Topping the kitsch list

Topping the kitsch list
August 19, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/topping-the-kitsch-list/2005/08/18/1123958136462.html

Fiona Scott-Norman analyses why actors bother to release albums.

Different things bring joy to different people. Some folks are elated by the advent of spring, others by the birth of a new child, still others are exultant if they score a free baseball cap from the back of a Fox Black Thunder.

For me, the most recent fast-track to joy town was the discovery that William Shatner and Russell Crowe have released new albums. I know: it doesn't get much better than that.

Crowe's downloadable solo album of original folk tunes is called My Hand, My Heart, and it is a significant release for two reasons.

One, because it raises the important question: which other body part did Russ have his hand on?

And, two, it is a welcome addition to the always irresistible world of kitsch musical recordings, the collecting of which can quickly burgeon into an addiction.

There are as many gloriously dubious musical releases as there are angels bootscooting on the head of a pin.

There are child stars (hello Nikki! Could be worse. At least you were born too late for Young Talent Time), religious albums featuring grim-faced and unlovely Christian families on their covers (most of these releases, disturbingly, originated in Waco, Texas), and there's also a small, seething pit of out-and-out megalomaniacal wrongness - Charles Manson and Imelda Marcos spring to mind.

Yes, they both have albums, eponymously named. Manson's is as ghastly an effort as you'd expect from a deranged killer, and Imelda, disappointingly, let slip through her elegant, thieving fingers the opportunity to claim These Boots Are Made for Walking as her signature tune.

The grand pooh-bah of them all, of course, is William Shatner. His transfixing 1968 recording The Transformed Man immediately achieved - and retains to this day - cult kitsch status, which is why a new album from him, 36 years later - titled Has Been - is so intriguing.

The Transformed Man came out at the height of Shatner's fame as Star Trek's Captain Kirk and was a hysterical, self-absorbed, psychedelic, sincere, spoken-word experiment, with Shatner talking his way through the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It is unlistenable without the appropriate medication and therein lies its charm.

Russell Crowe, having already released several albums with the uncomfortably named and now defunct Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, was also already a card-carrying member of the collectable kitsch celebrity subset: Actors Who Are Convinced They Are Serious Artistes/Rock Stars.

It's an exclusive club in which Crowe and Shatner rub shoulders with fellow serious not-so-young insects Eddie Murphy, Don Johnson, Craig McLachlan, Bruce Willis and even Tony Barber.

The paradox that traps all of these actors in a vortex of torment is that the fame that gives them the platform to launch a music career makes it essentially impossible for anyone to take them seriously.

Tony Barber, despite releasing many albums, has never broken out as a singer and overcome his image as Australia's perky quizmaster.

The others - especially Murphy, Crowe and Johnson - are all earnest singer/songwriters but hopelessly associated with the devalued currency of the celebrity album, where anyone with a spot of fame whacks out an album to cash in.

John Travolta, for example, released an album at 22 on the back of Welcome Back Kotter; other hit-and-run celeb offerings came from Cameron Daddo, Scott Baio (aka Chachi from Happy Days), Pia Zadora, Twiggy, Dennis Waterman, Leonard Nimoy, Torvill and Dean, John Laws, Don Lane, Bernard King (Pot of Gold) and Abigail (No. 96 and the first woman to get her breasts out on Australian television).

King and Abigail at least had their tongues firmly in their cheeks; King's A Man of Style is as camp as all get out, and following from her hit cover of Serge Gainsbourg's Je t'aime - on which she simulated an orgasm - Abigail released an album so stuffed with double entendres that Benny Hill would have suggested toning it down.

Understandably, the general public, when confronted with an album from Don Johnson at the height of his pink-jacketed and designer-stubbled Miami Vice fame, was not going to put him in the same creative basket as, say, Madonna or Bowie, even though the songs were original and he'd collaborated with Tom Petty.

Ditto Willis and his blues album The Return of Bruno on the back of the Moonlighting TV series. Ditto Captain Kirk of Star Trek releasing The Transformed Man, and Russell Crowe releasing My Hand, My Heart off assaulting a hotel employee with a telephone.

As Crowe attempts to reinvent himself as a sensitive, guitar strumming, folk balladeer, writing songs about cane cutters, his wife and deaths in the family, it may cross his mind that it's difficult to get the credibility you crave when you present in public as an antisocial wingnut.

What must be especially galling for Crowe is that the more seriously he takes himself, the greater the credibility gap, and the more ridiculous he becomes - and Crowe takes himself and his music very, very seriously.

When he first flagged the existence of My Hand, My Heart he invited a journalist into his home and spent 4 hours explaining his songs. That's not an interview, that's a hostage situation.

You can approximate the experience for yourself by visiting http://www.myhandmyheart.com. Crowe explains the history of every song, every thought, in extravagant, almost compulsive, detail; gives you three different potential over-designed CD covers to vote for (one made of wood, another an oil painting of Russ); and displays quotes from Billy Bragg and Sting praising Crowe's songwriting.

A fan site contains a blog from Crowe complaining that he's misunderstood, but to be fair, it's not for want of him explaining.

It's not Crowe's music (an unremarkable but pleasant and sincere folk album) that places My Hand, My Heart on the kitsch list; it's Crowe.

In stark contrast, Has Been lifts William Shatner entirely out of the abject company of Crowe et al.

Collaborating with Ben Folds, Joe Jackson, Henry Rollins and a kick-arse choir, Shatner has created a genuinely great album; funny, compelling, moving, sophisticated and self-aware.

His cover of Pulp's Common People has been getting justified airplay, and the entire project emanates wisdom and fun.

The secret is actually quite simple - after 36 years, Shatner learned to stop taking himself seriously.