By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
Weird Al’s Gaga Saga Finds a Happy Ending
In case you’ve been losing sleep over the Weird Al Yankovic-Lady Gaga feud over his parody of her song “Born this Way,” you can rest easy now. Not only is the feud over, but apparently it never happened to begin with.
The drama — written about in loving and humorous detail over on Weird Al’s blog — began when Weird Al decided he wanted to parody Gaga’s song with his own take, “Perform this Way.” Although fair use covers what he does, it seems the Weird One, out of respect for the artists whose work he parodies, always seeks their approval. And until Gaga, he’d always gotten it.
So Weird Al wrote about all it, and “leaked” the song onto YouTube, and lo, all across the Internet, Weird Al fans and Lady Gaga detractors responded in a wave of outrage over Her Gaga-ness refusing to allow Weird Al to include his parody on his album. Who the hell does Gaga think she IS? everyone seemed to want to know.
Turns out, though, that apparently it wasn’t Gaga herself who was being all demanding and unreasonable, but her manager (or so she says, who really knows but Gaga herself?) and Weird Al has now been granted permission to use the song, and will soon be recording the video that fans are frothing at the bit to see.
You couldn’t make up this kind of free publicity … right? Here’s the song on YouTube, you’ll have to wait for the real video along with everyone else. The song is pretty brilliant, but so is over 700,000 YouTube views before the album’s even ready to release.
Slight correction – Al *almost* always has received permission when he wants to do a parody; he’s been turned down just a few times. In those cases, however, they said so without demanding to know the lyrics first, and certainly not (like in this case) to actually hear a finished song.
One of those cases was Michael Jackson, who said that a particular song had too much personal meaning to him. But Jackson okayed at least two other parodies, so there was obviously a good mutual understanding.
I don’t remember exact numbers, but I think the total (including MJ) was no more than about half a dozen. I’d recommend looking on Wikipedia for more details.