Zitat des Tages von Al Yankovic:
I make charts of songs that are good candidates, good targets, so to speak. Then I try to come up with ideas for parodies. And 99% of those ideas are horrible.
My personal taste doesn't enter into it a lot when I make my decisions as to what to parody.
Some people want to advertise their weirdness, and spread it out, that's not me.
If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I'd love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.
I'm watching the charts every week and hoping something will pop into my head.
I don't really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I've never been to therapy so there's probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don't know.
So I'm one of the few celebrities that got to do a repeat performance on 'The Simpsons,' which I'm very flattered by.
In the '80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear - that if I didn't, people would soon forget about me.
Whenever I do a parody it's not meant to make you hate anybody's music really.
There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea.
At this point I've got a bit of a track record. So people realize that when 'Weird Al' wants to go parody, it's not meant to make them look bad... it's meant to be a tribute.
When I go to my live shows it's often a multigenerational audience, a family bonding experience.
I'm very analytical, I'm very precise.
One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don't realize there's a lot of craft behind the comedy.
As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it's been a huge promotional tool for me.
I'm still a geek on the inside, that's the important thing.
I was a huge fan of 'Mad' magazine when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. I'd scour used bookstores trying to find back issues, and I'd wait at the newsstand for a new issue to come out. My life revolved around it.
When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.
What kind of morons do you have working at newspapers in Austin that would base an entire review of an artist's performance on whether or not they had a good seat?
As a kid, I certainly never thought I would get to spend my life doing something fun.
I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.
A lot of artists have really been supportive over the years.
It's hard to force creativity and humor.
It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I've ever done, so it's a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.
As my father used to tell me, the only true sign of success in life is being able to do for a living that which makes you happy.
Like, I have had moments, which I think most people have, where you'll be watching TV, and it'll be interrupted by some tragic event, and you'll actually find yourself thinking, 'I don't want to hear about this train being derailed! What happened to 'The Flintstones?'
So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
I'm obviously not a rapper, and I don't have any claims to be one, really.
I have a long-standing history of respecting artists' wishes.
Pop culture's gotten much more disposable.
The irony is of course that my career has lasted a whole lot longer than some of the people I've parodied over the years.
If something is good enough, it can be out there and people will see it.
People never ask people doing serious music, 'Do you ever think about doing funny music?'
You still have Top 40 radio now, but it's 40 different stations. There aren't many hits that everybody knows, and there aren't many real superstars.
I know now that everything I write, I'm going to put out, and I'll have to live with it for the rest of my life.
I think that nerds, if you want to call them that, have only gotten more hip and assimilated into the culture.