Reasons Behind Yankovic's Weirdly Popular Music Review

The article I chose to read and analyze was “Weirdly Popular”. This is a music review published in the New Yorker magazine in 2014. It was written by Sasha Frere-Jones a writer and music critic. This review covers the reasons behind “Weird Al” Yankovic’s popularity. Weird Al is a comedian who specializes in song parodies. He has been doing this for forty years.

In the beginning of the article Sasha Frere-Jones establishes the main idea very clearly by asking a question. The beginning reads “Do people enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic because he is funny or because he's not that funny?” This question is an appealing way to start the article because it gets the reader involved. After grabbing the reader's attention Frere-Jones then presents some flashy
statistics. “Mandatory Fun” débuted at No. 1, selling more than a hundred thousand copies in its first week. The author then adds to this by saying “This might be the biggest first week for a comedy album ever.” The writer says this to give the reader an idea of Weird Al’s popularity before breaking down why or what it is that makes him so. Next Frere-Jones shares his opinion of why he personally is a fan of Weird Al. He claims that Yankovic isn’t popular because he is extremely clever but because he embodies how many people feel when confronted with pop music that is slightly out of style. He says this to establish
An opinion for the reader before they form their own. In this point of the article the author uses his profession position to attempt to persuade the audience. This would be considered using ethos. This is because the reader will likely believe what he/she reads based on the author's credibility. This is very effective for Frere-Jones to get his view across but is ineffective when it comes to the reliability. He could think anything and write anything, his experience doesn’t make it valid. “Weird Al’s songwriting process, almost without exception, is to confront that anxiety and to celebrate it. Yankovic will take a mysterious and masterful song and turn it into something mundane and universal.” In this part of the review Sasha talks about how the songwriting process that Weird Al possesses and how it is perfect for the anxiety that people have who don’t know anything about music. Here again you can see the bias that the author has and the second use of ethos. Later in this portion of the article is the first use of pathos we see. When Frere-Jones says “He makes the grand aspirational concerns of teen-agers in Lorde’s “Royals” into a story that includes a lesson about the hygienic advantage of taking food home in aluminum foil. (You’ll see the rhyme there.)” this is meant to be humorous. The comical effect makes the reader react better to the text and emotionally get involved in the paper.

Later in the work Sasha tells the backstory to Yankovic’s career.
He tells the story of how Weird Al grew up in Lynwood, a suburb of Los Angeles, and learned the accordion as a child, playing polka and other genres. He was inspired by satirists like Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman. Frere-Jones then provides some information about Sherman having a number one selling comedy album when Weird Al was a kid. This is a form of pathos. By providing you with the information that Sherman was a successful comedian and telling you he was an inspiration to Yankovic, it is logical to think this helped his career. It is logical to think that by studying the best it helped him become the best. This is an effective way of linking his past to present with good and factual
information.

Next Sasha talks about Yankovic's unique style and early work.
He ponders on the thought that it maybe his appearance that made him so popular. Someone that people could relate too. Frere-Jones describes him as a goofball with bad glasses, curly hair (longer now, but still not gray), and a taste for Hawaiian shirts. Is this the image that people fell in love with? It’s a question that he asks the reader to keep them involved in the article. He then moves on to discuss his song “Eat It” which would later award him with a grammy, after landing at number twelve on the Billboard’s 100 chart. While mentioning his songs Sasha speaks very highly of Weird Al by saying things like “Musical verisimilitude is part of what Yankovic provides—it’s a form of comfort that’s slightly different from comedy. With his producers and musicians, Yankovic comes up with songs that can function, in a pinch, as stand-ins for the original.” All this is again the authors opinion but by this point in the article using ethos is the most effective type or
persuasion.

The rest of the article Sasha provides information on a ton of songs that Weird Al has released. He tries to use logos to make the reader form a favorable opinion of all his works. Providing all this information at the end of the review and ending it on an joke is an effective way to close out the article. Overall Sasha Frere-Jones does a good job at keeping the reader involved, using his own professional opinion, and backing it all up with some facts. Although the article never really establishes what exactly makes Yankovic so popular, it provides the reader with plenty of information to understand why he is weirdly popular.