Ravinia 2019, Issue 4, Week 7

The accordion is featured not only in several of Yankovic’s parodies, such as “Yoda” (above), a spoof of The Kinks’ “Lola” inspired by the events of The Empire Strikes Back , but also in his signature polka medleys, which reinterpret portions of popular songs with polka instrumentation and style rather than set new lyrics to the orignal melody. All but two of his albums feature a polka medley, and last year he created “The Hamilton Polka”—comprising songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton —for the composer’s “Hamildrops” recording series. that song; a twist on the song title, or con- cept, or hook. If I’m very lucky, one of those ideas will be good enough to provide comic fodder for an entire song. I’m not sure that I’d do anything with “Old Town Road.” I’ve read a few comments online where people are saying it already sounds like a “Weird Al” song! Is it true Madonna herself suggested “Like a Surgeon”? It feels like an urban legend at this point, but what I was told is that Madonna was walking around New York with a friend of hers one day, and she just happened to wonder out loud, “When is ‘Weird Al’ gon- na do ‘Like a Surgeon’?” Her friend hap- pened to be a friend of my manager’s, so word got back to me, and I thought, “Hmm … well, not a bad idea!” [ e sitcom How I Met Your Mother even parodied the origin of this parody, positing that central charac- ter Ted Mosby had suggested the title in a fan letter.] I loved the Rock episode where Jenna and Tracy tried to come up with a song that is “Weird Al”-proof. Has there ever been a song you wanted to parody but just couldn’t crack it? at happens constantly. I can think of plenty of parody ideas for any song—just not always good ideas. I’m pretty picky about what I put out, and more o en than not, I can’t come up with a parody concept that I think is worthy enough, so I just have to let it go. My polka medleys are lled with songs for which I just couldn’t come up with satisfying enough parody ideas. What was your at ing You Do mo- ment when you rst heard one of your songs played by Dr. Demento? Funny, I usually reference at ing You Do when I talk about the rst time I heard one of my songs on the radio. I just started running around the house, screaming like a madman. “My Bologna” premiered when I was in college (where we couldn’t pick up Dr. Demento ) so I didn’t even know it was a hit until I got a postcard from him telling me as much. I think KROQ in Los Angeles was the only place, other than Dr. Demento , that played my stu in the very early days. is is before radio got tightly formatted, of course. I could just walk into 30 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 15 – JULY 28, 2019