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It might be true that you can separate the art from the artist.

The Guardian tries to make that its central point in its review of Johnny Depp’s album with Jeff Beck, the Englishman perhaps best known for being The Yardbirds’ guitarist in the 1960s.

While acknowledging how strange it is that Beck is collaborating with Depp, given how polarising the actor’s court battle with ex-wife Amber Heard has been, Depp’s dubious behaviour actually has very little to do with how objectively bad his songwriting is.

Exhibiting wholly characteristic egocentricity, Depp spends a lot of time ranting about how awful it is to be him with an overarching sense that he might be taking revenge in the album titled 18.

Besides a rendition of ‘Caroline No’ from the Beach Boys (“custom made for montages of gulls swooping above cliffs on the Travel Channel”) and an “entirely redundant version” of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Goin’ On’, the album also features two songs Depp wrote.

The review states that those songs are “the weakest musically, if the most revealing lyrically”, with ‘This Is a Song for Miss Hedy Lamarr’ – we covered that in more detail once before – evoking an “Oh dear”:

Actor and inventor Lamarr, one supposes, is being used as a cipher for Depp: misunderstood, abused, unfairly traduced: “Erased by the same world that made her a star / Spun out of beauty, trapped by its web.” Of course, Lamarr went into seclusion rather than making an album to win public sympathy.

Lend your ears again:

The album also includes – frighteningly – versions of Killing Joke’s ‘The Death and Resurrection Show’, as well as The Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus in Furs’:

The former simply lacks the menace and terror that are Killing Joke’s stock in trade – it’s like cosplay, so clearly about projecting danger, which is an odd thing to want to project given that Depp’s legal travails have concerned whether he really is dangerous.

Venus in Furs is an odd choice for the same reason – why now, of all times, would he choose to perform a song about sado-masochism? It is disastrously recast as goth metal, losing all the creeping dread of the original. Where Lou Reed really did come across as tired and weary, Depp just sounds like a bored robot.

Ouch.

Overall, 18 has been judged as an “uncomfortable listen” and a “peculiar and hugely uneven record” and awarded two stars out of five.

That would be the case, the review argues, even if Depp had never ever stepped into a courtroom before.

Double ouch.

[source:guardian]