Exactly. Being a great performer and being a great songwriter are simply separate forms of artistic expression, and you don’t have to be one to be the other. -It’s almost like expecting a race car driver to also be a mechanic or something.
I was thinking something similar- how do we know that Springsteen isn’t just doing his own act, which is to appear really sweaty and passionate, just like Liberace’s act was making it look easy and fun.
Remember James Brown’s “exhausted” act? How he’d collapse to his knees, some guy would drape a jacket over his shoulders and help him offstage, only for him to heroically shrug it off and come back for another verse? Nobody thought it was real, of course, but nobody thought he was fake, either. If anything, his willingness to put on a show like that was seen as proof of his passion and devotion.
Here’s a great version of that, he’s an amazing showman.
It wasn’t.
Interesting (seriously). As a wannabe classical pianist myself, I never paid much attention to him but what I remember most was his abruptly slowing waaay down for difficult passages in a Chopin etude.
It’s a famous bit he did often. Here it is from a very buttoned down Liberace from the movie Sincerely Yours in 1955 as he took his shot at being a movie star.
Now here’s a very, very slightly more flamboyant Liberace performing the same bit on his TV show in 1969.
Enough bad mouthing of the greatest talent of the 20th Century…
Three actors come to mind as I think about this. They are all decent actors I think and deliver their lines professionally, but they don’t seem to delve into those roles very deeply.
John Ritter. I think he was probably a better actor than he showed, but he mostly seemed like John Ritter in all of his roles.
Conrad Bain. In the two shows I’ve seen him in, Diff’rent Strokes and Maude, he just seemed to stand there and deliver lines. Not much character work with the roles.
Ari Larter. Ari Larter’s method seems to be stand there and give a different blank stare for whatever the scene calls for. It was unfortunate on Heroes because she had multiple roles and didn’t seem to handle them with any complexity.
Some of this could partially be due to the work. TV acting is generally a grind so digging deeply into a role is probably way more than necessary when the goal is to crank out a bunch of episodes for a season.
However she was an artist on the drums. I give her a pass on not having passion for singing because she never wanted to be a singer but her brother and mother forced her into it.
Even Sling Blade?
I think he was reasonably solid playing a character role in Sling Blade. I suspect it was more a case of massive typecasting limiting his career options, so he made of that what he could given those limitations.
Talk about Manfield Parrish-esque!
Also in Bad Santa, where he played a repressed, uptight, and slightly stupid mall manager. That was a very different performance than he gave in Three’s Company.
I don’t think an actor who doesn’t show a lot of range is necessarily the same thing as lacking “artistry.” Often, they’re playing the same, carefully honed and curated “character” (who often has the same name as the actor) in a variety of different vehicles, but there’s still a lot of artistry involved in creating that specific character. Paul Reubens is a good example, because his stage persona was clearly an invention - he played Pee-Wee Herman for about a decade and a half, across stage, television, and the big screen. Always the same character, but also something he clearly put a lot of work into. The same goes for a lot of other actors, from WC Fields to Ryan Reynolds. “Ryan Reynolds” is less obviously a stage persona than “Pee-Wee Herman,” but Ryan Reynolds (the actor) still puts a lot of work into crafting and presenting “Ryan Reynolds” (the persona).
A lot of “character” actors do the same thing, where they find a particular character niche they’re good at, and just zero in on doing that really, really well. There can still be a lot of artistry involved in developing themselves in that niche, even if they never successfully expand beyond it.
Hey! I played trombone! I wouldn’t say I was soul-less (or had great technique for that matter… I was ranked 3 of 10.) But I did do jazz and improv is hard. In fact I’d say it’s a super technical skill. You have to master your scales and key changes and somehow create melody out of that. I could never do it beyond a few boring notes.
We had an exceptional trombone player in high school who just made shit up in jazz band without even trying to match the key or tempo and it was just awful. The most annoying thing is nobody else seemed to realize how much it sucked. I mean the director sure did but the other kids thought he was a god. He was a damned fine player in any other context though. He was one of those assholes who was good at everything without having to try. Which is why he never bothered to learn proper improv - that would have required effort.
/Trombone rant
I feel the same about Rush. Technically proficient, but poor songwriters, and much of Lifeson’s solos are just picking a musical phrase and playing it over and over and over, increasing speed each repetition. Flashy, but with no heart.
“Come on, snipers. Where are you?”