Beautiful Scarlett

As I imagine to be the case with any number of heterosexual males, I find Scarlett Johansson rather easy on the eye, and I have no problem admitting this. She may not be as consistently impressive an actress as Cate Blanchett, or blessed with Tilda Swinton's remarkable ability to make you forget sometimes that you're watching a shit film (check her Archangel Gabriel in the otherwise awful Constantine if you don't agree). But she was great in Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn't There and Lost In Translation, and did a likeable screwball turn in The Nanny Diaries, a film which, although entertaining enough, wasn't quite as clever as it thought it was. All that said, she seems to have appeared in a few too many movies lately where her performances have been kind of flat. The Island is a case in point. I don't want to be too hard on her for that one - after all, it wasn't so much just another crappy, dystopian, sci-fi/action thriller as it was just another crappy Michael Bay movie. All the same, there were moments in that particular flick when, seemingly called upon to convey something like panic, confusion or some kind of realisation that the world her character inhabited was something altogether more terrifying, her expression was more like, "Now, did I remember to turn off the bathroom light? I'm sure I did..." No matter. Like I say, 'crappy Michael Bay movie'.

No, the real subject of this post is 'Scarlett Johansson - chantoozie'. About a year ago, she released an album of Tom Waits covers called Anywhere I Lay My Head, produced by Dave Sitek (token white dude in the best black rock band in the world). I'm not sure how it sold - Wikipedia claims it's done less than 25k worldwide (which is pretty fucking rotten), but it's Wikipedia, so whatever. I do know that the level of critical opprobrium heaped upon it was wildly out of proportion to what is by no means a bad album ('butchery' and 'trainwreck' were amongst the choicest descriptions). It isn't anything earth-shattering, but, as a Tom Waits fan, I liked it, and was surprised at just how much better it was than I expected. I certainly couldn't imagine people queuing up to take a Forrest Gump all over it with quite the same enthusiasm, had it been by some Pitchfuck-endorsed Hope Sandoval wannabe rather than a Hollywood actress. Sadly, its reception, broadly speaking, does tend to typify the "how dare she..?" attitude, not only of people who considered the record to be yet another vanity project by a piece of Hollywood eye-candy with ideas above her station, but also of those rock snobs and music geeks who seem unable to comprehend that a "gurl" might be familiar enough with the work of Tom Waits to do an album's worth of his songs. I mean, how could that be possible..?

And that's another interesting thing about the record. You might expect there to be a few of The Hits on there, mightn't you? I did. Yet there's no 'Innocent When You Dream', no 'Kentucky Avenue', no 'Jockey Full of Bourbon', and certainly no 'Downtown Train'. The tracklisting looks like the kind of thing a serious Waits fan would come up with, albeit one perhaps a little less familiar with his 70s output. So what does it sound like? Well, it sounds like This Mortal Coil to me, which is no bad thing at all (Ivo Watts-Russell had some involvement, I understand), and there are moments when Sitek's production sounds to me as if he might have had in mind a more modern take on the kind of kitchen-sink-and-all sonic overload that Phil Spector almost drowned Leonard Cohen in on Death Of A Ladies Man, with Nyquil and absinthe taking the place of Quaaludes and pharmaceutical chang. Scarlett's voice isn't the most astonishing thing you'll ever hear, and sometimes it gets a little swamped by the densely-textured arrangements, but I get the impression she prefers being just another component of the whole thing, as opposed to her acting work, when she's usually further up front. Even though it's her name on the cover, the enterprise itself isn't dependent on her being a virtuoso singer in order for it to work. Entertainment Weekly declared it 'the worst album of 2008'; an editorial decision I suspect was arrived at before they'd even cracked the cellophane on the CD, and one which confirms, for me any road, that it's a periodical far better suited to analysis of things like the finer details of Lindsay Lohan's love-life, rather than of music.

It isn't that Scarlett's a bad singer either, because she isn't. Her recording of Gershwin's 'Summertime', from a 2006 compilation 'Unexpected Dreams: Songs From The Stars' is proof she's more than capable of carrying a tune, even if the enduring impression is of someone who was unlikely ever to have much of a career in musical theatre. In fact, I put her original take on a couple of summer-themed mixtapes I did for friends last year as a hidden track. When they found out who it was, a couple of them were pleasantly surprised. Along with 'No One Knows I'm Gone' from Anywhere I Lay My Head, I've posted it below, so you can hear for yourself. As a little extra, I've also posted one of my summer mixtape secret weapons; a remix of 'Summertime' I did in an afternoon last year. It isn't something I've circulated all that widely, but if you happen to like it, then you're more than welcome to share it wherever.


Scarlett Johansson: No One Knows I'm Gone - Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008)




Scarlett Johansson: Summertime - 'Unexpected Dreams: Songs From The Stars' (2006)




Scarlett Johansson: Summertime (Mighty Love Remix) - unreleased

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

It never fails to amaze me how the music industry continues to come up with new ways of shooting itself in the arse.

There's a scene near the end of "Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story", where the misfiring career of John C. Reilly's washed-up c&w singer is revitalised after one of his songs is sampled as the basis for a multi-million selling rap hit. The difference between this scenario, and the wretched failure of good taste that is 'Johnny Cash Remixed', is that Dewey Cox's serendipitous good fortune is the punchline to the film's central joke. Not only that, but they had sufficient smarts to get Ghostface on the track in the movie.

Whilst you'd hope that, in the name of all that is good and decent, "Johnny Cash Remixed" would die like the dog it surely is, it's nevertheless difficult to look at it and not think; how on Earth could anybody think this was an idea worth spending money on in the first place? By its very nature, there's going to be a degree of gilding the lily involved with any remix project involving a Heritage Artist, particularly when the work of said artist doesn't immediately lend itself to such treatment. In this case, though, it seems particularly pointless. After all, it's no exaggeration to describe Johnny Cash as a giant of American popular music. Even if you were to disregard the recent, somewhat sanitised, biopic "Walk The Line" and the widely-acclaimed American Recordings series, made in his twilight years under the aegis of Rick Rubin - things which actually did bring the man and his music to a new, younger audience - Cash is hardly somebody you'd describe as a forgotten man in any event. Furthermore, it's unlikely anybody discovering Cash since his death in 2003 would need, or want, to have been met halfway by something as godawful as this

Compare such a shambles to the altogether more respectful treatment Cash's Columbia back catalogue continues to receive at the hands of Sony BMG's appropriately-named Legacy division, and you begin to see it for what it undoubtedly is. After somehow finagling access to a bunch of Sun-era Cash masters, the guilty parties - amongst others, Snoop Dogg, Matthew Knowles (father/manager of Beyonce) and John Carter Cash (who really ought to know better) - have decided that these recordings would benefit enormously from the musical equivalent of a "Pimp My Ride" makeover. Thus, the spare, introspective menace of I Walk The Line is obliterated beneath an unremarkable off-the-peg backing track that does its creators (Snoop, DJ Quik and Teddy Riley) no favours at all. In fact, the list of participants on each remix tells its own story; two-thirds of them are what you'd politely describe as "marginal" figures, many of whom seem to have little form beyond having contributed to several other projects of a similar nature (Kennedy? Count De Money? Mocean Worker? Me neither). You're left with the impression that any genuine A-list names who'd been asked to contribute had suddenly found themselves with prior commitments. No wonder, since virtually everything on here is barely listenable hackery of the shabbiest kind.



Worst of a very bad bunch indeed is Pete Rock's awful "will this do?" take on Folsom Prison Blues. Now, Pete Rock is without question one of the greatest and most innovative producers in the history of hip-hop, and I have to admit that I was at least curious to hear what he'd done with the source material. A filtered SP1200 bassline from some obscure Fania record? A few signature growls and ad-libs from The Chocolate Boy Wonder as a high lonesome horn sample pans back and forth across the stereo picture? The snare from Mountain's Long Red? Nope. What we get is the kind of rhythm track that probably took a minute to punch up, and which was then thrown into ProTools along with the master recording and, a few tweaks later, being FedEx-ed back to the label, doubtless within the hour. In fact, Compadre Records (let's name names here) could just as likely have found someone in their own mailroom every bit as capable of delivering something just as cheap and shoddy-sounding for a tenth of what they paid Pete Rock.

Whilst the debate continues to rage on both sides of the Atlantic over whether the copyright period for sound recordings should be extended, you'd think that the so-called custodians of some of the touchstones of modern popular music would be a little more eager to show they were up to the job. In their haste to squeeze more mileage out of these recordings in such an ill-advised manner, they've succeeded only in producing something destined to end up as road surfacing in a far-flung province of China.