music

…according to Weird Al himself on the song’s YouTube page, this song will not be part of his forthcoming album! In Al’s own words:

This is my parody of Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” — which, I’m sorry to say, will NOT be included on my upcoming album. I will give the details of the whole Gaga saga (and offer free mp3 downloads of the song) on weirdal.com very soon.

If this is at Lady Gaga’s insistence, I hope she will come to realize that to be chosen by Al to be the subject of one of his parodies is an extremely high honor! I mean, when Weird Al marks you for spoofing, it proves that you’ve achieved musical immortality: more so than getting a Grammy, in my opinion.

Well anyhoo, here is “Perform This Way”:

UPDATE 1:29 p.m. EST: Al has posted his account of what happened ...

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This is a momentous week for two of the greatest pop icons of our generation… or any generation. A few days ago William Shatner turned 80 and today his fellow Star Trek shipmate Leonard Nimoy gets to enter his ninth decade!

Shatner and Nimoy: the men who brought James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock to life. May they live long and prosper!

Hey, let’s celebrate with some music! How about Nimoy singing “Proud Mary”…

And who could ever forget (seriously, who can forget that this happened?) Shatner doing his cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”…

Truly going where no one has gone before šŸ˜›

Seriously though: Happy 80th Birthdays to Shatner and Nimoy!...

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Before today, Elvis Presley held the record for most singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, since it began keeping track of the most popular since in 1958. The King of Rock and Roll boasts 108 entries on the list.

But now, no more. Elvis has been dethroned by something that has 113 singles on Billboard’s Hot 100.

Y’know… this is the kind of thing that typified the decay and fall of the Roman Empire, when you think about it.

What has the most singles to make the top one hundred?

Fox’s hit show Glee: which has not produce even ONE original song! They’ve all been covers and “redone” versions of original songs by real musical artists!

(No, I haven’t watched Glee except for this season’s Christmas episode. But too many trusted sources have told me that it’s true: ALL of Glee‘s songs are re-recordings of songs that were ...

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The baton behind some of the most iconic themes in motion picture history has fallen silent.

John Barry won Academy Awards for his scoring of Out Of Africa, Born Free, The Lion in Winter, and Dances With Wolves. He was responsible for many other soundtracks as well. But it was his work for something which didn’t garner him any Oscar nods which he will be most remembered for: the legendary James Bond theme music, beginning with Dr. No in 1962. It was a film series that he was actively composing for until 1987’s The Living Daylights.

My personal favorite John Barry score is from what is for me a “guilty pleasure” movie (but hey, it’s a guilty pleasure for a lot of people): Walt Disney Picture’s seductively disturbing 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole. For whatever other… issues… that movie has, Barry perfectly captured ...

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Hey y’all, been a few days since an update. All that can be said at the moment is that I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, so to speak šŸ™‚

Here, maybe this’ll make up for it. My good friend and brother in Christ (not to mention fellow Star Wars ubergeek) Joshua Ausley shot, edited and produced this head-slammingly rockalicious music video for a band called Death Proof out of our very own Greensboro, North Carolina!

Behold the pure awesome that is “Rip It Up”!

And if you wanna know more about Death Proof then click on over to the band’s Myspace page....

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If you’re going to attend the Mile High Music Festival this weekend in Denver, don’t even think about bootlegging the music. Merely considering the notion means you’ve already been sued by event producer AEG Live. The company has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against “John Does 1-100, Jane Does 1-100, and XYZ Company” for illegal bootlegging… which hasn’t even been committed yet. Since nobody exists (yet) to contest the lawsuit, it moves ahead in court. It also means that AEG Live can get “law enforcement involved by using the lawsuit to ask the court to order US Marshalls, local and state police and even off-duty officers to go ahead and seize and impound the bootlegged material.”

Techdirt has more about this legally ridiculous situation, including the full text of the filed lawsuit.

(How soon will it be before we start seeing companies like Viacom using this sort of tactic ...

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Hey gang, just blew back into town after being gone for a few days. Take a looksee at who I met last night in Knoxville…

None other than “Weird Al” Yankovic himself!! We were at his concert at the Historic Tennessee Theatre and got to hang around after the show. Folks I cannot possibly begin to tell you how off-the-chain frenzied awesome a tour Weird Al and his band are doing for 2010. This was the fifth Weird Al concert I’ve been to since 2000 and it was by far the best yet! It was a nearly sold-out house as people from ages 5 to 75 and everything in between came to enjoy a rousing show! Al and the band went for more than two hours, leaving the stage just long enough to change costumes (during which we were treated to several great Al-produced or otherwise associated video clips, ...

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