LOS ANGELES — Prolific musician Alfred Yankovic announced today that he is putting an end to his “weird” phase and moving in a new direction for the foreseeable future.
“I had a really long and prosperous career creating what you might call ‘weird’ music, but it’s time for me to move on. Under the ‘weird’ banner, my music spanned dozens of genres and styles, so it’s going to be interesting seeing that applied in a new way. From now on, I am only going to perform and release music under the moniker Regular Al,” Yankovic explained in a video released on his social media. “I don’t want to be weird anymore. I just want to be a regular guy making regular music.”
“And by the way, a lot of people say that my music was a parody of other songs. Not quite true. My art, like all good art, was inspired by other art. That’s really all there is to it,” Yankovic went on to say. “So yes, in a lot of ways, my music will still be inspired by other music. I’m working on a really great song right now called Haul Me With Your Crane that’s sort of a ballad about blue collar workers and definitely inspired by Lil Nas X’s Call Me By Your Name. But it’s not weird; it’s very regular, actually.”
Fans of the musician responded passionately to the video in both positive and negative manners.
“I love Al so much, I’ll listen to him no matter what adjectives before his name,” said Twitter user @phoebebridgesandtunnels82. “Honestly, I haven’t even heard most of the originals of his songs. I just go pure Al. I thought for decades that Eat It was just some goofy thing he made up. I don’t even get what Beat It means.”
“This is such fucking bullshit. If I want to listen to normie ‘regular’ music, I’ll listen to fucking anything on the radio,” said Redditor u/PM_ME_PICS_OF_GARFIELD. “There’s one thing that I like about Weird Al: it’s the fact that he’s fucking WEIRD. I wanna listen to WEIRD SHIT. I wanna listen to his songs and think ‘this guy is fucking INSANE, he must be TWISTED IN THE HEAD to come up with this WACKY-ASS song.’ If I can’t do that anymore, then I’m out. I’m fucking out!”
At press time, Yankovic surprise-released an entire two-hour-long noise album of just ambient sounds without any lyrics titled I Present To You My True And Actual Self, An Album By Regular Al.
