Music That Saved Me--Letter W

My first W choice is Wall of Voodoo. 


Honestly I don't know much about the band but with the advent of MTV I was crazy about the video for Mexican Radio. I loved the slightly sneery voice of the singer, the echo effects,the harmonica,  the ability to rhyme the words iguana with Tijuana and the beans. Oh the beans.  Just watch and you'll see what i mean by beans. I have never looked at beans the same way after this video.
Watch it here:

The rest of this post is dedicated to Weird Al. I have loved Weird Al's parodies ever since he looked like this:


But these days, he has grown his naturally curly hair out, shaved off his trademark moustache and gotten Lasik eye surgery so he doesn't need glasses and he looks like this:

Isn't he sexy these days? Also he is vegetarian who is mostly vegan! He has this great quote that says:
“Many years ago I found out something about hamburgers that really grossed me out. You may not know this, so I hope I don’t make you sick, but it turns out hamburgers are actually made out of dead cows. I am not making this up. Needless to say, as soon as I discovered that, I gave up meat entirely."

I remember his early attempts like Another One Rides the Bus (a parody of Queen's Another One Bites the Dust) on Dr Demento which was basically just him manically playing the accordion while Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz banged on his accordion case for percussion. I think he really started to get good when he started to parody the video as well. My first choice is Eat It (a parody of Michael Jackson's video Beat it) which was a shot for shot copy of Jackson's video using the same set and same dancers. Plus there is a little wink to Thriller at the end.
Watch it here:

Funny fact: In 1987 our community theatre did The Wizard of Oz and my young cousin Marty won himself a role as one of Lollipop munchkins after singing this song for his audition piece. 

My next pick is a brilliant parody of Don McLean's American Pie called The Saga Begins. It is a retelling of the plot of the Star Wars film The Phantom Menace and in my humble opinion, is a shitload better than the film itself. 
Watch it here:

Sometimes these days I don't know the song he is parodying because I am not up with the latest stuff (as this series of blog posts have shown) but Weird Al is. He is still rocking and making brilliant parodies. This next song is quite funny on its own, even if you don't know the original song. (Ridin' by Chamillionaire and Krazie Bone--it is about racial profiling and police brutality) But the video copies many ideas from the original. Chamillionaire is singing while Krazie Bone is dancing in the background. In Weird Al's version he is singing with Donny Osmond dancing in the background. He asked Donny because "he was the whitest person i could think of." This song is called  White and Nerdy. 
Watch it here:

Bit o' trivia: The part where he goes POP POP is exactly the same as in Ridin' except in Ridin' it is the sound of a gun being being fired instead of bubble wrap.

I could choose so many more--his new ones are great even if you don't know the song it parodies. I love song Foil which is a piss take of Lorde's Royals which involves the many uses of foil like keeping food fresh and protecting your brain from being scanned by aliens. But I think my last choice has to be Word Crimes.  This is so good you could almost use it in school to teach grammar, but there was a wee bit of controversy over the use of the word spastic, but I still love it. It beats the snot out of the original which is Robin Thicke's rape anthem Blurred Lines. 
Watch it here:

Do you love parody songs as well?