Weird Al’s No. 1 Album
The past week for “Weird Al” Yankovic has been a little weird by the standards of the curly-haired, accordion-playing, oddball master of pop music parody.
The 54-year-old singer of such songs as “Eat It,” a culinary spoof on Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit “Beat It” and “Amish Paradise,” the send-up of rapper Coolio’s 1995 sensation “Gangsta’s Paradise,” scored his first No. 1 album on the U.S. Billboard chart with “Mandatory Fun”, following a week-long rollout of music videos.
“It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around that,” Yankovic said in an interview. “It means a lot to me.”
Seemingly eclipsed at his own game by the rise of parody and fan-generated music videos online over the past decade and shut out from MTV when the network largely gave up music videos for original programming, Yankovic has survived by tapping into social media.
Denisha Sahadevan