Reasons Behind Yankovic's Weirdly Popular Music Review

The article I chose to read and analyze was “Weirdly Popular”. This is a music review published in the New Yorker magazine in 2014. It was written by Sasha Frere-Jones a writer and music critic. This review covers the reasons behind “Weird Al” Yankovic’s popularity. Weird Al is a comedian who specializes in song parodies. He has been doing this for forty years.

In the beginning of the article Sasha Frere-Jones establishes the main idea very clearly by asking a question. The beginning reads “Do people enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic because he is funny or because he's not that funny?” This question is an appealing way to start the article because it gets the reader involved. After grabbing the reader's attention Frere-Jones then presents some flashy
He tells the story of how Weird Al grew up in Lynwood, a suburb of Los Angeles, and learned the accordion as a child, playing polka and other genres. He was inspired by satirists like Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman. Frere-Jones then provides some information about Sherman having a number one selling comedy album when Weird Al was a kid. This is a form of pathos. By providing you with the information that Sherman was a successful comedian and telling you he was an inspiration to Yankovic, it is logical to think this helped his career. It is logical to think that by studying the best it helped him become the best. This is an effective way of linking his past to present with good and factual
He ponders on the thought that it maybe his appearance that made him so popular. Someone that people could relate too. Frere-Jones describes him as a goofball with bad glasses, curly hair (longer now, but still not gray), and a taste for Hawaiian shirts. Is this the image that people fell in love with? It’s a question that he asks the reader to keep them involved in the article. He then moves on to discuss his song “Eat It” which would later award him with a grammy, after landing at number twelve on the Billboard’s 100 chart. While mentioning his songs Sasha speaks very highly of Weird Al by saying things like “Musical verisimilitude is part of what Yankovic provides—it’s a form of comfort that’s slightly different from comedy. With his producers and musicians, Yankovic comes up with songs that can function, in a pinch, as stand-ins for the original.” All this is again the authors opinion but by this point in the article using ethos is the most effective type or