That’s not parody, though. That could be a whole other discussion.
I think the complaints about unoriginality are referring to the kind of bits you hear on radio morning shows, where they rewrite an Air Supply song to make fun of some local sports scandal (or whatever.) I’d be happy to never hear one of those again.
Exactly. His Devo-like “Dare To Be Stupid” is spot-on, as is his “I’ll Sue Ya” in the style of Rage Against the Machine.
That’s not what this thread is about. (Some) people are saying it’s unoriginal to re-write existing song lyrics, not to write totally new lyrics for a piece of music composed by someone else.
When I was in grad school I gained a certain level of “fame” within my program for re-writing pop songs with lyrics related to our field. (We actually wound up singing one of these at our graduation ceremony.) I’m not particularly musical and had never done anything like this before, it was just something I took up for a while to amuse myself and my friends when none of us had much money. Really it was not that difficult. I won’t say it didn’t take any talent/skill/wit at all, but in terms of writing then much of the work had already been done. There’s already a meter and rhyme scheme, and often you can keep a good bit of the original phrasing. Since I’ve never written original song lyrics in my life and don’t think I’d be very good at it, I have to say that doing this kind of parody is much easier than writing wholly original lyrics for a new piece of music.
Weird Al is a hell of a lot more musically talented than I am though, because he not only rewrites the lyrics to pop songs but also does both new arrangements of existing songs and totally original songs, some of which spoof a particular artist/genre and some of which are just meant to be funny novelty songs.
Isn’t rewriting existing song lyrics a member of the genus “writing totally new lyrics for a piece of music composed by someone else”?
ETA: I see now, you’ve got in mind the idea of keeping alot of the original phrasing etc.
It still takes a particular kind of non-trivial creativity IMO. I mean sure, your friends liked what you wrote, but they were your friends (and other everyday acquaintances). Your success there doesn’t have much relevance to the question of whether it’s actually difficult to do this kind of thing well.
Love parodies and impressions.
One of my favorites is comedian Jim Breuer’s impression of AC/DC’s Brian Johnson.
I wrote a song parody back in High School. I don’t remember all of it, but it was to the tune of What If God Was One Of Us. I shall now share it for nostalgia’s sake, and to illustrate how something that’s not actually very good can still get a lot of performance requests. 
What If My Cat Was A Chair?
If I sat on my cat
would she get angry? Would she
come when I call
even though she’s got legs that are
rigid, made of wood?
(something something something)
(something something something)
would she yowl in pain?
And yeah, yeah, she’s cool to pet.
And yeah, yeah, she purrs when I’m around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
But what if my cat were a chair?
Tell me, do you think you’d stare
if my chair was growing hair
and trying to lick itself clean?
Would you like to buy a cat?
Yes I know it looks more like a
chair, but I promise you that
this once was feline
(something something something)
(something something something)
(something something something)
(something something something)
What if my cat was a chair?
Tell me, do you think you’d stare
if my chair was growing hair
and trying to lick itself clean?
And licking something that’s obscene?
My territory marking queen
is a chair of wood or bag of bean.
Even if you don’t keep a lot of the original phrasing – and since a parody has to be recognizable as a spoof of the original, a song parody will almost always preserve some of the original phrasing – if you’re rewriting existing lyrics then all the structural work has been done for you. You know how many verses there will be, how many lines per verse, where the chorus comes in and for how many repetitions, etc. This is not the case if someone is trying to write new lyrics from scratch for an existing tune.
My point isn’t that my friends liked what I wrote, it’s that it was pretty easy for me to re-write the lyrics of existing songs without ever having written truly original song lyrics or feeling that I’d be any good (even in the “funny enough to amuse my friends” sense) at it. The question is not whether I’m as good at re-writing song lyrics as Weird Al (I’m not), but whether it’s easier to rewrite existing lyrics or write totally original lyrics. Based on my own experience I’d say it’s FAR easier.
Exactly how easy it is varies a lot depending on how complex the original lyrics were and how far you want to stray from the original phrasing, but many pop songs are so repetitive that if you change a few words from the chorus the job is largely done. I abandoned a parody of “White Wedding” because it seemed like shooting fish in a barrel. The whole song only has about 15 lines and 50 unique words.
Lamia, you remind me of what one master parodist said about one of his own works:
[QUOTE=Lewis Carroll]
In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of ‘The Song of Hiawatha.’ Having, then, distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject.
[/QUOTE]
Imitation is easy, and parody that is little more than just imitation is lame and tiresome. This is true not only of song parodies but of other sorts of parodies (for example, comedy sketches or episodes of TV shows that parody some other movie, TV show, etc.). They can be works of real creative merit, or even of genius, but it takes more than a single twist on an existing work, at the level of “just putting food items in the place of lyrics” [which, to be fair, doesn’t describe Weird Al at his best, but is a pretty good description of his “La Bamba” parody “Lasagna”].
This parody by Weird Al of R Kelly’s song Trapped in the Closet is brilliant. R Kelly’s music just screams to be parodied, and this parody of it is perfect, just as silly as the original version.
“Weird Al” Yankovic - Trapped in the Drive-Thru [Official Music Video]
original song
R. Kelly - Trapped In The Closet Chapter 1
Thing is, you can say the same thing about established, “formal” forms of poetry like the sonnet, limerick, or haiku. These forms have specific rules regarding meter, syllables, and rhyme scheme. And in the case of haiku, there are even rules about the subject matter (they’re supposed to be about nature). It would be ludicrous to say Shakespeare was unoriginal because he just kept rewriting the same sonnet over and over, or that every limerick after the first one was a ripoff. Honestly, I think it’s potentially more difficult to compose new lyrics that conform to a pre-existing rhyme/meter — you have to first think up what you want to say and then spend time trying to figure out how to say it so that it fits within the rules. I suspect the screwy grammar and syntax in so much poetry wasn’t the poet trying to be clever by “playing with the rules”; it was the poet trying to force a sentence to conform to the meter and end with a rhyming word.
Good parody is so much more than just replacing the lyrics. It includes clever wordplay, including making the new lyrics aurally resemble the original. One of my favorite examples of this is a Bob Rivers (I think) song spoofing Freddy Fender’s Feliz Navidad: it replaces the phrase “feliz navidad” with “police stop my car”. It takes a moment to realize you’re listening to a parody, because with “police stop my car” being sung in a Mexican accent by a Freddy Fender soundalike, it sounds almost identical to the original words.
I also look at things like putting morbid lyrics to an upbeat, cheerful melody, or lines that have multiple levels of humor to them that you only notice after repeated listenings. An example of the latter is Al’s “Fat”, his parody of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. Where Jackson said, “Jam on! Jam on!”, Yankovic said, “Ham on, ham on…” which sounds like a simple food substitution joke until you realize that “jamon” is the Spanish word for “ham”, and is pronounced, roughly, “ham on” and spelled “jam on”.
Not the part about preserving the original phrasing. To take one of Weird Al’s less impressive efforts as an example, a good portion of “Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch” is just the title phrase from “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” with three letters of the last word changed. To be fair, a recognizable parody of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” almost has to center on the phrase “[someone] just wanna [do something]”, but that’s my point. If you want to throw together a parody of a fairly repetitive pop song then once you’ve changed two or three words in the most recognizable line your work is mostly done. The result may not be a particularly good parody, but I didn’t say it was easy to write good parodies. I just said it was easier to change the words of an existing song than to write an original song from nothing.
All I can say is that I personally find this much, much easier than writing wholly original song lyrics. If I could have amused my friends with original songs then I would have done so, but that’s beyond my abilities.
Yes, but not every song parody is a good parody. It’s obviously more difficult to do a good job of something than to do a mediocre job of something, but **jayjay **seemed to think that re-writing the lyrics to a pop song was exactly the same thing as writing wholly original lyrics for a piece of music composed by someone else.
And after all that, if you’ve done it right, it has to be funny. Not as easy as it sounds and requires lots of thought and creativity. Having written both original songs and parodies, I’d say good parodies are actually harder.
Bob Rivers wrote a pretty funny parody of “One of Us” called What If God Smoked Cannabis? Joan Osborne has performed the parody lyrics in concert. (That’s not Osborne on the recording, though, just a sound-alike.)
To be fair, Al didn’t want to record “Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch.” It was forced on him by his record label who wanted to exploit the popularity of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Al wrote the parody grudgingly as he knew that anything he could come up with for this song would be clichéd. It remains one of his least favorite parodies to this day, and I don’t think he even performs it live anymore.
Sung to the tune of [I Don’t Remember Christmas](Hugh Panaro - I Don’t Remember Christmas - YouTubewww.youtube.com/watch?v=oHShw8ddF5M)
I don’t remember Christmas
And I don’t remember you.
Forbidden Broadway is so incredible. Please get one of the cast CDS and just listen.
I learned about song parodies from Mad Magazine, and wrote my first in sixth grade, and had my first brush with stardom singing it at a Boy Scout camping trip to packed tents.
A good parody has to be true to the structure of the original and to the structure of the comedic version at the same time, and that isn’t easy to do well.
Sorry you are not a fan. I am. And like Voyager. I learned my parodies from Mad Magazine, supplemented by Dr. Demento.
If any song ever cried out for a parody, it was Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey” and this one really tickled me. Scattered among this guy’s parodies are some real gems.
It sounds to me like you’re not objecting so much to Weird Al style parodies so much as the turkeys who take a piece of music, file off all the words, slap some new and vaguely related text on it and try to pass it off as a new work.
I like the stuff Weird Al does. I don’t like the other kind. I get way to many of them here in Germany. The “volksmusik” wieners are worst about it. They carry on like no one ever has or ever will hear the english originals of the songs they rip off.
Here’s the most egregious one, and the one the gets on my nerves the most anytime I can’t avoid hearing it:
Original “Let Your Love Flow” by the Bellamy Brothers
Cheap knock off “Ein Bett im Kornfeld” from Jürgen Drews
I was going to post another one, but I couldn’t find the German rip-off. It’s just as well, 'cause it truly cheeses me off everytime I hear it.
I like parody songs in general. I don’t get why some people parody songs like LMFAOs “I’m Sexy and I Know It.” It’s a joke song all by itself. It’s a parody of a joke.
It’s still funny when Elmo sings it.
Yeah.
So this isn’t an entirely “Al Yankovic - yay or nay?” thread, I’ll throw out Mark Russell as someone deserving of scorn, as SNL did. Yes, I’m about 20 years out of date.