Repetition of the Title of the Song
Feb. 26th, 2006 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaWeird Al's parodies of boy-band songs somehow rescue the songs, for me. (DaVinci's Notebook's parody of the whole genre does something similar; see also the title of the post.) There was a period when I had "I Want It That Way" as a persistent earworm, and I actually purchased the song off of iTunes in order to play it through three times (which is the only way I can consistently clear an earworm, short of replacing it with one of the two atom bombs, which I will not mention here so as not to get them stuck in anyone else's head and which are often worse than the earworm). However, not only does "eBay" successfully clear that earworm, having had the opportunity to compare them side-by-side, I have come to a startling conclusion:
Weird Al's version is musically superior.
I think it's because he knows what he's doing and they don't. After all, delivering a message through comedy is often more difficult than delivering it straight. But, more to the point, for him, the imagination and the execution are done by the same person. The boy-bands typically can't read music, even if they write their own lyrics. Weird Al picks the whole thing apart and rebuilds it from the ground up. On most of his parodies, he spends a lot of effort making it note-for-note except for the humorous substitutions (I can't tell "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from "Smells Like Nirvana" until the lyrics start). But on the boy-band songs, I think he actually fixes things - fills musical holes, as it were. And somehow, the intellectual effort of creating the parody makes the music of the songs less embarrassing to enjoy.
His voice has also gotten noticeably better over time. His harmonies on "eBay" are a lot better than they are on the song listed below. I suspect he finally decided to take vocal lessons around Off The Deep End - not that his voice was bad to begin with, but he seems to be able to control the nasality better. Maybe he could pass the info along to Bob Dylan . . .
Weird Al's version is musically superior.
I think it's because he knows what he's doing and they don't. After all, delivering a message through comedy is often more difficult than delivering it straight. But, more to the point, for him, the imagination and the execution are done by the same person. The boy-bands typically can't read music, even if they write their own lyrics. Weird Al picks the whole thing apart and rebuilds it from the ground up. On most of his parodies, he spends a lot of effort making it note-for-note except for the humorous substitutions (I can't tell "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from "Smells Like Nirvana" until the lyrics start). But on the boy-band songs, I think he actually fixes things - fills musical holes, as it were. And somehow, the intellectual effort of creating the parody makes the music of the songs less embarrassing to enjoy.
His voice has also gotten noticeably better over time. His harmonies on "eBay" are a lot better than they are on the song listed below. I suspect he finally decided to take vocal lessons around Off The Deep End - not that his voice was bad to begin with, but he seems to be able to control the nasality better. Maybe he could pass the info along to Bob Dylan . . .
