In case you haven’t navigated over to YouTube, TMZ, “Entertainment Weekly,” or any other pseudo-tabloid over the past few days, you are missing out on what could very well be the $10,000 winner on a future episode of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Joaquin Phoenix, mighty Joaquin Phoenix, serious Joaquin Phoenix, the guy with a name that conjures up images of Spanish porn stars, has fallen on stage. No, he wasn’t doing a reprisal of “Walk the Line,” demanding to take the Oscar away from Reese and give it to him. He was rapping. Very badly, I might add.
If you head over and check out the YouTube clip, you can clearly spot a few things right away:
1. Joaquin seems to be rapping in front of a very large Abercrombie & Fitch advertisement.
2. Joaquin seems to be hiding every trace of his personality behind a beard that could suggest he’s not really retiring from acting (as reported in October 2008), but that he’s instead auditioning for a future role as Moses.
3. Joaquin simply cannot rap. He has no skill, timing, rhythm, or real sense of what he’s saying. I may not necessarily be an expert on rap style, but I do know that in order to be successful you need your audience to understand what you’re rapping about (unless you’re 50 Cent, then you can just use some sexual metaphor no one really understands).
Really, the “falling down” stunt at the end of the video only served as a reprieve from the rapping, which ranks somewhere in between K-Fed and Marky Mark. In fact, the rapping is so bad it forces us, as a video-watching audience, to wonder what is really going on here. The idea of an Oscar-nominated star quitting what he does best in lieu of a music career is the silliest thing possible next to agreeing to star in “The Village.” Yet our ol’ Phoenix has risen from the ashes to do it.
It really doesn’t seem likely that this guy is taking this career seriously at all, unless too much pandering to late night talk show hosts and pretentious Hollywood-types has caused him to go insane. Rather, this seems to be a test: will I receive the same amount of publicity for this as anything else? Plus, there’s the fact that Phoenix’s good friend/brother-in-law Casey Affleck is shooting a documentary and that the aspiring rap superstar is throwing tantrums before shows. He’s playing a game, a very smart game but a game nonetheless. There are a ton of people out there (myself included) that bet when this chronicled “rise of stardom” is sent to theaters, it will make more money than “We Own the Night” or “Ladder 49.” It represents profit without a huge budget, and with the economy so bad it may be a great idea for Hollywood to try more of this. Make a fool out of yourself; it’s guaranteed to make money!
That idea may be the funniest thing about this whole “Joaquin Phoenix raps” ordeal; we may all be laughing now at a popular actor growing a beard and falling on stage, but in a matter of many months he may be laughing his way to the bank.
Matt Carter is a senior creative writing, journalism, and Asian studies triple major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
