Crash Test Dummies themselves were pleased with the final result and even performed the song with Yankovic in concert twice. The song and video were met with mostly positive reviews from critics, although at least one critic for The Commercial Appeal felt that the source material was already dated upon the single's release. Several notable individuals made cameos in the video, including Doug Llewelyn, Dr. The song's video took two days to film and ended up running over the allotted time that had been scheduled for production, costing the record label a considerable amount of money. In it, the three news stories are presented as if they are one-act plays to an audience.
To help promote the song and album, Yankovic directed a music video that was a direct parody of the Crash Test Dummies’ original. The song was written after Yankovic's label insisted he craft a new song to promote the album Yankovic in turn combined the music of the Crash Test Dummies’ song with three news stories that were popular in late 1993 and early 1994.
It was released as the lead-off single for the compilation box set Permanent Record: Al in the Box on September 27, 1994. It is a parody of the Crash Test Dummies’ 1993 hit “ Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”. “ Headline News” is a parody song by "Weird Al" Yankovic. " Christmas at Ground Zero (Alternate Mix)" The kazoos employed to such delightful effect in “Smells Like Nirvana” return along with the accordion that distinguished Al’s self-titled debut and even the musical hands of manualist Mike Kieffer.From the album Permanent Record: Al in the Box The same is true of “Headline News.” It’s one of the only songs in Al’s oeuvre that has the same chorus as the song that Al is parodying, which finds Al singing in a register lower than he ever has before in a successful attempt to replicate the oceans-deep croon of Crash Test Dummies frontman Brad Roberts.Īs “Headline News” draws to a close, Al pulls out all the stops. Instead of words in its chorus, “Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmm” substitutes noises, namely strangely hypnotic humming. Crash Test Dummies frontman Brad Roberts sings in a bass-baritone so low that it almost sounds like he’s doing a goofy fake voice to amuse friends.
#Weird al headline news parody of full#
“Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” is one of the goofier products of the Nirvana-fueled Alternative Rock boom of the early to mid 1990s, a borderline novelty song full of additional novelties. Al’s tongue-in-cheek spin through the top tabloid tales of the day is consequently the product of an earlier era. We’ve changed a lot in the quarter century since the release of “Headline News.” We’ve evolved and de-evolved, made great social progress and regressed egregiously. Happy” in what is perhaps not the most sensitive moment of his career. Bobbitt was similarly the subject of a sympathetic film, in this case a documentary that portrayed her not as the tabloid cartoon of the public imagination who lopped off her cheating husband’s penis in a fit of rage but rather as a passionate, dignified immigrant who was viciously raped and sexually terrorized by a dead-eyed sociopath until she was moved to take violent action against the instrument of her abuse, which Al refers to as “Mr. Harding was the subject of a high-profile biopic starring Margot Robbie that depicted the controversial skating champion as the troubled victim of abuse, first from her mother and then from husband Jeff Gillooly. Fay, alas, is still widely seen as a doofus who ran amok in Singapore and then was punished viciously and disproportionately for his youthful transgressions but Harding and particularly Bobbitt are seen in a vastly different light these days. In the decades since the single’s release our understanding of two of these curious, sordid figures, these walking punchlines, has shifted tremendously.
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