Move over Taylor Swift, one other musician is about to grow to be the main target of a college class.
Vermont State College will launch a examine of the songs of Bizarre Al Yankovic this fall. The music trade and enterprise course might be accessible each to college students and people locally who hope to do a deep dive on sings like “Amish Paradise,” “Date to be Stupid,” and “Living With a Hernia.”
“Al Yankovic‘s work is not just about the parodies,” Brian Warwick, the Music Business & Industry professor who will teach the class, told WCAX. “It’s additionally about his tribute or pastiche songs, the place it’s truly an authentic work by Al Yankovic, however he’s paying tribute to a different artist. … It simply provides us an avenue to begin learning the twentieth century and popular culture within the twentieth century.”
Warwick isn’t only a pupil of Yankovic’s work, he’s additionally a collaborator, having labored with the artist as a recording engineer on his last two albums.
Yankovic is straightforward to dismiss as a result of he focuses on parody songs, however the musician has proven longevity in an trade subset the place lifespans are quick. He has demonstrated a singular capability to not solely write lyrics that audiences discover catchy, however to carry out them in quite a lot of kinds, from machine-gun-fire rap to grunge to pop. He has managed to translate that success to movie and tv initiatives as nicely.
The Bizarre Al course follows different faculties’ launch of programs learning the music of Taylor Swift Stanford rolled out last year, following one at a New York College and one on the College of Texas, Austin, each in 2022. The Stanford course was known as “All Too Well (Ten Week Version),” and was introduced as an “in-depth” evaluation of Swift’s 2012 track, which the artist re-released in 2022 in a 10-minute-long model.
