“Weird Al” Yankovic “Eat It” Podcast: Greatest Pop Stars

It’s been a week of “Weird Al” on Billboard.com. Our recent cover star and indie spirit award recipient comes to us at a fascinating place in his career, where despite having recorded only sporadically over the past decade, he’s in many ways at a career peak — culturally ubiquitous, about to embark upon the biggest tour of his career and still very much unchallenged in his lane as the world’s No. 1 song parodist. It’s a four-decade-plus-long reign, which was cemented in 1984 with his true breakout hit: “Eat It,” his parody of both Michael Jackson’s Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Beat It” and its equally popular music video.

On this week’s Great Moments in Pop Star History episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast, host Andrew Unterberger is joined by Billboard executive editor Rebecca Milzoff — writer of our cover story — to talk about the song and video that brought “Weird Al” Yankovic to a level stardom and omnipresence nearly comparable with the artists he parodied. We dive into the context that allowed “Weird Al” to crash the charts and MTV over 40 years ago and has allowed him to remain pretty much consistently popular for every decade since.

Along the way, we of course ask all the most important questions about “Eat It”: Why was food such an inextricable part of the “Weird Al” experience — and does it feel different now that we know him to be a vegan in real life? Were there really a particularly large number of kids starving in Japan in 1984? Will Weird Al ever come back to performing the song after removing it from his live setlist post-Leaving Neverland? And what the hell actually started the long-running feud between “Weird Al” producer Rick Derringer and “Beat It” soloist Eddie Van Halen?