In mid-July, the Internet was buzzing with the release of "Weird Al" Yankovic's purported final traditional album, Mandatory Fun. Starting on Monday, July 14 and running for several days, a different track appeared in video form, taking over pop culture sites and Facebook alike. It started with "Tacky" spoofing Pharrell Williams' "Happy"; followed by "Word Crimes" which went after Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines"; and then "Foil" which recast Lorde's "Royals" as a TV chef's spin into conspiracy theoretical madness. As the premiere week rolled on, people wondered why RCA Records failed to collect the videos for the CD release. They had done such a combo with both the Super Audio version of Straight Outta Lynwood and Alpocalypse. They had made a huge marketing deal out of doing the same with 2013's self-titled Beyonce album.
Having begun in the very late 1970s, Yankovic has become a sort of institution, outlasting most of his peers and the artists he has parodied. In 2014, one assumes RCA questioned if anyone still cared. The music videos were given no budget and, in fact, were created with the help of sites like Funny Or Die and College Humor. Lo and behold, Yankovic's videos go viral one by one, with RCA/Sony holding just the song rights versus having a financial stake in the videos' creation. In the end, if Sony chooses to double-dip the market and release a special edition with these videos involved, they will have to negotiate with these independent contractors. I guess they miscalculated.
Yankovic stated in several interviews that this was his last album in the commonly-known sense, partially because Mandatory Fun is the last in what has been a very long recording contract. Also, Internet culture has become so fast and agile, by the time an album has been written or recast and then recorded, a year has passed. What was a topical hit is barely a memory. Yankovic sees his future in digital distribution where things can be developed and released much quicker. This makes a great deal of sense when one looks at Mandatory Fun's tracklist. We do have "Handy", a parody of 2014's summer hit "Fancy" (by Iggy Azalea), but the near-institutional polka medley this time out has tracks that are far older, including Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" from two summers ago. Given the forces being brought to bear, it is no wonder that Yankovic longs to move past the 12-song collected form into the datastream.
He couldn't have gone out with a better collection than Mandatory Fun. From the bizarre Soviet-influenced packaging to the expected parodies, to a slate of stand-out "style parody" originals, all the silly subversion that intrigued people early in Yankovic's career remains intact. However, there is a comic bite to this slate of tunes that is refreshingly angry. Perhaps not talk-radio angry, but one can tell Al has been thinking about the scale of human absurdity from when he started to where he is now, and has concluded that there's much more intellectual material to play with than ever before. "Foil" is a key example. When the narrator starts rolling off from a home cooking enthusiast to exposing the Illuminati and mapping the secret plots of assassins, it is only with the knowledge that such mindsets earnestly believe these things.
Having said that, Al remains professional enough to take the (mostly) high road. It would have been far too easy to remake "Happy" as "Crappy", and Lord knows a billion pranksters on YouTube probably thought they were terribly original when they tried. "Tacky" instead diverts into one of Yankovic's favorite tics: love of kitsch.
I've contended that there are few backing bands as good as Yankovic's. Think about what they have to do: not only do they have to play the lines from the original songs in transmogrified form both convincingly and energetically, but they have to take the sound of some artists' entire body of work and fit it into Yankovic's bizarre context. An example is the bravura performance from Poodle Hat's "Genius In France", a song that dared to stand toe-to-toe with the complexity of Frank Zappa, the inspiration for the track. Sadly, the state of top 40 pop is deadly-dull and not challenging for a band of such a caliber. "Handy" ("Fancy"), "Word Crimes" ("Blurred Lines"), "Inactive" (Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive") all come from either the dull thud of an electronic boom-boom-bap plod or the glorified inanity of a keyboard preset, yet they dutifully serve.
It is on those previously mentioned original style parodies where Jim West, Steve Jay, and Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz show their mettle. Foo Fighters' doppelganger "My Own Eyes", Pixies rip "First World Problems", and the epic Ben Folds-ish "Jackson Park Express" find this able unit capable of nearly anything. The only reason why they are not revered is because their talents are in the service of comedy, which is a shame, especially when so many of the original tracks on which the parodies are based are jokes in and of themselves.
That may sound arrogant and utterly "rock-ist" but there must be some truth in it. Modern pop has offered up a virtually blank canvas onto which Yankovic could do anything, and he does. Maybe that's another reason why it is best if he and Sony part ways. In his peak and prime on Mandatory Fun, "Weird Al" Yankovic also exposes the company's musical assets as even more bereft of long-term interest and investment as what was supposed to be in his heyday. Two years from now, when the originals from which these parodies came are banned from the collective consciousness, Yankovic might still be relevant. That's a hopeful sign.
