Column:
Reality star Montag fails as artist
Published March 9, 2010
There's an age-old complaint about the entertainment industry that goes something like, "How do all these completely untalented morons get on the radio, TV and so on?"
A lot of the time it seems there's absolutely no filter in place to stop rich, well-connected, uninspired morons from taking over the airwaves. In fact, there's a whole genre of reality TV exclusively devoted to this: "The Hills," "Jersey Shore" and so on.
But for anyone who thinks there's no system in place to stop idiots with too much money and not enough talent from reaching the top, I present Heidi Montag, a has-been reality TV star turned pop artist.
I was vaguely aware she existed from a string of moronic late night TV interviews she had done with her husband, but it wasn't until she released her wildly unsuccessful debut album in January that I took real notice of her.
In reading interviews about her album, she seems to have the misconception that enough money, time and devotion are the ingredients to guaranteed success, and her definition of success is simply popularity.
She told Entertainment Weekly her album "cost as much or more than a Britney Spears album, because I wanted it to be that quality and to be able to get those people."
In explaining why her album took three years to create, she claimed unlike today's artists, she wanted to go back to the time of Elvis and the Beatles, a time "when (artists) used to spend years on their albums." The statement itself is completely untrue — the Beatles never took a full year on any album with the exception of the eponymous white album. Britney Spears, on the other hand, has released half as many albums as the Beatles in a professional career that's already longer than the Fab Four's by three or four years.
Nirvana recorded their debut album, Bleach, for just more than $600, and it went on to sell more than a million copies. These numbers are almost the exact opposite of Montag's album, Superficial, which cost nearly $2 million and, according to Nielsen SoundScan, sold 658 copies upon its release.
In an Entertainment Weekly interview almost as brief as this column, Montag claimed her album is on par with Michael Jackson's Thriller, vowed to perform at the World Cup and assured the interviewer "within the first week we will definitely make our money back."
Unless she saw $3,039.51 of profit for each of the 658 albums sold, all her claims are demonstrably untrue.
Montag told Popeater.com, "I've been called superficial and that's not who I am — that's just the surface, it's just the beginning of who I am."
Montag doesn't reject the notion that she's superficial. She says superficiality is indeed a part of her identity, just not all of it. This quote, whether she said it intentionally or merely stumbled over her words, initially made me want to write something more empathetic about her.
As a girl with more cosmetic surgery bills than record revenues, I'm sure she harbors a deep-seated self-loathing, a sense she will never be pretty enough or good enough, and I'm sure the colossal failure of her album, the thing she considers her "love and passion," has made her feel even more inadequate and probably shattered her already volatile sense of self-worth. And truthfully, we'd probably all be better off focusing on celebrities' humanity rather than their dashed dreams.
But 658 copies? The system works after all.
