Celebs Just Made 'Imagine' Unimaginable
Well, let's dive right in here, shall we?
Over on Instagram, Gal Gadot tells a brief story about being inspired by a video of an Italian guy playing John Lennon's "Imagine" on the trumpet, and then she begins to sing one of the lamest songs ever to emerge from the hippie movement. What comes next is a litany of celebrities, some of whom are more recognizable than others. The only sorta-unique moment we get here is a clip of Sia without her trademark face-hiding wig.
This paint-by-number cover of a song by a man who beat his wife is meant to be inspiring as we power through this coronavirus situation, but holy shit is it tone-deaf in every possible sense of the phrase. First of all, there's plenty of famous and high-end vocal talent in here, but the clips are pieced together like a 9 year old did it in iMovie, completely ruining any elevated effect from their voices. There's also a bunch of people in here who can't sing at all. The worst is when the editing tucks someone who's deliberately sung their lines in an acoustically-heightened bathroom or luxury car setting next to someone who's singing outside or something. It's legitimately jarring to the ears. There's also no thru-music here to help carry the tune, and if we had to hazard a guess, it's probably because using any Lennon and/or Beatles-adjacent music is much too expensive for a stupid Instagram post.
It's also tone-deaf in the sense that it's a bunch of incredibly wealthy people quarantined in their mansions, with clearly nothing better to do than sing a song together. While the rest of us sit on our IKEA futons in our 600 sq. ft. two-bedroom apartments, rationing out servings from $0.99 boxes of pasta, wondering about the next time we're gonna be able to go back to work at our 2nd jobs, we've got Wonder Woman up there asking us to imagine a world with no possessions. Spoiler alert, that's the barrel a bunch of us are staring down anyways, Gal.
The only person in the video who seems to realize that what they're doing is bullshit is Sarah Silverman. She appears to be looking away from the camera briefly, as if she's gotta double-check what the words are. She also gives the most uninspired "ooo-ohhh-ewwww," knowing full well it's the dumbest and least necessary part of the song. Zoe Kravitz also does a similar deadpan delivery of her lines, as if to say "I can't believe I got roped into this, but I'm just so bored." Which, like, we all are? Have you tried puzzles yet? Puzzles are great.
All that said, if a group of rockers wanted to get together and cover a bunch of Rage Against The Machine and start actually getting some problems solved in this time of crisis, we wouldn't say no to that.
