Scarlett Johansson Recording an Album
A Links entry from Thursday, August 2, 2007Scarlett Johansson Recording an Album
And it’s all Tom Waits covers (read his reaction.) And it’s being produced by David Sitek of TV on the Radio… and it features members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Celebration. (Via Rolling Stone.)
The decision to do Tom Waits covers seems pretty Advanced, but it remains to be seen whether or not she’ll start sporting cut-off leather jackets, aviators and a mullet. Also, I still think it’s possible that this might just be extremely Overt, but I guess we’ll have to wait until the album’s released. She wasn’t that bad at karaoke in Lost in Translation.
Jason
yes she was
Mark Cullen
I have a strong feeling that this album will be strongly hated and will end up on VH1’s “Remember the 00’s?” in ten years or so.
Bryan Klausmeyer
I bet people had the same attitude towards Debbie Harry just because she was a Playboy model. But Blondie ended up being a great band, so maybe, just maybe, it’ll actually be good. If not, maybe a 50-year-old Michael Ian Black will make a good witticism out of it.
Mark Cullen
I was hoping for Andy Dick, but i’ll definitly give it a listen and try to keep an open mind.
tina oiticica harris
I strongly dislike Scarlett Johansson’s acting. Her tits are fine, and so are her red lips. When I saw her on SNL I could cry if I liked her, but there’s no sympathy here for a talentless actress, especially now getting into recording.
Karaoke in a movie is quite different tnah cutting a record but I think the recording industry does sucj wonders in studios maybe I’ll hear crrretins refer to her as the white Billie Holliday.
Mark Cullen
To me, doing a Tom Waits album is actually pretty overt since he’s well liked by people looking for “different” music, myself included. To quote from the bible of Jason Hartley’s Advanced Theory Blog:
“The Reverse Advanced (started out Advanced and became Overt, otherwise known as Second-Stage Advanced Weirdo) Tom Waits is going on an honest-to-goodness tour. Well, eight dates and for Overt, cockamamie reasons, but I’ll take it.”
Whether he’s advanced, overt, or neither, I still like his music.
Bryan Klausmeyer
Your criterion for Advancedness just sounds elitist (that canaille have to not like it). I think that’s a misreading of what Hartley is saying. Take, for instance, Bob Dylan or David Bowie. Many people like both of those aforementioned artists, yet they are both (at times) Advanced.
Also, from Hartley on Tom Waits: Ad It Up
This is a pretty Overt stance, but as you may remember, Tom Waits is Second-Stage Advanced, which looks a lot like Overt. He started out Advanced (he must have been Overt before he started recording), then has gotten more and more Overt. But it isn’t true Overtness because if you are Advanced, everything you do will be Advanced as well. You might be shaking your head, but you’d have a pretty hard time convincing yourself that Tom Waits doesn’t belong among the Advanced.
AND, on the subject of Scarlett Johansson releasing a Tom Waits cover-album, Hartley wrote:
This is awesome
I still think the choice to do a cover-album of someone who’s Second-Stage Advanced over someone who is purely Advanced—say, Lou Reed—or someone who is purely Overt—uhh, Nirvana I guess—is, in fact, Advanced. If she chose to do Nirvana covers, it almost wouldn’t even be worth reporting. If she chose to do Lou Reed songs, I think that’d be a good example of being extremely Overt. The fact that he’s at least somewhat popular means that her choice isn’t “the opposite of a normal choice” nor a “straight-shot choice,” which is how I define Advancedness (somewhere between the two, but tilted towards the side of “oppositeness”).
Bryan Klausmeyer
Another possible definition of Advanced vs. Overt:
If you read any Hegel, Heidegger or Sartre, they talk about “being-in-itself” vs. “being-for-itself.” Being-in-itself is basically being-for-us, what is transparent to consciousness, concrete and fixed. Moreover, the Thing-in-itself is also unaware of itself. On the other hand, being-for-itself means that it is conscious of its own consciousness and is also the subject of phenomenology, causation, etc.
If, rather than applying these concepts to the Notion of Being, we instead focus only on the subspecies of one’s musical talent/choices, then I think Advancedness could be categorized as a being-in-itself, whereas Overt might be a being-for-itself.
Bryan Klausmeyer
bryklaus@umich.edu
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