ABSTRACT
Creative activities such as songwriting, improvisation, and arranging are essential components of a popular music curriculum. These experiences balance the recreative focus of most traditional school music programs and are aligned with many of the 2014 National Core Arts Standards driven by creating music. A parody is a song that uses the same chords, structure, and melody as an existing song, but replaces the text with original lyrics. Weird Al Yankovic is famous for his humorous parodies of popular songs. Using parody as a songwriting technique helps students to focus on lyric writing, since the chord progression and the melody are provided by the original song. The chords within these familiar chord progressions work well with one another, in any order. Students may struggle to generate original material for a song, especially if they are in a group. One approach to lyric writing is to develop a list of words or expressions that connect to a topic.
