Scarlett Johansson Music? WTF?!?

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern

Perhaps exactly a year ago to the day, a strange thing happened to me in Balboa Park where I am now sitting and now, unfortunately and unbelievably, living, though hopefully not for one single day more. I almost froze to death last night. I don’t know why I still write this blog at a time like this. I guess I’m...leaving a record...

So one of the reasons that I think it isn’t totally preposterous that Scarlett Johansson might like me is Ryan Reynolds. That’s also a reason she might be mad at me. And the reason for this funny thing that happened to me a year ago. Let me explain. 

Alanis Morissette (Morissette is in iOS spellcheck but Alanis is not—Steve Jobs is rolling over in his grave) has been my favorite musician since around 2002 or whenever that was when “Under Rug Swept” came out. Alanis was engaged to Ryan Reynolds. I always thought they had actually gotten married, but that shows you how closely I follow celebrity news. Ryan then subsequently married Scarlett Johansson. I mentioned in “What Is a MAT Girl?” how so many of the MAT Girls I love have dated or married guys I really like. And I left out some in that list, like I forgot that Gwyneth Paltrow was married to Chris Martin and Coldplay is one of my favorite bands. So there really is something to this, and it makes me think that these might be people I’d like in real life and that’s why I like their work. But that the same dude would be with my favorite musician and then my favorite actress, it’s weird. But then I started to do a little research and it got weirder...

Alanis and Scarlett have all these strange coincidental connections between them. When I discovered them, I thought that people must be aware of this in pop culture given what huge stars they are. So I came to Balboa Park to do a public survey. I see two teenage girls and their mom (or at least one’s mom) and I figure this would be a good group to ask about celebrity girls. I asked them, “Do you know what Scarlett Johansson and Alanis Morissette have in common?”. And Alanis, you wouldn’t believe it. These two girls look at each other and then one says, “We don’t know who...that other person is”. They didn’t even know if you were a boy or a girl!  And Scarlett, they didn’t seem to have that good a grip on who you are either. I believe if I’d asked them what you do, they would have said, “She’s famous, right?”. I tell the girls to do themselves a favor and go buy Under Rug Swept and then I give up on this group. 

There is a middle-aged woman standing nearby who seems to be listening with interest. If you’ve worked around the entertainment industry at all, there is a certain vibe industry people put off and you know they work in the industry without the necessity of being told. This woman worked in the industry. When I asked her what those two have in common, she says, “Well, they both have great voices.”. Now this stops my clock for a second. It seems a strange thing to say about Scarlett. I had noticed she talks kinda funny, like she’s not used to using her voice and has had to talk a lot for the first time.  But then when I get home after nobody knows what I’m talking about, I go to Scarlett’s wikipedia, which I’ve still never read, and I see in the intro, “actress, singer...”. Singer? I’ve never heard anything about Scarlett Johansson singing.  My instant reaction is, “I bet her music sucks.” Then I think, wait, would I expect anything Scarlett does to suck?  Well, she might have won the great war for Ryan Reynolds (temporarily), but there’s no way her music is a good as Alanis’. I think maybe it was one of those things where she recorded a song or two for one movie. But why then would this industry person be saying she has a great voice?!?  I refuse to look up any information about Scarlett Johansson’s music, let alone listen to it. And I’ve refused up until this minute. I follow music. There’s no way Scarlett has more than a couple of songs without me knowing about it. Scarlett’s music career...is a fraud.  

I tell myself, this must have been like a feminine ego thing—“Alanis sings so I’m gonna sing!” I would so hope that Alanis and Scarlett are friends. Alanis Morissette and Scarlett Johansson sitting around talking shit about Ryan Reynolds. That’s so hot. Wait, Alanis, Scarlett AND Blake Lively sitting around talking shit about Ryan Reynolds. Nuclear smoking hot!  I bet Ryan is cool enough that he would sit on a couch with me behind a one-way mirror and watch that show!

So I tell this industry woman about the Alanis/Scarlett coincedences and she says, “That’s interesting.”. Then she says another strange thing: “I just saw Alanis in New York.”. The way she said it, it was not like she saw her in a concert, or saw her at the mall. She said it the way you would say you saw a friend. 

For a year, even as I’m daydreaming that somehow I might get so lucky in this universe to get to know, get to work for, or maybe even get to marry Scarlett, I refuse as a matter of silly principle to listen to her music as I have Alanis Morissette’s Collection frequently on repeat. And just another demonstration of how awesome Alanis is: hardly anybody’s actually got the right collection of songs on a single disc greatest hits album, but hers is pretty close to perfect. 

So I’m homeless in Balboa Park on a cold rainy Sunday night, rejected even by jail, at rock bottom, totally alone in the world. What better occasion to go listen to Scarlett Johansson’s music for the first time?

I Google search and see that Scarlett’s got a bunch of songs, many of them for animated movies that I assume she did voices for. That makes sense. But then I see it looks like she has at least two albums. My fear...is fear the right word? My fear is that Scarlett’s music will actually be good. I mean, how much more unfair can life get? She’s ridiculously rich, smoking hot cute, a brilliant actress even though she generally refuses to do the kind of movies I like, and she’s gotta be pretty close to the top of the all-time box office gross list for actresses by now. It just wouldn’t be right if she could actually sing. 

On this night, I decide it is the right time to end my Scarlett music embargo. To me, music is always better when I’m moving, so I take a walk around Balboa Park during a break in the rain. I scan through the list of titles, and the first song I listen to is “Trust In Me”, because I did afterall put Scarlett on the list of public figures that I trust posted on my previous blog. She may have been on there twice, because I put the girl I saw in Vegas on it too, still unsure if they were the same person. 

“Trust In Me” is more or less exactly what I would have expected. I’m not saying its bad. It is what it is—an actress singing a song from a movie. I listen to a few more songs. Some are better than others. But I now know who Scarlett Johansson the singer is. I could go on listening and daydreaming about Scarlett, but I’m still SANE. Seventy percent, anyway. Sixty-five, seventy percent. We’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy. I think I heard that somewhere. So I put “Under Rug Swept” on, and immediately I’m reminded how awesome Alanis Morissette is. I wonder if she knows what “GOAT” means?

Oh, the reason Scarlett might have gotten mad at me. Several years back, I posted this poem about music on my website. I thought it was one of the better things I’ve written, and the audience seemed to agree as it got more traffic than any page on my site except the piece I posted right after my kidney failure. Part of that poem is dedicated to how much I love Alanis’s music, and I end that section by saying “Fuck Ryan Reynolds”, mystified, at that point in time, that he’d ever leave Alanis for HER!

I didn’t think anybody was reading my website. Nobody important anyway. But what I didn’t consider until recently was that during that time, my script “All-Nighter” was being circulated to actors. There was a serious Hollywood casting agent working on it. I feel like a jackass that I don’t know her name.  But there was a role in it that someone very well might have sent to Ryan to read (I think they were seriously talking to David Gallagher about doing it). I never thought about Ryan because I wasn’t thinking that big and it’s not really a comedic role, but he, like Scarlett, doesn’t mind doing low-budget movies and atypical roles. So maybe Ryan was sitting around with his wife reading it, and she says, “I’m gonna Google this guy”, and the first thing that comes up is “My Life With Music” because that is the most popular page on my site, and unbeknownst to me back then, Scarlett is a singer so she reads that, and right in the middle, I’m heaping superfluous praise on her husband’s ex, and saying “Fuck Ryan Reynolds”.  She might have gotten up, taken the script out of his hand and threw it in the trash.  

Do I think that happened? Not highly likely, but sometimes the world is smaller than you think and the explanation for what happened is something you never would have thought of. You have to be careful what you say, even when you think no one is listening. I didn’t mean the line with any actual malice. It was, in context intended to be funny and it rhymed with the beginning of the next verse. But I’ve often failed to realize how the intended tone doesn’t always come through in writing. Maybe the reason reason “All-Nighter” died midstream was that Scarlett Johansson said “Fuck Ryan Reynolds? No. Fuck this guy’s movie!”. I wouldn’t be mad if that were true. It would be funny and totally justified, if a tad bit on the overreaction side. 

But on the music front, Alanis wins. But, Scarlett’s acting career is better than hers. Though that is the hottest God’s ever looked. But “One Whole Hour” is really good, so much so that eventually I’m going to have to go listen to the rest of Scarlett’s music. Scarlett always wins...

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern