Song, by Toad

I always remember the snivelling acolytes of the cool kids at school being so horrified when you showed indifference to the glowing aura of dazzling beauty emanating from the posteriors of their deities that there was only one response: you must be jealous.

Aye, right, spot on you fucking psychological genius.  Christ almighty, are you that heartbroken by someone showing a lack of respect for your personal heroes that you have to whine like a jilted baby?  The answer is yes, of course.  Yesterday someone left a great comment on my post about Scarlett Johansson’s merciless butchering of Tom Waits’ back catalogue which was pretty much in that exact same vein.  It was perfect – a little gem of spurned, wounded madness and I thought I had to share.  No rambling, no idiotic screed, perfectly concise and absolutely brilliant.  No need to mock the old dear any more of course, but I though you might find this funny:

I actually love Tom Waits AND Scarlet’s covers, especially “Falling Down.” There is absolutely no reason for you to bash someone personally because they didn’t cover a beloved song of yours to your liking or because you’re bitter about not being famous.

She’s quite right.  I am unforgivably bitter about not being famous.  Because I’ve done, erm… nothing worthy of fame really.  But then, that doesn’t seem to discourage many people. And it couldn’t possibly be because I think Scarlett Johansson can’t fucking sing and that our pathetic toadying to celebrity means no-one had the balls to tell her, could it?  No no, that would be entirely implausible.  Can anyone sense that I’m in a bit of a mood today?

And what better song:

The Magnetic Fields – Famous

Scarlett Johansson is making an album of Tom Waits covers, as I am sure you are all aware (I am not linking to it – download it illegally by all means, but I will be really pissed off if any of you actually part with any wedge for this garbage).  I haven’t really mentioned it that much on these pages because Tom Waits is an icon, and I am not sure that vanity projects like these particularly merit all that much attention to begin with.

But here it is, and it’s fucking dreadful.

Why Tom Waits, seriously? What does she think she is going to add by throwing a bit of pointless karaoke over someone else’s arrangements of songs that are so far beyond her that you almost marvel at the Olympic feat of hubris required to even consider the project.

Everybody knows Waits is a genius.  Lots and lots of people love his work, but this sort of nonsense is the equivalent of jumping up and down in front of the camera when someone is trying to interview a musician and shouting ‘Me too, I love him too, look at me everyone, see this really talented person, well I think he’s really talented, I do, me, me me me’.  We do not need to see Tom Waits through your eyes Scarlett.  If you’d sit down and shut the fuck up we are quite capable of operating a CD player ourselves.

I wouldn’t, of course, be feeling quite this hostile if the results had been any good, but they aren’t, they’re rotten.  Her video for Falling Down is here, and it’s woeful.  Apart from the joyless shoegazey arrangement – for which someone needs a very public buggering – the quality of her singing is just dismal, and herein lies the crux of the issue.  And funnily enough it isn’t just that these are crap Waits covers.  Let’s face it, there are plenty of sub-standard Waits covers out there, and homage is part of art.  This isn’t art though, it’s a vanity project.  If you have any doubts about this ask yourself one question: on its own merits, just a musical project, is there any chance that this record would be in the shops if Scarlett didn’t have the semen of half of Hollywood dribbling down the inside of her thigh?  Thought not.

What it’s really about is that for the good of the human race’s collective cultural soul someone, somewhere needed to say no.  And this is the problem with celebrity culture.  For some unfathomable reason people seem to think that being famous is something to be applauded, celebrated, envied and pandered to.  No-one ever seems to think to turn around to these pampered, preening popinjays and say ‘Sorry love, I’m sure the album would be interesting, but the fact is you’re shit at singing’.  It’s not in anyone’s interests of course, because some twat somewhere will make the thing, and having Scarlett whip her baps out a couple of times and flash that ‘If you like my record I might just blow you’ smile guarantees that the thing will sell.

Human beings’ capacity for deluding themselves that they are in some way special or talented is pathetic, quite frankly.  We are fucking average, almost every single one of us.  That, if you care to look it up, is what average means and no amount of inner-enlightenment, validation, vanity, positive thinking or toadying is going to make a jot of difference to the fact that we are all fucking ordinary.  Get the fuck over it.  The only thing Scarlett Johansson is any good at at all is having really big breasts.  What a towering achievement – she must be very proud.

This is how you cover Tom Waits:
Holly Cole – Falling Down
Holly Cole – Soldier’s Things
Still not a patch on the real thing though:
Tom Waits – Falling Down

There I was listening to a song from Kevin Drew’s new album Spirit If… (visit Tim at The Daily Growl for a proper review, I don’t like it that much) when it slowly dawned on me that he was using naughty words.  Ooh, I thought, splendid!  If there’s one thing Mr. Toad likes it’s things that are good and sweary, so I listened a little closer and thus divined that the song’s title TBTF stood for the phrase Too Beautiful To Fuck, and a thought started to weasel its way into my head.

I don’t think beautiful is all that sexy.  Now, I don’t mean that I think beautiful people are hugely vain and that their personalities turn me off, or that I find ‘real’ people more appealing because they are more attainable or things like that.  I mean that in terms of sexual attraction, really beautiful people do not do it for me at all.  There is barely a supermodel who makes my trousers twitch in the slightest – although now that Elle McPherson and Cindy Crawford are getting older they are becoming far more attractive.  Angelina Jolie may be physically perfect, but I don’t find her sexually attractive at all.  I know you may not believe me, but this is the truth.

In all honesty, extreme beauty is pretty fucking common these days.  Magazines, billboards and television are crammed full of one-dimensional images of physical perfection.  Go to any expensive town centre bar in a busy metropolis and you’ll see gorgeous people everywhere.  They are slightly compelling, I’ll give you that – fascinating almost, a bit like an exhibit.  But I never could muster up the slightest desire to try and hump ‘em.  Being good-looking is easy, it’s cheap and it means nothing.

Being saucy, on the other hand, is something of a rare commodity.  There are very few people you look and think instantly ‘Rrrowwrr – I could strump her till I sprained my pelvis!’  That enigmatic quality called sex appeal is far, far rarer than the rather common one of physical perfection.  So panic not if you aren’t beautiful – you might still be sexy as hell.  Beauty itself is just not an especially attractive quality.

Kevin Drew – TBTF
Billy Bragg – Everybody Loves You Babe

P.S. Click that picture.  She has sex appeal.  She also happens to be beautiful, but that picture hurts my eyes, it’s so marvellous.