On the occasion of the release of Scarlett Johansson's debut album, Matthew Oshinsky has assembled a handy wrap-ups of actors, or at least professional camera subjects, turned vocalists. It comes divided into categories: "the teenyboppers" (Annette Funicello, David Cassidy, Hillary Duff); "former child stars" (a category that, perhaps surprisingly, seems to be the likeliest to yield an actual recording career, along the lines of those enjoyed by Janet Jackson, Phil Collins, and Alanis Morissette); and my personal favorite, "former soap stars" (including Rick Springfield, who Oshinsky notes "was already a popular singer in his native Australia when he suddenly found himself on millions of afternoon TV screens in 1981 [on General Hospital] and learned that he didn’t know what popularity meant"). For those fully fledged adult mainstream celebrities who decide that this is their big chance to show that they've still got what they had at the high school talent show, Oshinsky favors the label "Meatheads." Here we find your Russell Crowes, your Eddie Murphys, your Steven Seagals (no shit, really!?), and Bruce Willis, whose 1987 Motown release The Return of Bruno (with backup work by Booker T. Jones and members of the Temptations) tried to hedge its bets by presenting itself as a "soundtrack" to an HBO special in which Willis pretended that he was pretending to be a legendary white soul singer on the comeback trail. He thus hedged his bets in a way that, in this specialized field, passed for clever, inviting people who noticed that his music sucked to treat the whole thing as a joke. His hideous, malformed cover of the Staples Singers' "Respect Yourself" made it to number five on the charts anyway. If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand how anyone could miss the 1980s.
Oshinsky names Jennifer Lopez and David Hasselhoff the queen and king of this niche of pop cross-pollination, noting that Hasselhoff's second album, the 1989 Looking for Freedom,” "shot to No.1 in Deutschland on the strength of the title track, which was embraced by thousands of Germans looking for something American and easy to understand." (This may be closest that anyone has ever come to describing David Hasselhoff's career as being easy to understand.) But he also knows that anything touched by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy just has a special magic to it. "It is unknown if Mr. Shatner intended for his 1968 recording of poetry and pop covers, The Transformed Man, to be the galaxy’s funniest album, even 40 years later, but it’s a serious contender. Mr. Nimoy’s 1969 record, The Touch of Leonard Nimoy, was his fourth and last until 1995’s wistfully titled You Are Not Alone, which presumably referred to someone other than him being with us." I have no idea just what to make of the fact that the author seems to have gone out of his way to snub every crossover pin-up who earned my sister's devotion when we were living under the same roof: namely, David Cassidy's brother Shaun; John Schneider, of The Dukes of Hazzard; and David Soul, who before attaining stardom on Starsky and Hutch used to appear on talk shows singing in a ski mask so that his devastating good looks wouldn't distract viewers from admiring the beauty of his music, and whose big hit, the tender ballad "Don't Give Up on Us Baby", would be rediscovered by disk jockeys with sick senses of humor every time he was arrested again for beating up a woman. Unless I hallucinated all that, but I don't think I did. Drugs of that quality never made it into the Walthall County school system back in the day.