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Is This News?: Macaulay Culkin’s Velvet Underground Parody Band Is Over

attends the Adult Swim Panel: Robot Chicken. Adult Swim at New York Comic Con 2015 at the Jacob Javitz Center on October 9, 2015 in New York, United States. 25749_002 418.JPG

In late 2013, erstwhile child star Macaulay Culkin resurfaced as frontman of the pizza-themed Velvet Underground tribute band the Pizza Underground. The Pizzas released a demo medley featuring snippets of songs like “Papa John Says” and “I’m Beginning to Eat the Slice,” 50-year-old melodies repurposed in service of a unifying theme so cheesy it accidentally managed to tap into the naïvety of the originals. The band even went on tour in 2014, but we haven’t heard much since. So it should come as no great surprise that, on today’s episode of WTF with Marc Maron, Culkin acknowledged that the Pizza Underground are effectively over.

The original idea was “a lark that we did,” Culkin told Maron. “We were a joke parody band. I didn’t want people walking away going, ‘That was a good show.’ I wanted people walking away going, ‘I had a lot of fun.'” The project came to an end, he explained, because “I was a little tired of it, to be completely honest. … I’m very casual about everything I pursue.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the 37-year-old Culkin described himself as “a 30-something retired person” who spends his time writing and painting. “Everything I do is a hobby now,” he said.

As Pitchfork points out, the Pizza Underground supposedly did record a real album at some point. That project was never released, and if it exists, Culkin didn’t mention it. He did offer a pretty self-aware summation of the Pizza Underground’s appeal: “It’s one of those things where it’s a joke and you laugh, and then we keep on repeating the same joke so it gets un-funny, and then it comes back around again and it becomes hysterical.”

Macaulay Culkin’s surprisingly good but unsurprisingly forgotten parody band with no formal releases is officially on the permanent hiatus anyone who did remember it would have assumed it’s on… is this news?

Is This News? is a series of stories that might be news.