Mandatory Fun
Weird Al Yankovic
(RCA Records)
Three stars
In the world of parody music, Weird Al Yankovic has reigned supreme since sending up Michael Jackson standards in the 1980s. Since then, for pop stars, a Yankovic spoof has almost become a mark of arrival as a megastar. As per most of his 14-album disco-graphy, it's easy to separate Mandatory Fun into two distinct halves: skip past the songs that stylistically ape bands/genres in favour of the straight-out mangled covers of smash hits. The indisputable highlight is Word Crimes (based on Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines), wherein Yankovic turns into a sub-editor to decry the modern state of grammar and spelling – it's possibly the only tune ever to include both "conjugate" and "homophones" or rhyme "pronoun" with "clown". The pick of the rest is Foil, which transforms Royals by Lorde into a pleasingly silly instructional ditty about how to wrap your leftover food, while Imagine Dragons' Radioactive becomes Inactive, a paean to slobbish laziness. At 54, then, Yankovic is still full of cornily loveable lines that push a playful pin into popular music's pompousness.
aworkman@thenational.ae
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