‘Dare To Be Stupid’: the Weird Al Yankovic parody song Mark Mothersbaugh said was better than Devo
There’s a certain stigma that surrounds all kinds of parody music for some unknown reason. Even though people love the idea of listening to a song they can relate to, some of the greatest comedy artists like Bo Burnham often get pushed to the side, even if their music is far more sophisticated than many artists currently climbing the charts. But when artists do some parodies a little bit too well, no one logically thinks that the artist in question is going to respond to what the comedic take on their song is.
Because, really, it’s a catch-22 trying to parody somebody’s work. Although there’s a good chance that artists have a good sense of humour and realise that it’s coming from a place of love, there are often people who either don’t get the joke or are extremely protective of their music when they are writing and would rather take a clubbing to anyone who try to take the piss out of them.
If there’s one person who is immune to those kinds of critiques, it’s Weird Al Yankovic. Yankovic has been known to make an entire career out of doing comedic send-ups of classic tunes, but it always came from a place of respect for the artist, to the point where he would call up every single artist that he decided to parody so that he would have the approval to make the record.
That’s only one facet of Yankovic’s work, though. There are many opportunities for someone to parody their fellow artists rather than changing the lyrics to mean something about food or something along those lines, and the best versions of Yankovic’s work come from the style parodies where he gets the spirit of a band down with an original tune rather than copying their melodies.
And that’s where ‘Dare to Be Stupid’ falls in his catalogue. There were already novelty tunes on Yankovic’s first album, but from the boiler suits in the videos to the strange images, he wanted the whole thing to be an ode to Devo: “It’s a pastiche where it’s meant to sound like an artist or a group. In the video, we tried to do all the Devo-isms as we possibly could. I had a list of random things, like a woman cutting a kiwi, and said, ‘That’s something Devo would do. Why not?’”
When it reached Mark Mothersbaugh after the fact, though, it wasn’t a case of him being flattered: he was almost intimidated. The whole thing was very on-the-nose, and looking back on it, the Devo frontman was strangely jealous that even the biggest parodists were lapping him.
Even when he appeared on the Behind the Music of Weird Al, Mothersbaugh remembered how struck he was by the video: “I was shocked. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. He really sculpted that song into something else, and I hate him for it, basically.” However, given the fact that Yankovic has continued to play the song for generations, it’s not like Mothersbaugh ever wanted to press legal action or anything.
That was hardly even Yankovic’s best style parody, either. ‘You Don’t Love Me Anymore’ is one of the most cheeky sendups of the kind of cheesy power ballads that the 1980s couldn’t get enough of, and when listening to a song like ‘Frank’s 2000’’ TV’, it’s easy to see Michael Stipe strutting around onstage and singing the same thing if he were with REM.
This was a case of Yankovic getting the best of both worlds when composing one of his original tunes. There are many cases where someone can try their best to emulate their favourite artists, but whereas ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ or ‘Eat It’ are easier to spot out in the wild, ‘Dare To Be Stupid’ could practically pass as an unofficial part of Devo’s catalogue.
