I just have to say that Word Crimes is a vast improvement over Blurred Lines.
Latest one is out: “Lame Claim to Fame”.
Great video! Very funny song, and the video is terrific. One of the best so far.
That’s a rather good song musically.
Actually, I knew this one, so no need to edumacate me. Yeah, it’s really a crappy tune, isn’t it? I have never bothered to even watch the nekkid version. It wouldn’t help.
And note it’s been ~a year since release. WA said that this is the last album he was contractually required to produce (after 32 years!) and is going with just singles from now on in order to stay more current.
I got distracted because he said he shares his birthday with Kim Kardashian. I had to look that up. Her birthday is two days before his. I guess Al was playing a character born on October 21 
Hey Al, you could have gone with Ryan Reynolds who really does share your birthday!
Yeah, except Ryan Reynolds is a bit more legitimately famous, while Kim K. is mostly famous for being famous, so being connected to her is even more “Lame” of a claim to fame.
The album arrived yesterday. It’s a bit uneven, but there are some gems. The Obligatory Polka is a great one, and several of the songs that don’t yet have videos are really great. Wondering what video #8 will be. Likely Inactive or Mission Statement, though I’m hoping for Jackson Park Express. But I don’t know what comedy website has a budget to fund a 9 minute music video.
Not bad. Kind-of a Pixie-ish style parody, right? If you haven’t heard it, my favorite pastiche of this style is Mother Banger, which gets the whole soft-loud-soft thing, as well as Frank Black’s esoteric lyrics, arbitrary injections of Spanish, and Joey Santiago’s oddball guitar stylings.
I’m really enjoying Mission Statement. The business lingo is excellent, but even more than that, I like the combination of CSNY’s music with those buzzword-heavy lyrics. It feels sort of like a comment on the way rock and roll is used in commercials and other corporate settings, although I’m not sure that’s what Al was going for.
If there’s anything that validates Weird Al’s decision to go off-label and produce Internet content, it’s the fact that no one complained about “spastic” until after the YouTube video came out.
Also, isn’t it a slur against those with movement disorders, like cerebral palsy?
See post #156
Yeah, that’s my favorite one from the album as well, for pretty much the reasons you say.
8th and final video is for Mission Statement, musically based on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Suite Judy Blue-Eyes” and apparently tied-in with the Wall Street Journal.
I think most of it is based on Carry On, but it does go into Suite Judy Blue Eyes at the end.
“Fancy” is terrible to the point of parody anyway; it was probably not an ideal target. While unintentionally so, Iggy Azalea is as hilarious as Yankovic. Granted, “Royals” is an awful song too and “Foil” works, so I dunno.
I’d agree that the album’s best work, by a long shot, is “Mission Statement,” which in addition to being screamingly funny is the album’s best musical work and is meta-ironic in having a CSNY-sounding song appear to be sung by a team of $5000/day management consultants. I’d put it easily among the five or six best songs he’s ever done, parody or pastiche.
As to this video-a-day thing I’m not sure I think it was a good idea. “Tacky” was okay enough and the animated work in some of the others was okay, but the rest looked really cheap. “First World Problems” and “Handy” combined looked like they cost maybe $10,000 to shoot, including the bill for lunch, and “Sports Song,” a song I think is utterly hilarious, could have stood to have a more inspired presentation as well. “Handy” would have been much funnier had it in some way followed a similar video narrative to “Fancy.” “Foil” at least had an original idea that isn’t really in the song but, again, it looks cheap and would have been funnier had it stayed a bit longer with parodying “Royals.” But if you’re planning on pumping out eight videos at once you’re inevitably going to end up rushing things.
“Word Crimes” really is a better song than “Blurred Lines” and will stand up as one of his best parodies.
I have only heard his 8 videos, but I’d say Word Crimes was the best on the album and he has more or less replaced Blurred Lines in my mind. If I hear that song start, I’ll think of Word Crimes from now on. Sweet relief to be saved from that crappy song.
Songs he has done that with(for me, anyway):
Amish Paradise - far better than Coolio’s
White and Nerdy - again, just a lot better than the original
Word Crimes
A Complicated Song - hilarious enough that I nearly forgot about Avril Lavinge.
I believe it’s from the filming of the video for “The Saga Begins.”
Hmm… I don’t think that sounds like Carry On at all…
When I first saw the photo, I thought “Yeah, that’s from a video shoot. There’s a video where he looks like that.” Then I started racking my brain trying to think which video it was, until I finally concluded I was mistaken.
In “The Saga Begins” video, the hairstyle is similar but it is clearly a wig- an ill-fitting wig because his obviously still long hair is smooshed up inside of it. In the photo, it’s either a much better wig job, or a photoshop job, or his hair was actually that short.
I thought photoshop immediately.