Weird Al Can’t Parody Slim Shady

Mikael Wood of the Dallas Observer spoke with ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic about Eminem’s refusal to let you do a video for ‘Couch Potato’ and whether he worried that stars are getting too silly and self-reflexive on their own. Yankovic responded, “That’s the reason it took me so long to get around to doing Eminem, because he was certainly big enough to lampoon a year ago, but you can’t really make fun of a song like ‘Without Me’ or ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ because there’s a certain amount of self-awareness there, and they’re already tongue-in-cheek swipes at pop culture to begin with; it would’ve been sort of redundant to do a parody of that. Whereas ‘Lose Yourself’ was a very serious kind of anthem, and those are always the best to make fun of–it’s always better to get a very serious song and to inject a little humor into it.”