All Hail Weird Al!

He's releasing a new video per day for a number of days due to the release of his new album. I've also seen part of one parodying a Robin Thicke song -- not THAT one -- talking about grammar instead.

I hadn't considered before how broad the meaning of "tacky" is in English. He doesn't just sing about questionable aesthetic taste, but obnoxious behavior. I guess the whole concept is unified by "shamelessness."

I sort of wish he'd done something with the most memorable line from the original, "clap along if you feel like happiness (/tackiness) is the truth." At the same time, I like how here (as he often does with his other parodies), he replaced the repetitiveness in the original with unique lyrics when possible. Repeating lyrics can work okay in feel-good anthems ("I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna bring me down") but would be annoying in a comedy song. The unique-lyrics thing was also done to good effect in "A Complicated Song", in which each verse and subsequent chorus involving a different rhyme with "complicated".

Looking at this post first thing when I woke up was a bit surreal because I had a dream last night with Weird Al. (Nothing interesting; he was on my bus and exhausted after a show. It was probably because I'd talked to a likewise tired but less-famous comedy musician about a week before. My dreams are usually just slightly-remixed versions of whatever happened a week ago.)

I think it's a nice touch that as the elevator goes down you catch a glimpse of what is happening on the other floors, and it's just more people dancing weirdly in exotic outfits.

There are a few references I don't understand. What's an Ed Hardy shirt?

John of John and Kate Plus Eight favored Ed Hardy shirts, and that's when they entered pop culture as an emblem of tackiness. (It's bad enough that I know that - I think it replaced my memory of the rational root theorem, so I'll direct you to Wikipedia for more details).