Wishing they would just shut up and sing already...

This is how my brain works:
I was in the shower, sort of groggy from the few drinks I had last night and not quite awake from the morning coffee. I began thinking about my weekend and what I needed to do like laundry, groceries, read for work. I also started thinking about the first season of Dr Who which had just arrived and I was really looking forward to watching it. Then my head jumped to season three, which I had been given for my birthday this year and how much I had enjoyed it. Especially the bits with the Master who was played by that actor, oh what’s his name, John Simm, he was in that show Life on Mars…
Yeah, my mind is a jumbled, strange place.
It was at this point I remembered that Simm had apparently started his career as a musician, even playing with Ian McCullough of Echo and The Bunnymen. Then I took a left turn at musicians who act and actors who try to be musicians. How people always think actors are terrible musicians but musicians are such terrific actors and how that is rather unfair.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that actors are terrible musicians. I equate listening to Russell Crow or Kevin Bacon or Kevin Costner as the equivalent of aural rape. And please do not bring up 30 Seconds of Mars to me. Yes yes, I know YOU like them.
But musicians seem to get a big pass on their acting abilities because most people seem astounded that they not only can sing, but apparently they can also speak. And sometimes emote. Let’s face it, most of them can convincingly pass for humans, but don’t ask for much else.
It reminded me of Law & Order SVU this week, which was Ice-T’s big solo episode for the season, a job that required his character to go through a long patch of self-anger and doubt, and to showcase his skills as an interrogator and detective. Yet pretty much all he could muster was some version of angry-grumpy-constipated.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Ice-T and I generally like him on the show. I am not expecting the guy who sang “Girls, Let’s Get Butt Naked and Fuck” to all of a sudden become a student of the Stanislavski Method of acting. But still you would think that someone, anyone involved with the show would have pointed out that he was out of his league.
When acting, musicians are usually some version of their stage personas and that is how we like them. Ice –T is always Ice-T, Ice Cube always Ice Cube, Elvis, Madonna, the list goes on. In some way, we expect no more from them than just extensions of their musical personas, only now speaking rather than singing, acting happy or sad or in Madonna’s case, horny rather than just sounding like it. Even the brilliant comedian Ricky Gervais, who started out in a British synth pop band, is still rather a one note actor, never branching out much from his safe zone. When they fulfill our expectations, no matter how limited, we are quite happy to praise them for their talent.
Maybe that’s why I love Flight of the Conchords so much. With their flat New Zealand accents and their dead pan style and delivery, they seem to get this idea that they are not actors, just playing them on TV. They let us in on the joke. They really only come alive when they perform the musical numbers, when the “acting” disappears and they can do what they do best.
If only L&O had allowed Ice-T to rap.