al Yankovic
Al Yankovic
Alfred Matthew "Weird Al" Yankovic is an American singer, songwriter, parodist, record producer, satirist, actor, voice actor, music video director, film producer, and author. He is known for his humorous songs that make light of popular culture and often parody specific songs by contemporary musical acts, original songs that are style pastiches of the work of other acts, and polka medleys of several popular songs, featuring his favored instrument, the accordion...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth23 October 1959
CountryUnited States of America
I'd like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.
I was a huge fan of 'Mad' magazine when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. I'd scour used bookstores trying to find back issues, and I'd wait at the newsstand for a new issue to come out. My life revolved around it.
I have a long-standing history of respecting artists' wishes.
By the time I'm in the studio recording my parody, 10,000 parodies of that song are on YouTube.
In the '80s, I was the only game in town, I was the only one getting that kind of exposure in any rotation on MTV. Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they're not all good!
Didn't have Nintendo, we just poured salt on snails.
Boys like Peter are afraid of alot of things, like nuclear annihilation and flunking algebra, but they're not afraid of wolves.
Probably 90 percent of my albums have polka medleys.
Velvet Elvis never puts on weight.
I'm always a little leery about doing shows where I'm not the headliner because when I first started playing in 1982 I opened for Missing Persons and got pelted for 45 minutes. After that, I made the decision to headline no matter what, even if I was playing to seven people. I wanted people to be there to see me.
I don't really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I've never been to therapy so there's probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don't know.
I'm an ugly girl, My face makes you hurl, Sad I have it, I should bag it. Acne everywhere, Unwanted facial hair. I'm a relation to Frankenstein's creation.
It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
I tend to enunciate pretty well. It's always seemed that my voice is one of those voices that people can recognize pretty easily - which has been a bit of a drawback for some characters because you're supposed to lose yourself in the character, but sometimes people look at a character and go "Oh, it's 'Weird Al.'"