Kyle Gordon has feelings about being dubbed the "Millennial 'Weird Al' Yankovic" – and the flattering comparison is not lost on him.
"I take it as a very high compliment," Gordon says. "He's such a Goliath in the world of comedy music. … I used to listen to him growing up. So, yeah, pretty cool."
Gordon, 33, is a New York comedian and musician, best known for his parody songs and their corresponding music videos that routinely go viral online. He currently boasts over 3.9 million followers on TikTok, with similar stats on Instagram and YouTube. His new album, "Kyle Gordon is Everywhere," dropped on Oct. 2 and is narrated by "Harry Potter" actor Daniel Radcliffe.
Many discovered Gordon after his 2023 hit, "Planet of the Bass," a '90s Euro-pop parody
performed by Gordon's pink-haired alter ego DJ Crazy Times. Its music video now has over 8 million views on YouTube, and Gordon's DJ character has been immortalized in fan-made art. On X, the video gained over 145 million views.
From 2000s nu-metal to 2010s indie folk, Gordon's parodies land because he clearly loves the genres he's lampooning. For USA TODAY, he reveals that he's always had a knack for musical comedy, ever since he formed a spoof rap group in high school with a silly biological name.
"Endoplasmic Ridiculum," he says, laughing. "We met in science class, so we called it that."
"There was some girl at the high school newspaper who wrote an article, like a big page-long interview with me and all my friends," he adds. "If it's on some archive online, that would be insane. But the music, there's probably an old computer somewhere in my parents' house. The problem is: We put all that music on MySpace Music. … It may unfortunately be lost media."
— Kyle Gordon (@kylegordon101) July 28, 2023
Gordon says that he played the guitar growing up, but making people laugh was his first passion: "It took a lot longer for me to be comfortable singing in front of people. I was much more comfortable being a moron publicly."
Growing up in Katonah, New York, Gordon admits that he was a music nerd and worshipped musical comedy greats like "Weird Al" and actor Christopher Guest, best known for his performance in the 1984 mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap" – Guest wrote many of the parody hair metal songs in the Rob Reiner film.
"I think what he does so well is, every character he creates … they're so precise, and it's absolutely plausible that all of these characters could have existed alongside all the contemporaries that he's parodying," Gordon says of Guest. "I think we're doing the same thing in the sense that we're imagining an alternate reality in the past where these new characters and original songs existed."
"Planet of the Bass," Gordon's Eurodance parody, is a good example. He says that it going viral online in 2023 "changed everything" for him. "It kind of gave me the confidence to be like, 'Oh, I can really do this,'" he adds.
Gordon doesn't let the word "viral" get to his head, though. "Very little of my brain is thinking like, is this going to go viral? How can I make this go viral? … If you do that, then that's a surefire way to make it corny."
Gordon follows his own interests when picking musical subject matter. "A lot of the things I choose to parody are things that I genuinely do love," he says. "When I am parodying a genre that I'm not as big of a fan of … I try as best as I can to put myself in the mindset of someone who genuinely likes that music."
This mentality has led to his palpable success online since "Planet of the Bass." His TikTok account alone already has over 200 million total likes across all of its videos. Public support for his antics has pushed Gordon to pursue more ambitious projects.
In July, Gordon released the song "Mr. Jambo," a parody of Paul Simon's 1986 album, "Graceland," inspired by Simon's travels in South Africa. Gordon followed in Simon's footsteps and flew to South Africa and Eswatini to film the music video, which now has over 2.6 million views on YouTube and 4.3 million more on TikTok. "White guys when they go to Africa," the video's caption reads on the latter app.
The song's punchline is that Gordon's character mistranslates the eponymous character, Mr. Jambo, who sings the song's chorus and's actually telling Gordon to get lost because of their language barrier. Gordon's character hears something profoundly different when Mr. Jambo shoos him off: "The love you seek is in the valley of the soul."
"I did, like, Ph.D.-level research for that song," Gordon says. "I listened to 'Graceland,' which is an album I love, but then I got into the South African music that inspired it and all these South African subgenres. … Then I took many months of Zulu lessons to be able to actually understand a little bit and speak a little Zulu."
@kylegordonisgreat Full song Out Now! Streaming everywhere #newmusic #musicalcomedy #funny #History #africa
♬ original sound - Kyle Gordon
Gordon did all of that to play a character who's hilariously ignorant of the culture. "If I'm going to play this role and parody this type of guy, I have to do as much as I can," he says. "[But] I'm still just a white guy from New York."
Gordon's always cooking up a new parody song idea and considers his white whale Bruce Springsteen – or anything "kind of like '80s Bob Seger, John Cougar Mellencamp … like '80s beer commercial music that's just watered-down," he says, but he hasn't found the right comedic angle yet.
Gordon would also love to one day make a "This Is Spinal Tap"-esque musical comedy movie. "If someone wants to give me a few million dollars," he says with a smirk. "You know what? Check that. I'll do it for less."
His new album, "Kyle Gordon is Everywhere," has several songs in new styles. "We've got like a 2000s butt rock song about the Iraq war," Gordon says. "We've got sort of like a Lindsay Lohan and Freaky Friday, Miley Cyrus, early 2000s Disney [song]."
"I really focused a lot more on the songwriting on this one, or tried to. So I'm just really happy – really, really happy with pretty much every song on this album. … I'm really, really happy with it."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kyle Gordon talks new album, reacts to 'Millennial Weird Al Yankovic' nickname
