And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #317: Prince v Weird Al Yankovic

By | Published on Friday 5 August 2016

Weird Al

Weird Al Yankovic has parodied the songs of anybody who’s anybody over the last 40 years. If you’ve written a massive hit, then chances are he’s piggybacked off your music at some point. And you loved it, didn’t you?

Well, except James Blunt, whose manager once responded to a request to approve a rework of ‘You’re Beautiful’ – retitled ‘You’re Pitiful’ – with an email saying: “Both James and I will never approve this parody to be released on any label”.

Because, you see, Yankovic does get permission from the original writers of the songs he parodies before releasing his own versions. Which is nice of him, given that under the parody provisions of US copyright law he might well be able to get away with not bothering. But he doesn’t want to merely get away with it. He wants approval. And that is why you have never heard a Weird Al Yankovic version of a song by famous naysayer Prince.

In an interview with People this week, Yankovic revealed that he’d had various ideas for joke reworks of Prince songs, but they’d always been knocked back. He’d hoped that things would change at some point, or that maybe he’d come up with a funny version of a new Prince song that the musician would actually like. But now Prince is dead. In many ways, Weird Al Yankovic has been hit harder than anyone by the death.

“It’s too bad”, says Yankovic. “I hadn’t approached him in about 20 years because he always said no, but I had this fantasy that he’d come out with a new song, I’d have a great idea, he’d finally say yes and it would erase decades of weirdness between us. But that’s obviously not going to be the case”.

Yes, a man who has the word ‘weird’ in his name was worried about weirdness. Of course, another person Prince had a weird relationship with was Michael Jackson, who was parodied by Yankovic four times in his lifetime.

“Michael Jackson wasn’t just cool about my parody of ‘Beat It’, but he also loved my version of ‘Bad’, which was ‘Fat'”, says Yankovic. “He even let me use the actual ‘Bad’ subway set for the ‘Fat’ video. He was very supportive, which was huge with opening the doors with other artists. Because if Michael Jackson signed on, you couldn’t really say no”.

Just think, if Prince hadn’t been such a humourless curmudgeon, he could have had one of his songs turned into something as hilariously funny as ‘Fat‘, which contains the actual lyrics, “The pavement cracks when I fall down / I’ve got more chins than Chinatown”.

Shamone. But, hey, we should at least hear Weird Al out. Maybe he really did have some great ideas for reworking those Prince songs. “I had a parody of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ that was about ‘The Beverly Hillbillies'”, he explains, getting off to a bad start. “And I wanted to do something funny with ‘When Doves Cry’, and ‘Kiss’. For ‘1999’, I wanted to do an infomercial where you could get anything you wanted by dialling 1-800-something-1999”.

To be honest, if that was the actual pitch he gave to Prince, it’s easy to see why he wasn’t keen. Though that ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ idea was later recycled for Yankovic’s take on ‘Money For Nothing’ by Dire Straits, so we can get an idea of what might have been.

Yeah.



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