On Tuesday night, NBC’s surprise hit, The Voice, airs its finale, and whoever the fans of this show are – suicidal Carol Channing tribute artists, lonely women and wretched men who whisper back at the TV – they must be pumped. But would they be so enthusiastic if they’d read this week’s tabloid probe of the judges’ backgrounds – in particular that of the seemingly cuddly Cee Lo Green?
This week, The Voice’s judges are featured in Star Magazine, and Cee Lo’s past as a teen thug involved mugging “pedestrians” (this distinction is bizarre to me – did he stop short of mugging zip-liners and the seated?) and spending his days “torturing animals [and] beating up homeless people.”
For those who have not seen the show – if, like me, you watch American Idol and know you must choose one reality show per genre and avoid all others for fear of incurring irreparable brain damage – The Voice is a “blind audition” show. Four dubious stars – Christina Aguilera, Blake Shelton, Adam Levine and Green – imperiously listen to ugly people sing, while sitting in gigantic red Starship Enterprise chairs with their backs turned.
They then meet the uggos and marvel, then fight over them in order to form winning teams in a super-positive version of the age-old sadism that is choosing sides for gym class.
I remember early promos for the shows that advanced the idea, via Levine, that, before music videos, “in the 1970s” there were a lot of “sketchy-looking people [who] had gorgeous voices.”
Levine’s logic is, of course, completely warped. In the 1970s, there were album covers, fan magazines and concerts. The Beatles did very well with female fans, despite the infrequent visuals; Elvis Presley never shot a video in his life but women are still throwing their panties at the Meditation Garden in Graceland.
Okay, these stars are good-looking, but the “sketchy-looking” people still often succeed: Is The Voice trying to suggest that the well-upholstered Cee Lo is doing well because of his good looks?
It’s all right that he looks like an extremely unpleasant version of Professor Sherman Klump in The Nutty Professor; that he reads horrible poems to his team that have no flow or logic. (Just how much did producer Bruno Mars bring to the composition of Green’s big hit, called Forget You in its sanitized version?) What’s not okay are the recent interviews in which, misquoting William Congreve, the Atlanta-based rapper claims that “music did truly calm a savage beast.”
Green has talked frequently about his criminal youth: “I was a kleptomaniac, a pyromaniac, just a plain maniac,” he claimed last year in an interview with Blender.com, which raised a few eyebrows, and nothing more.
“I was enraged, without an outlet,” explains the former Gnarls Barkley duo member, who experienced some hard times in his youth. “I was aggressive … and took pride in that.”
Then the music saved him, and the rest is tacky TV history. But why is that, again? Are the Atlanta police as slow as me, in terms of hearing the news, and if so, why are they not investigating?
Animal torture and gross physical assault on helpless people are crimes, and – if what he says is true – he is a criminal. This is not like confessing to a wayward youth filled with drug experimentation and sexual liberty.
What if he killed one of the homeless people? Did he torture the animals to death?
What kind of person takes “pride” in such actions?
Are we so star-sick now that we think even a minor celebrity like this can behave with impunity because squeezing his hippo-bulk into a big red chair every week is an act of contrition? That when he recited a bad poem, and cried a bit, he had repented?
This week, Peter Falk, a great actor who dedicated his life to art, died after years of suffering the harrowing disease that is Alzheimer’s; the second anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death occurred, and with the memorials came a renewed sense of the man’s persecution and his own peerless artistry.
This week, the families of missing or suffering persons and animals everywhere were again given chilling pause, that their loved ones mean nothing because of a catchy hit pop song; because of a public so delusional it believes fame is the same thing as redemption.
If only one could recite his own original lyrics to Green: “Forget you.” And Atlanta Police, “forget you” too.
