Let's See Chris Pine Top That

I'm a man who has the ability to take great pleasure in things that are truly awful. Bad music. Bad television. Bad movies. Taco Bell. There's just something wonderful about coming across something so absolutely terrible that it enters into the realm of camp. It was with this mentality that I took great delight in entering two little words into my Pandora application this morning.

William. Shatner.

Okay, if you don't know what Pandora is, it's a program that lets you put in the name of a song or an artist. Then it builds a radio station around the entered data, using the Music Genome Project to match other songs and artists that are similar to what you've selected. When a song plays, you say whether you approve of it or not, and it fine tunes the station. It's a wonderful way to find new music, and the first 40 hours a month are free (and only a dollar for the rest of the month if you want more). It's awesome.

Anyway, I knew that Bill Shatner, one of my personal heroes for obvious reasons, had produced some variety of music, but I had only heard a couple of songs a few years ago. It was spoken word poetry set to music, and Henry Rollins was involved, so naturally I was delighted. Thus, I decided to pursue what else there could be.

Oh what I found.

Try to imagine Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, only entirely spoken over background singers. That's...well it's awful. Wonderfully, delightfully awful. Then Pandora throws in a Rufus Wainright song, or maybe something by Tom Jones. Something to cleanse the aural palate before I'm subjected to his work from The Tranformed Man, where he performs a Shakespeare monologue and then follows it with a cover of some song, again entirely spoken in his stilted, Captain Kirk cadence.

The thing is, and it's really hard to accept at times, he's completely serious. Unlike his later work, there's no indication that he has any idea of how ridiculous this all is, no tongue-in-cheek wink at the camera to let you know he understands. It makes it so, so sweet.

Don't believe me? Here, try this. The sound is a second or two off, but it's so worth it.



I'm almost afraid to watch Leonard Nimoy's Balland of Bilbo Baggins now lest I implode in a moment of perfect, tasteless delight.