Al passed along a tape to Demento in 1976, which got on the air but didn’t spark much attention. He’d play new oddities, which is why Yankovic made it a mission to get himself onto the Dr. Novelties were his métier, but he didn’t limit himself to old Nervous Norvous 45s he had excavated. Demento-born Barret Hansen, so who could blame him adopting a nom de plume–specialized in airing the weirdest records he could find, a task suited for an ethnomusicology major masquerading as a ringmaster. Operating out of the darkest reaches of Pasadena, Dr. Rock‘n’roll wasn’t really his thing Al’s personal Elvis was Dr.

To make matters worse, when he was six, his parents gave him an accordion, not a guitar, and he embraced the anachronistic instrument. He started kindergarten a year too early and skipped second grade growing up in the southern Los Angeles suburb of Lynwood, he was always the runt of the litter. Chalk it up to smarts or good timing, but “Weird Al” Yankovic arrived at a time where the counterculture met the monoculture, beginning his career as an outsider and winding up as a beloved institution.Ī nerd by birthright, “Weird Al” was always a step ahead of the curve. Joke songs are a tricky idiom even for clever musicians, but “Weird Al” finagled a robust career out of novelties. It wasn’t simply that these familiar tunes were mocked his send-ups underscored the ways that hits become part of the fabric of daily life.

Sure, the songs he sent up are pillars of pop music-whether it was “Beat It,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Ridin’,” or “Blurred Lines”-but hearing Yankovic’s parodies provided a sense of their deep, lasting impact. Listening to the complete recorded works of “Weird Al” Yankovic-which is now easy to do, thanks to the release of the 15-disc Squeeze Box, which contains all 14 of his studio albums along with a disc of rarities, housed in a replica of his signature accordion-provides a graduate course in the junk culture of the 20th century.

Weird al headline news original song