The Not Al Page

The most popular songs he didn't even write (or perform)!

Updated: Dec 09, 2005

I spend a fair amount of time on the various peer-to-peer file-sharing systems. Occasionally, I just browse the available music hoping to find something I'll enjoy. I have my main artists that I listen to, and I own all of their CDs, so there's no incentive for me to "pirate" in the dirty way the word is used by the music industry. One day I thought I would try to find some Weird Al Yankovic concert recordings and was amazed at what I found.

Apparently, Al had been doing a lot more parodies and music recordings than I had realized! I saw all kinds of songs bearing his good name that I hadn't even heard of! Fortunately, it did not take long for me to realize that a lot of people had probably found some wacky parody of a popular song and slapped Al's name on it, because everybody knows Weird Al Yankovic is the only musician who's ever done a parody.

Geez, people.

I think it's truly unfair that to the vast majority of the MP3-sharing world, Al has become wrongly associated with songs like, "What if God Smoked Cannabis" or "The Vagina Song" or "F*** the Macarena." It's exactly the same as people spreading a rumour that you once wrote a book advocating communism. (Well, okay, not exactly the same... but close enough.)

In a possibly vain attempt to restore some bit of honour to his name, I have compiled a list of songs that appear in MP3 format on the internet that Weird Al Yankovic has never performed yet bear his name. If you ever happen to make it to this page, do the community a huge favour and go through your MP3 list (or any other kind of music list, for that matter) looking for filenames that associate Weird Al and any of the song titles below. Trust me, you'll thank yourself later.

Lorne Carscadden suggests that it might be a good idea to put the phase "not Weird Al Yankovic" somewhere in the filename of any song title that appears in The List. He says: "Then people could still find these files by doing a "weird al" search, but would learn who the actual artist is. People who already have the file would stumble across it, and could correct the name of the file they already have." Sounds reasonable to me.

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