Audio By Carbonatix
Everyone needs a hobby. I, for example, sometimes enjoy figure drawing, which I am not-terrible enough at to produce people with bodies that are only a little contorted, faces that are recognizable but off-putting, and alarmingly freakish hands and feet that come out looking like withered claws. But what separates my hobbies from those of Drew Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow is that it’s my policy to burn those figure drawings, eat the ashes, shit them, re-burn that shit and then scatter those ashes over the ocean just so that nobody will ever know that I’m not good at everything. Paltrow and Barrymore, though, you’d think they were shitting gold nuggets.
The list of celebrities who publicly try their hand at something else to a resounding pat on the back and a “good job” is a lengthy one — see Steven Tyler’s semi-retarded collection of skull paintings or Michael Jordan’s embarrassing but mercifully short-lived golf career, for starters — and the offenses get particularly egregious in the realm of actors-who-try-to-be-musicians or vice versa. We’ll thank you, Lindsay Lohan, to never record another album again.
Because that mediocre, overproduced album that millions will buy just to satisfy their morbid curiosity-shaped hole in our heart that Lohan’s house arrest left is perhaps about to be filled by another irritating actress, who, incidentally, is Lohan’s polar opposite: Gwyneth Paltrow.
Paltrow, as we all know from her infuriatingly sanctimonious website GOOP, wherein she provides the teeming plebeian masses with tips on how to live like a rich, entitled socialite who has never known hardship, is perfect in every way. And so there were two striking things about her turn as a country singer in last year’s otherwise unremarkable Country Strong: One, Gwyneth Paltrow awkwardly pretending to endure hardship, and two, Gwyneth Paltrow actually singing. Wow! Those notes she holds are, like, real notes!
Meanwhile, Drew Barrymore, another well-bred automaton who has at least known a modest degree of hardship, was discovering her true calling as a director of music videos. The results: Best Coast‘s newly released clip for “Our Deal,” set to a Barrymore-directed mini-series involving two rival gangs called the “Night Creepers” and the “Day Trotters,” who, you know, paint graffiti at night and day, respectively, in a plot line less reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story than of Charlie’s “Day Man” musical in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “One of the things I’m most inspired by is timelessness,” Barrymore attempted to explain, also noting that her first meeting with Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino was like “a little peanut butter and chocolate — very yummy.”
I, uh, all right, then.
But the prognosis for Paltrow is even worse. Evidently spurred on by her admittedly kind of novel performance with Cee-Lo at the Grammys, as well as by friends Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Paltrow told Elle last week she was considering doing an album: “They think that I should go…in a studio and see what happens. And if it’s good, do it. And if it’s not, don’t. So that’s probably what I’ll do.”
Oh, Gwyneth, we have no doubt that it will be…perfect.
