[UPDATE: Turns out it's Lady Gaga's manager who lacks a sense of humor. Lady Gaga herself has approved the song in the wake of the insta-controversy.]

Of course, Weird Al Yankovic was going to parody Lady Gaga, and turning "Born This Way" into "Perform This Way", an extended joke about her wacky costumes seemed perfect. But sadly, Lady Gaga wouldn't allow Al to put the song on his forthcoming album. Madonna was ok with "Like a Surgeon", so you'd think Gaga would follow her idol and go along with the joke, but no such luck.

From Al's blog:

After the Australian tour, I was supposed to go on a long-awaited family vacation over my daughter’s spring break — but because I now had to record what ostensibly was going to be my “hit single” as quickly as humanly possible, I cut our vacation short and came back to L.A. to spend long days and nights in the studio. The band and I worked around the clock. On April 11, I put the finishing touches on the mix and mastered the track. Done.

Or so I thought.

A couple days later we got the final word: Lady Gaga says “no.”

*silent scream*

And that’s it. As of this posting, I still don’t know specifically what kind of problem she has with the song (obviously I take a few jabs at her, but y’know, it’s satire — that’s how it’s supposed to work). And I’m especially confused as to why she waited until I actually recorded the song (at her insistence!) before saying no. It’s not like there were any surprises in the finished song that she couldn’t have foreseen by, you know, READING THE LYRICS.

A conventional release for the song and video would have also raised a nice chunk of change for the HRC — an organization which I have to assume Gaga supports. Hopefully, if fans enjoy hearing the song online, they’ll make a donation anyway.

My parodies have always fallen under what the courts call “fair use,” and this one was no different, legally allowing me to record and release it without permission. But it has always been my personal policy to get the consent of the original artist before including my parodies on any album, so of course I will respect Gaga’s wishes. However, given the circumstances, I have no problem with allowing people to hear it online, because I also have a personal policy not to completely waste my stinking time.

So I uploaded the song to YouTube, and will be making free mp3 downloads available on weirdal.com shortly. Hope you enjoy it.

Man, I wish you all could have had a chance to see the video we were going to do for this thing. It was going to be BEYOND AWESOME, and disturbing on many levels. Oh well.

Anyway, I realize that this may be way more information than many people would care to know about the whole situation, but I just wanted to set the record straight before any crazy rumors started. There’s really nothing more that I have to say about it now, so hopefully I won’t have to be answering questions about Lady Gaga in interviews for the next 20 years.

I know this news is disappointing to many of you. Believe me… nobody is more disappointed than I am.

Thanks for listening. I’ll keep you posted.

Your pal,
Al