When it came to music growing up, I was a total dweebus. My parents didn’t listen to the radio much, and my brain automatically classified anything that rocked harder than “We Didn’t Start The Fire” as “Bad Kids Music.” Odds are pretty good, then, that if a song came out sometime between 1980 and 1995, and my musically sheltered kid brain was still somehow familiar with it, it was because it was either a) by Billy Joel or Paul Simon, or b) had been parodied at some point by “Weird Al” Yankovic. Deep into his late-career renaissance, Al is rightly held up for his talents as a comedian and a musical mimic. But it would be a mistake to overlook his talents as a curator of musical tastes, transforming top 40 hits into comic creations with each new album. The direct parodies are obvious—I heard “Fat,” “Smells Like Nirvana,” “Headline News, “Like A Surgeon,” and literally dozens more before I’d ever gotten a taste of Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Crash Test Dummies, or Madonna. But the real revelations were his “style parodies,” where Al adopts a band’s general sound rather than a specific track. More than once, I’ve heard a song on the radio and instantly gravitated it, only to realize that, say, a million plays of “Frank’s 2000-Inch TV” had prepped me to fall immediately in love with early-era R.E.M. [William Hughes]