Eli Orzessek talks to pop's king of parody, Weird Al Yankovic.
He's A one-man pop cultural legend with a career spanning three decades - and in January, Weird Al Yankovic is bringing his "best and biggest show yet" to New Zealand.
Famous since the 80s for his pop parody hits, Yankovic originally trained as an architect before being discovered by radio comedy personality Dr Demento. He went on to record an endless stream of parody songs, based on the biggest hits of the day.
No one was safe: Michael Jackson's Beat It became Eat It, the Offspring's Pretty Fly for a White Guy was changed to Pretty Fly for a Rabbi - and our very own Lorde was even parodied by Weird Al last year, with Royals morphing into Foil, an ode to "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theorists.
Despite being legally entitled to record any parody, Weird Al still makes a point of asking an artist for their blessing before releasing his version of a song - and they very rarely refuse, especially after Michael Jackson lent his support back in the 80s.
Yankovic didn't talk to Lorde directly though: "It was like my people talking to her people, but she did approve it and I did read an interview that she did a while ago where she said she liked the parody and she was honoured by it, so that was very gratifying."
"These days it's extremely rare for me to actually get a turn down," he says. "When I first started out in the early 80s it was a lot more common because nobody knew who this Weird Al was and what I was about. Nowadays artists usually look at it as a badge of honour or a rite of passage to get a Weird Al parody."
The 55-year-old's long career means he has gained generations of fans. Eighties kids have Eat It, 90s kids have Amish Paradise and millennials have White and Nerdy - which is Weird Al's biggest hit so far, playing off Chamillionaire's Riding Dirty.
This makes for a "multimedia rock and comedy extravaganza" that travels through the pop cultural history of the past 30 years - with lots of new material from latest album Mandatory Fun, but also all of the greatest hits. "It's really gratifying for me to look out into the crowd and see people of all ages enjoying the show, maybe on different levels, but they're all having a great time," he says.
The secret to his long-lasting success? Luck mostly, he says, and a lot of "sheer tenacity". Plus he's stuck with the same band since the beginning and they work out the music for every parody from scratch.
"The sheer fact that we've been doing it as long as we have, I like to think we've been getting better every year. It's a great live show and it comes from a lot of hours on the road."
The internet has also helped Weird Al stay on top of pop culture.
Research is a breeze, but there's also a lot more competition. He welcomes those YouTube comedians. it's helped him step up his game.
"If an idea for parody is very obvious, you can bet that ten thousand people have already done it," he says.
For the release of Mandatory Fun last year, he decided to "really exploit the powers of the internet" and dropped eight music videos online over eight days - which turned out to be a great marketing success.
"Because people get tired of things on the internet very quickly and things go viral on the internet very quickly, I said well for release, let's have a video every single day. And it became a much bigger snowball effect than I had anticipated."
Despite his name, Yankovic is a pretty regular guy to chat to.
"I'm pretty normal most of the time, I save all my weirdness for when I'm on stage.
"I just sort of save it all up and let it come out in one concentrated burst."
