Allan Sherman and Weird Al Yankovic made their livings writing and performing song parodies. But what about some others? There were ones my dad sang, and others from military units. Often, one of these ditties will pop unbidden into my head. For example:
To the tune of I’m Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover there’s Korea:
I’m looking over, a well fought over Korea that I abhor.
One for the money, and two for the show! Ridgeway said stay, but we want to go.
There’s no use explaining, why we’re remaining,
We got what we were fighting for.
Korea, Korea and diarrhea,
To make the rice grow some more.
Dad used to sing My Bonnie Has Tuberculosis:
My Bonnie has tuberculosis.
My Bonnie has only one lung.
My Bonnie can cough up raw oysters,
And roll them around on her tongue.
I don’t know if he made song parodies in the sense of taking a hit song and refitting it with wacky lyrics and sound effects. To my knowledge though, his entire discography is a jokey, musical look at any number of topics du jour.
The Streak is probably his most well-known “hit” but a quick look at his anthology reveals he’s touched upon topics such as global warming and presidential politics.
Ray Stevens popped into my mind right away because of The Streak. Back in time a little more there was Spike Jones. Besides doing satirical lyrics he added a lot of sound effects to the music and his act was padded out with jokes and shtick.
Lehrer wrote his own music, so it wasn’t parody in the sense being used here. Maybe you could say he parodied genres. In any case, that’s what made him far superior to any of these others.
Just changing the lyrics of a famous song is crude, unimaginative, and rarely funny–though I’d say Weird Al does it better than most. The Capital Steps have got to be the lamest, crappiest, most pathetic of all.
Parody has to make a point. Simply changing lyrics arbitrarily is cheap and lazy–and usually just stupid.
Well, if we’re including changing the musical genre of existing songs, there’s Dread Zeppelin, who specialize in reggae covers of Led Zeppelin tunes but also work with other classic rock material.
For actual parody there’s the **Walk Hard **soundtrack, comprised entirely of original songs in spot-on styles of popular music from the 50s to the 70s. The quality of the music here is surprisingly high.
Just to elaborate, what made Lehrer so brilliant was that he melded spot-on parodies of specific genres with highly-crafted and aptly aimed satire that was culturally linked. “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” was an attack on a certain type of mindless, fluffy music (not really in existence today). The dark narrative of the lyrics was not simply amusing and well written–it was specifically designed to undercut that particularly annoying genre of song. It required a keen musical ability to be able to write an original song like that and also couple it with the verbal satire so well.
Most of these other parodies don’t come anywhere close to such craftsmanship. I would say the music in Spinal Tap does, though it’s mostly just about one type of music.
What makes The Capital Steps so shitty is that the choice of song and topic is purely arbitrary, and the new lyrics are not well written. Most of all, they never have anything insightful or original to contribute with regard to cultural criticism. The only point they ever make is: “Guess what? We watch the news! Isn’t that funny?” No. It’s not. Everyone watches the news.
That could be something that would be worth checking out–from your descriptions it seems it could be closer to what Lehrer did, and not just the typical “parody” of changing lyrics of a popular song.
Mark Russell did political song parodies for 40 years - even before the Capitol Steps began. His musical choices were pretty lame, but he was popular enough to be lampooned by both Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons.
Of course if you want parodies* of music*, you have Victor Borge andPDQ Bach. Among other works, PDQ Bach wrote the* Missa Hilarious*, which combined parody lyrics with parody music in a parody of an entire genre. Here’s an example.
Love that PDQ Bach bit, but they tell you it’s Missa Hilarious, and then they give you the Monk’s Song from Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice. That’s just a little bit disappointing.
Unfortunately, the Missa Hilarious can’t be linked to online for love nor money. It was recorded on A Portrait of P.D.Q. Bach, which is not available in streaming format.
I wrote and recorded song parodies for Bob Rivers, when he was on WIYY in Baltimore in the late 1980s. He writes some of his material, but buys a lot of it, most of which he pays for.
Through the exposure, I almost got signed to a national radio network to do parodies. There used to be more money in them back when you needed musicians to record the instrumental parts. With the advent of karaoke machines, pretty much anyone was able to do them, and in the opinion of some, this led to lowered quality, and lower demand. Sort of like karaoke has helped lower the quality of and demand for live music.
Mad’s Frank Jacobs was absolutely an influence on me, along with Tom Lehrer. Lehrer is a good illustration of how song parodies used to be, if not more highbrow, at least more original. Radio stations today would choose a mediocre idea based on a big, current hit than a list of chemical elements set to the melody of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”.
Weird Al seems to be some sort of supernatural being who has maintained the highest quality in his work since forever. He made a great comment once about how many reviews of his work start out by describing him as a one hit wonder. He’s done more albums than most hall of fame rock bands.
Very true. Even Billy Connolly struggled to make that work.
The taking off of a style or a particular performer offers much more scope for something actually funny. The late, great and very much missed Neil Innes was a master of the form: Cheese and Onions; and a protest song.
It occurs to me that a song parody doesn’t really HAVE to just be the same music with different lyrics. Weird Al’s Dare to be Stupid is like a perfect rendering of a song that might have been put out by Devo.
“I’m Gettin’ Bi” from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does such a great job of capturing Huey Lewis and the News, that you might have thought Huey wrote it.
But the best I’ve seen so far was last night, when Michaela got me to start watching SMASH with her (a two-season miniseries about an effort to produce Marilyn Monroe musical). The number “The National Pastime” had been brilliantly parodied by “The Math of Love Triangles” in CEx-GF.
Roy Zimmerman is a fantastic song parodist. Can’t link from my phone, but one of his is making the rounds right now, and has been linked to on the Dope in a couple of threads, easily found on YouTube: “The Liar Tweets Tonight”. Another wonderful one is a takeoff on Old Man River, named “Old Man Fibber”, about Mitch McConnell - it’s great! (Most of his other songs have original melodies.)
