Matthew Jenner
Staff Writer
With only a few days left of Weird Al Week, “Weird Al” Yankovic continues to release one video a day from his latest album, Mandatory Fun. Today’s music video is a more obscure musical pastiche, taking influence from the weirdly wonderful Southern Culture on the Skids.
The song, entitled Lame Claim to Fame is all about Weird Al’s slacker character who name-drops every famous person he is associated with. The problem is that he isn’t really associated with them in any meaningful way. For example, he apparently is associated to Paul Giamatti because they share the same plumber, and he once bought a toaster from a guy who claims he knows Brad Pitt (there is even a very sly joke, as Al “knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Kevin Bacon”).
The music video is quite impressive in the fact that it takes place as stop-motion paper cut-out figures arranged in the way of a moving scrapbook. Of course it has to be like this, because if he got the real stars to appear in the video, I doubt there would be many happy faces (especially Russell Crowe – watch the video and you’ll know what I mean). The music video also includes appearances from the gloriously strange Dr. Demento, who is the man who gave Weird Al his career.
You can view the video below: