Rockin like Weird AL

On his website, Weird Al Yankovic was asked about his music appearing in either Guitar Hero or Rack Band and though he was interested stated neither Activision nor Harmonix (comanies that produce the game series) were interested.

Earlier in the day I was asked about his parodies appearing in the game and I stated that since the music was written by other people it would be very difficult to obtain the rights to produce the parody version. Personally I would really enjoy if either Hardware Store or Albuquerque (my two favorite original Weird Al songs) or any other of his original songs made the game but most people only know the parodies and would not care for his original material. In a post in November 2009 I explained that about half his released material are original songs and I doubt either company would put the effort into creating them for the game.

That got me thinking .... How many songs available for Rock Band have been parodied by Weird Al and how many have appeared in his polkas? The answer is 48 total. I turned the results into a chart:



In his song Bedrock Anthem, Weird Al parodied both Under the Bridge and Give it Away and since they both are available in the game, I counted them both. Also, Enter Sandman (available in a polka medley) and Give It Away though appearing on the disk for Rock Band and Rock Band 2 respectively were among 10 songs that were not allowed to transfer to the hard drive to play in Rock Band 3 due to licensing issues.