Weird Al Yankovic Comes Out with Awesome Lady Gaga Parody, ‘I Perform This Way’

Weird Al Yankovic is coming out with a brand new album in a couple of weeks and, even better, he’s already released the leading single off it: a parody of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” called “I Perform This Way,” which you can also find embedded at the end of this article.

The announcement that “I Perform This Way” will be the leading single comes from Al himself, but not after he chose to upload it on YouTube without Lady Gaga’s consent, because she refused to give her blessing for it – or so Al thought.

Yankovic, known for parodying everyone from Michael Jackson to Madonna and Coolio, says he always asks for the consent of the artists he’s making fun of before he includes the songs on his album.

The same happened with “I Perform This Way”: he contacted Gaga’s manager and, after a series of complications and ruined vacation plans, he even went to the trouble of recording it, only to be told he couldn’t release it as a single, Al explains in a lengthy post on his official blog.

He’d already decided that only Gaga’s hit single would be perfect as a leading single for his album of parodies.

“After hearing the song, I was reluctant to tackle it. Because it was such an earnest human rights anthem, I thought some people might consider a parody to be in poor taste. Plus, I was really kinda predisposed not to do a Lady Gaga parody anyway because, well, that’s what everybody in the universe was already assuming I would do, and I hate to be so predictable,” Al writes.

“Based on my concept, I was reasonably sure that my parody wasn’t really going to offend anybody… but I still decided, as an act of good karma, that I would donate all the money from sales of the song and music video to the Human Rights Campaign,” he says.

Even so, Gaga’s manager said no to the offer – so Al decided to take the lemons and make lemonade, and offered the song for download online. The proceeds would have still gone to HRC.

When word got out that Gaga was “too serious” to accept her song to be parodied by Yankovic, she had a change of heart: of sorts, since she never knew of the offer Al had made to her, because her manager didn’t tell her anything.

“Gaga’s manager has now admitted that he never forwarded my parody to Gaga – she had no idea at all. 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,” Al writes in a new blog post.

“He’s sorry. And Gaga loves the song,” he adds.

As such, Al Yankovic is sticking to the initial plan: “I Perform This Way” is the official single for the new album. A video will also be made soon but, until that happens, check out the song below.