“Weird Al” Yankovic has mocked songs by everyone from Michael Jackson to Nirvana.
But he won’t be able to poke fun at
Lady Gaga.
He has
blogged that he had asked her management team if he could cover her hit “Born This Way” with his tune “Perform This Way” (sample lyrics: “I might be wearin’ Swiss cheese or maybe covered with bees / It doesn’t mean I’m crazy – I perform this way”).
“As with all my parodies, it would be respectful of the artist, while having a bit of fun with her larger-than-life image,” he said he told her team.
Yankovic said that Gaga’s camp responded by telling him that she needed to hear his completed track before giving him an answer.
In the end, she rejected it.
Even though his song parodies are legal under fair-use interpretations of the law, he said it his personal policy “to get the consent of the original artist before including my parodies on any album, so of course I will respect Gaga’s wishes.”
But he is hurt.
“I’m especially confused as to why she waited until I actually recorded the song (at her insistence!) before saying no,” he bloged. “It’s not like there were any surprises in the finished song that she couldn’t have foreseen by, you know, READING THE LYRICS.
“I know this news is disappointing to many of you,” he concluded in his post. “Believe me… nobody is more disappointed than I am.”
Yankovic posted late Wednesday that Gaga’s manager never forwarded along the song. “Even though we assumed that Gaga herself was the one making the decision (because, well, that’s what we were TOLD), he apparently made the decision completely on his own, without any input from Gaga,” he wrote. “He’s sorry.”
The song will go on his album and he said “all my proceeds from the song (and the MUSIC VIDEO… I can’t wait…) will go to the Human Rights Campaign.”
