How do you ruin the message behind a popular song forever? For instance, it’s impossible to listen to “I Believe I Can Fly” or Aaliyah’s “...
How do you ruin the message behind a popular song forever?
For instance, it’s impossible to listen to “I Believe I Can Fly” or Aaliyah’s “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number” without realizing prolific sex abuser R. Kelly was behind both. For almost 20 years, Stealer’s Wheel’s 1973 song “Stuck in the Middle With You” was a minor hit with a pleasantly hippie-ish vibe. After 1992, however, it’s primarily remembered for soundtracking an excruciating scene in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” in which a psychopath tortures a tied-up policeman in ways unmentionable in a family publication.
Admittedly, those are extreme examples, and none of those songs rises to the level of iconic. Can you really ruin the message behind, say, John Lennon’s “Imagine”? And do it just by covering it?
Give it to “Wonder Woman” actress Gal Gadot: In 2020, she made a solid go at destroying the one Lennon solo song everyone knows. Now, she’s admitting her bad-viral video was in “poor taste.”
In case you’ve forgotten, let’s rewind to March of 2020, as the world ground to a halt. Those of us who could afford to were told (or forced, in some cases) to stay at home, bathe ourselves in hand sanitizer and wash our hands after every encounter while singing “Happy Birthday” twice. For many of us, this meant losing jobs or businesses — or knowing that, if the lockdowns continued, we’d lose them. Streets were desolate. People couldn’t get the medical care they need. Recovering addicts were cut off from support.
Fear blanketed countries around the globe. We knew not how long this would last or how many lives it would claim. Many lost loved ones without being able to say goodbye — particularly in care homes and very particularly in New York, where COVID-positive patients were ordered to be allowed into nursing homes by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
But don’t worry, plebes. Gadot and a cadre of celebrity friends had just the balm for a wounded world:
“We are in this together, we will get through it together,” Gadot said in her Instagram caption for the preposterous video. “Let’s imagine together. Sing with us”
Imagine the tenor of the responses that tone-deaf let-them-eat-lockdowns cover of “Imagine” inspired at the time. It isn’t hard to do:
Yes, apparently a roster of thespians, comedians and sundry other entertainers singing about imagining no possessions from their mansions as the proles watched their businesses and careers founder didn’t exactly go over well. Not only was it a horrible cover, two years later, it’s still an albatross circling Gadot’s career — and, in an interview published by InStyle in January, she admitted it was a bad idea.
The topic was broached after the interviewer noted that Gadot had, while receiving her award at the Elle Women in Hollywood ceremony, started singing “Imagine” as a form of self-mockery.
“Yeah. Might as well. They had a mic there,” Gadot said.
“So many people just wouldn’t do that,” InStyle’s Laura Brown said.
“It just felt right, and I don’t take myself too seriously. And with the whole ‘Imagine’ controversy, it’s funny,” the Israeli-born Gadot responded.
“I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, ‘Listen, I want to do this thing.’ The pandemic was in Europe and Israel before it came here [to the U.S.] in the same way,” she continued. “I was seeing where everything was headed.”
However, she said the viral cover song “was premature. It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right?”
Yes, one might it missed the mark. However, there’s a difference between when the dart doesn’t hit the bullseye and when the throw is so errant it hits a spectator in the sternum.
Fine, give points to Gadot for realizing it “was in poor taste.” However, you only get credit for “pure intentions” if your worldview resides somewhere vaguely in the orbit of reality.
Gadot and everyone involved in this mess are creatures of the entertainment world — those who’ve managed to escape reality’s orbit like human Voyager probes, propelled into the inky darkness of La-La Land by an admixture of money, privilege, fame and a battery of attendants whose job it is to insulate them from the existence the other 99.999 percent of the world has to suffer through.
Nobody learned any lessons from this, mind you. I can’t go over every Marie Antoinette moment our Hollywood betters engaged in during the pandemic, but let’s remember last year’s Emmy Awards They took place as Los Angeles County — where the awards show was being held — had an indoor masking order. But that’s just for the commoners, right?
When Seth Rogen is calling people out on their incaution — and, in a way, their hypocrisy — that says something.
But don’t worry — the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health assured us all this was on the up-and-up, as “[t] Emmy Awards Show is a television production, and persons appearing on the show are considered performers,” giving them an exemption.
Imagine the cognitive dissonance involved there. You may say Gal Gadot is a hypocrite, but she’s not the only one. Now, when we hear “Imagine,” we can all think of coddled Hollywood stars assuring us from their manses that we were all going to be OK when we just locked down, even if we weren’t. Good work.
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