As a card carrying member of the geek clan, I feel that whenever the spheres of Weird Al and Apple intersect it is my job—nay, duty—to report on it. Weird Al, for the uninitiated, is a popular song parodist (though some of my favorite Weird Al songs are ‘genre parodies,’ in which he sings an original song in the style of a band) who lampoons pop culture every few years with a new CD (his biggest hit was White & Nerdy).
Weird Al started in the business of show when pop culture was much more centralized than it is now. Songs made the Billboard charts and tended to stay there for a long time. People would instantly recognize those songs, and parodies based on them, because they were playing everywhere. Everywhere. Now we have iPods, iTunes, satellite radio, and lots of other devices that allow us only to listen to the things we want to hear. This makes it tough for Weird Al because by the time his CD is in the stores, the songs he lovingly mocks have faded from our short term pop culture memory.
Does Weird Al let this get him down? No! He uses the very technology that created the problem to solve it. Starting tomorrow, October 7th, Weird Al will be releasing his new songs as they are finished on, what else, the iTunes store. They’ll be available exclusively from iTunes for two weeks before they make their way to the other digital music distributors on the Internet.
I love both Weird Al and iTunes. This is superb news. Now if they will only continue to include him on the "Essentials" lists so he gets more exposure. Al is brilliant and is a true authority on pop culture.