The ‘Millennial Weird Al’ is back with a new target: Paul Simon

By David Mack, CNN

(CNN) — Ask any musician who’s produced a massive hit song and they’ll tell you about the pressure to replicate it with a follow-up. That burden is especially unique for someone like Kyle Gordon, a musician whose whole career is built around making fun of other musicians.

Gordon experienced massive success in 2023 with “Planet of the Bass,” which parodied ‘90s Europop groups like Aqua. As that song blew up online and made him an internet star, he was featured in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and NPR. Some called it the “song of the summer.” The song was even remixed in “The Simpsons.”

Gordon, 33, subsequently released two comedy albums with spoofs of genres including emo, nu metal and British rap, but none broke through in the same way that “Planet of the Bass” did — until now.

His latest work to take the internet by storm is “Mr. Jambo,” a hilarious yet admittedly catchy song in which a character named Barry Bergen travels the African savannah and claims to experience enlightenment, all while the locals can barely abide him. As one particularly frustrated man tries to explain to him in Zulu that he can’t understand him, Bergen simply decides the man is telling him about seeking love in “the valley of the soul” and “the wisdom written on the ancient scrolls.”

The tune is inspired by Paul Simon, who traveled to South Africa in the 1980s to record his album “Graceland” — which Gordon insists he believes is a masterpiece.

Gordon so believed in his latest parody that he self-funded a trip for him and a small team to travel to South Africa and Eswatini to shoot the video in April. That turned out to be a good bet. Since he dropped the “Mr. Jambo” video on his social channels last week, it’s exploded in popularity and been viewed millions of times. Streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker called him a “generational talent,” while fellow comedian Gianmarco Soresi said he was “obsessed” with the song. As more than one X user has said, “We finally found the Millennial Weird Al.”

Gordon’s third album, “Kyle Gordon Is Everywhere,” will feature “Mr. Jambo,” as well as narration from “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe. It is set to be released on October 2.

The comedian spoke with CNN about the viral success of “Mr. Jambo,” the comparisons to Weird Al Yankovic, what it takes to pull off a dorky white guy aesthetic and whether he thinks Paul Simon is mad at him.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hello — or should I say “Jambo!”

Jambo! Or in Zulu, “Sawubona!”

Your song made me recall my own trip to Africa when I was just out of high school and learning some basic Swahili, but also how cringeworthy most of the stuff I probably said about the trip was.

It’s kind of par for the course for Westerners going abroad. There’s something instinctually cringey about everything we end up doing. It’s something I am just as guilty of.

Like a lot of your work, the joke underscoring this new song and video is incredibly niche and also evidently instantly comprehensible to millions of people. How do you pull that off?

I appreciate you saying that because that balance is my number one goal. I enjoy going niche because it means it’ll be unique. Ideally, it’s a territory and a subject that hasn’treally been covered in comedy. But the goal is also to make it accessible. I try not to create stuff 50 nerds like me are going to jump up and down for. It’s sort of just vibes and hunch at this point.

Tell me about the journey from the idea for this song to this trip to Africa. I mean, this is a long way from the Oculus World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, where you filmed “Planet of the Bass.”

I started cooking this idea probably last fall, so almost a year ago. It happened naturally. Obviously, it’s heavily and primarily influenced by Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” That album was interesting to me because in Western pop music it’s a very unique, strange hit record to have that combination of sounds. But it was really when I heard the music of Johnny Clegg about a year ago when I got more excited about this idea because that’s when I realized, “Oh, it’s not just ‘Graceland.’ There’s a whole trend that happened here with combining Western rock and pop music with traditional African music.”

This trip was self-funded. That’s a big bet to place on one idea. What made you so confident?

Tunnel vision! There were a lot of people telling me, “Why do you need to go to Africa? You can just find somewhere out west that kind of looks like that.” But I really just got deeptunnel vision. I was like, I really know what it has to be, and I was just like super gung-ho about it.

In “Planet of the Bass,” we met your alternate persona “DJ Crazy Times.” Tell us about this new character.

His name is Barry Bergen. All my songs have a corresponding character; I’m never really performing as myself. In the lore of this world, this song came out in 1985 and won the Pulitzer Prize for music. And so, as Daniel Radcliffe spells out in the introduction to the song on Spotify, he’s essentially based on Paul Simon, loosely, but he’s an aging singer/songwriter who discovers African music and just kind of wings it. He’s very ignorant about Africa in general.

That style of song is both, as you said, incredibly corny, but also undeniably popular. Many of those songs are bops, right? Especially “Graceland”! How do you square those two things?

That’s what made it so enticing for me. I unambiguously love “Graceland.” I am not sick of it. Top to bottom, every song I love. I think it’s a pop masterpiece. It definitely has a corniness that’s extremely ’80s.

“Graceland” has this inherent juxtaposition of the whitest guy in the world being in Africa and finding his soul — somewhat controversially given that Simon went to South Africa despite the anti-apartheid cultural boycott at the time. Where do you fall on that controversy?

Well, to the first part of your question, the music on “Graceland” is incredible. Paul Simon is one of the best songwriters of all time. I don’t think that’s debatable. But the comedy for me is that, yes, it’s the whitest guy in the world with Ladysmith Black Mambazo behind him. But the fact that there was such controversy around the album also gave me the confidence that it absolutely justified being a subject of parody. It’s a totally legitimate target.

So if Paul Simon’s coming your way on the street, are you crossing to the other side?

No! I’m going to go up behind him, give him a kiss on the cheek and take him out for a pastrami sandwich. I hope he would like it and would find it funny and could see where it was coming from. It’s also been 40 years, so this is not his first rodeo. If I had to guess, he’s probably rolling his eyes rather than punching a wall. It’s definitely done with love.

Do you think good parody comes from a place of love?

Most of the time, yes. My favorite stuff that I do comes from that. You can both love something and recognize what’s funny or silly or cringey about it. Both can be true.

Let’s talk about the logistics of this shoot because I’m so curious. How did you find this choir, for example? What was the brief to these people as you were dancing in front of them?

We shot this in South Africa and Eswatini, which up until recently was called Swaziland. All the stuff with the choir and Mr. Jambo was shot in Eswatini. We had a Swazi producer there, Myxo Mdluli, who did all the casting. I knew I wanted a choir and the brass band.

I took some Zulu lessons, which is very close to the Swati language they speak there, so I could kind of brokenly explain the song and thank everyone. But the producer was translating too and they could all understand the Zulu part of the song, so they could get the joke. I explained I’m a character that’s a dumb American tourist and doesn’t know what he’s doing. They got that. They were laughing at me the entire time.

What about Mr. Jambo himself?

His name is Mandla Dlamini. He is the nicest guy. We still talk all the time on WhatsApp —and he actually does speak English! Sorry to destroy the illusion for everyone. He was a friend of the producer, and he was just a retired guy with time on his hands and thought it would be fun. There were a few different guys that the producer thought could play it, but he sent me a video of Mandla being like, “Get out of here!” and that was enough. Done! You’re hired! He crushed it. He sent me a really nice voice note the other day and said he had a lot of fun, so: mission accomplished.

Does he know he’s a breakout star?

I sent him the video. I hope he knows!

The costuming here is so specifically dorky. You know, the idea of you traveling to Africa with this in your suitcase is just hilarious to me.

Before anything else. I had this outfit. It’s the quintessential ‘80s/early ‘90s yuppie guy. Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Simon would wear versions of this sometimes. There’s a real me inside that would actually feel more comfortable if I had the courage to.

When “Planet of the Bass” blew up for you three years ago, it forever changed your career. What was the pressure like to replicate that success on that scale?

I learned so much through that experience. I’d had viral TikToks and built up an online audience before, but it is a totally different ballgame to expand and permeate a level of culture beyond that, and it was one I really wasn’t used to. Post that, the biggest thing for me was not trying to do “Planet of the Bass” over and over again, even though I could have maybe cashed in. I knew the most fun for me would be doing all these different characters and keeping myself from getting bored. My goal was never to follow up the success, but just to ask how I could keep doing what I want to do as long as possible. The fact that I’ve been able to do that for three years — testing things and seeing what works and getting more comfortable with this type of songwriting — was leading to this moment.

I’ve seen multiple people compare you to Weird Al in the last week. What’s that like to see?

I mean, I’m speechless. That’s like the George Washington on the Mount Rushmore of comedy. I’m just flattered people even put me in the same category.

Who inspires you?

So Weird Al, absolutely. But really my biggest one is Christopher Guest. In “Spinal Tap” and “A Mighty Wind,” which is my favorite movie, the songs aren’t related to the plot. He did what I try to do, which is that if you squint you could imagine that this song might have conceivably come out.

Just lastly, your song makes fun of white tourists who travel to Africa and claim to experience some sort of spiritual awakening. But I’m wondering if there was anything about your trip there — short as it was — that did change you? As an artist, or just as a person?

Yes, in the sense that everyone I worked with there was so nice and we were all having a really fun time, as I’ve had on all my other music videos. That just proves how silly the song is because they’re just nice, good people that are great to work with. So if there’s some humanist message that crosses boundaries, I think that’s what I would take away.

But no spiritual enlightenment to be found “in the ancient scrolls”?

I’ll probably just go upstate and do some ayahuasca, and then I’ll have my spiritual experience. Shooting a video in Africa? That was just good times.

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