Steven Seagal. Keanu Reeves. Bruce Willis. Kevin Bacon. Billy Bob Thorton. The litany of actors who definitively proved they should stick to acting is a long and frequently silly one. Rarely do thespian’s aural explorations result in a She and Him – or even a 30 Seconds From Mars. But despite the stigma, despite the grossly unbalanced dross to gold ratio, America’s brightest (or at least most famous) stars continue to cut albums.
Take Scarlett Johansson. The Hollywood starlet has a professed love for the music twisted balladeer Tom Waits. Unlike the average fan, who might follow Waits around the country on one of his extremely rare tours or write a one-act play about his greatness to be performed with a taxadermied mouse in a dress and a Ken doll, she has representation, yes-men and enough clout to do whatever she wants. Under circumstances like those, wouldn’t you record a Tom Waits cover album? I know I would. The resulting vanity project, Anywhere I Lay My Head, promises to not sell well and do poorly among critics and Waits’ fans.
The worst Johansson can really be accused of, though, is overexuberant fandom. If she wasn’t making movies and laying down tracks with the dude from TV on the Radio in her downtime, she’d probably be on Deviant Art uploading MS Paint files of her and Tom as furries. Her fangirlishness, in short, is forgivable. Lindsay Lohan has no such excuse.
The Marilyn Monroe if you squint at those extremely airbrushed pictures of her look-alike is recording her third album for Motown Records. If the first two were terrible and had negligible impact on the charts, what justification does she have for making another one? A taste for cocaine and rehabilitation that would put most musicians to shame? No, her pièce de résistance… is Snoop Dogg, Pharrell and Timbaland. If she can’t come by talent naturally, Motown will send in the trendiest producers money can buy to build Lohan’s album around her.
For the kind of money the label’s dropping, they could, I don’t know, sign a lesser-known artist who knows how to sing and everything!
