page_title: Word Crimes
section_title: Music video
hierarchical_section_title: Word Crimes / Music video
context_page_description: "Word Crimes" is a song by American musician "Weird Al" Yankovic from his fourteenth studio album, Mandatory Fun. The song is a parody of the 2013 single "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke, featuring Pharrell Williams and T.I. The song spoofs misuse of proper English grammar and usage, reflecting Yankovic's own rigor for proper syntax and semantics. Yankovic chose a topic that would be distinct from those used in many pre-existing parodies, and that would avoid the misogyny issues that had arisen from the source material.
  "Word Crimes" received favorable reviews from contemporary music critics, with some describing it as a highlight of Mandatory Fun. The song's music video utilizes kinetic typography, and was compared to the earlier educational Schoolhouse Rock! musical cartoons. The song peaked at number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100, granting Yankovic his fourth Top 40 hit, making him only the third artist in history to have a top 40 hit in every decade since the 1980s.
context_section_description: The song's music video, a lyric video, was released on the same day of the album's release, the second in a series of eight consecutive video releases. The video is a kinetic typography video created by Jarrett Heather, which plays on the song's theme of proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. MTV News considered it a spoof on the growing popularity of lyric videos, calling it "a pretty incredible piece of animation".
  Heather had previously gained fame in producing a similar typography video for Jonathan Coulton's song "Shop Vac". The "Shop Vac" video, Heather's first major public production, had caught Yankovic's attention, and the musician sent Heather an email about creating a similar video for "Word Crimes" around November 2013. The video started production in January 2014 after Yankovic sent the final lyrics to Heather, and took about 500 hours of work in Heather's off-hours to assemble using the Adobe Systems suite of products. Heather and Yankovic coordinated nearly daily in the early stages of the video, with Heather presenting initial sketches and storyboards for the artist's approval. Initial designs of the video were based on the "Blurred Lines" video, using the color scheme and font style, and expanding it to a full color bible to provide contrast during the video. Most of the drawn animations in the video were created by Heather; the child's drawing at the lyric "unless you're seven" was done by Heather's son, Ethan. The video was completed by April 1.
  The video spoofs a number of facets of the original "Blurred Lines" video, such as the large hashtags in the original that appear seemingly at random, dancing letters and punctuation symbols on an off-white background, and ends with the phrase "'Weird Al' Yankovic has a big dictionary" spelled in balloon letters.
  The video also is filled with Easter eggs that appear quickly onscreen during lyrics. The graphic for the title phrase is modeled after the Merriam-Webster logo. During the line "You're a lost cause," a poster for ABC's Lost appears, with the sentence "Learn your ABC's, doofus" using the ABC logo. The number 27, which frequently appears in previous works by Yankovic, appears throughout the video. An illustration on a college notebook cover includes Pac-Man and the character Trogdor the Burninator from the Homestar Runner web animation series. The graphic for the lyric "irony is not coincidence" pokes fun at Alanis Morissette's use of the word "ironic", noting that "rain on [one's] wedding day" is merely coincidence, whereas a better example of irony would be a fire truck being destroyed by fire. The video also includes cameos by Doge and the Microsoft Office Assistant "Clippit" (also known as "Clippy"), and references to the Sacramento-based offices of the California Department of Food and Agriculture where Heather is employed.
caption: The video incorporates a re-creation of the Merriam-Webster logo.