If it were easy to be Weird Al, there would be a lot more Weird Als.
But as with any other professional, Weird Al only makes it look easy. Because at least on paper, it shouldn’t be that difficult at all to write a song-parody; most the work has already been done for you in terms of melody, song-structure, production, and base lyrics to manipulate, right? Yet though there have been no shortage of song parodies produced over the decades, the vast majority have fizzled out immediately and faded back into obscurity, while Weird Al has an acclaimed career that spans nearly four decades (was it really just last year that he performed a dead-on parody of Gal Godot’s cringing John Lennon Imagine tribute?), often outlasting many of the acts he lampooned in the first place.
His parodies of “Beat It” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were not only beloved by fans but by Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain themselves. Madonna specifically requested he do a parody called “Like a Surgeon.” His style-parody of Devo—”Dare To Be Stupid“—was so spot-on that it actually made Mark Mothersbaugh mad with envy. And in terms of long-range pop-cultural impact, “Gangsta’s Paradise”, “Ridin’ Dirty”, and “Blurred Lines” have now been eclipsed by “Amish Paradise,” “White and Nerdy,” and “Word Crimes“—such that the former are now the footnotes to the latter, not the other way around.
This startling longevity can’t just be chalked up to Weird Al merely gloming on to pop-culture trends; plenty of much more “serious” artists have chased trends as they’ve aged, only to fade away anyways. Nor can it be attributed to his G-rated family friendliness (hence his quip that his best album is always whichever one critics first heard in 8th grade), though his childlike guilelessness is at least getting warmer.
No, what has made Weird Al such a pop-cultural constant for well-over 30 years, and pretty much the lone standard-bearer for American pop-cultural parody, is something that his more mean-spirited wannabes miss completely: it’s because (with rare exception), he’s actually not trying to denigrate, mock, insult, or score cheap points off his targets, but rather express his sincere love and appreciation, even at his most cheeky. And he does that by playfully making these songs his own.
This playful approach is of especial interest to us here at Ships of Hagoth, as we also seek to go about “playfully reinterpreting anything we like through an unapologetically LDS lens” (which we have already done, by the way, with Pixar’s Soul, the Velvet Underground’s Heroin, Mark Z. Danielewski, Fugazi and Bomb the Music Industry!, Deleuze and Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, The Good Place, Catch-22, Futurama, and Catcher in the Rye, just for starters). Indeed, it is an approach that many of us in the Church have already taken just on our own: how many BYU parodies already exist of Lord of the Rings, or Pirates of the Caribbean? Seriously, how often has an earnest young LDS Star Wars fan equated the Force with the Priesthood (as though there were a “Dark Side of the Priesthood”)? For reals—I had an ex-hippie Bishop growing up, who once stated unironically during a Fast & Testimony meeting that watching the OG Star Wars in theaters in 1977 prepared him to meet the missionaries, I swear. Back when I was in the MTC, they even showed us the clip from Empire Strikes Back when Yoda explains the Force to Luke. You cannot make this up.
But our goal here is not to smile at this approach, not to chuckle good-naturedly at the folly of youth, but rather to lean into it, own it, to rev this engine and see what it can do. No one seriously thinks that, say, Star Wars harmonizes with the gospel, but what of that? Why can’t we have some good clean fun, a la Weird Al? What are the gospel principles found in Avengers: Endgame? How much Peter Brienholt would be on the mixtape of Guardians of the Galaxy: EFY Edition? For that matter, where’s the food parody of “You Wear Flowers?” Why have we not seen more on how General Authorities eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? GK Chesterton wrote in 1908’s Orthodoxy that perhaps the best-hidden attribute of Christ was his mirth. Christ could be quite playful when he felt like it, too, and we must follow the Savior’s example in all things, are we not? Might this approach renovate our “faint spiritual admonitions” as well?