Were you to ask a random person on the street if they had heard William Shatner sing, they would probably have no idea what you were talking about. This is either a mercy or a grave injustice. For those in the know, Shatner’s music career has long been a camp curio. (Do yourself a favor and look up his live “Rocket Man” cover on YouTube.) The Star Trek actor has recorded nine studio albums, and if you’re tempted to believe we live in a just world, remember that that’s more than Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana combined. Considering that his output has mostly consisted of deeply silly covers, the surprise isn’t that he recorded a Christmas album— it’s that it took until 2018’s gloriously titled Shatner Claus for him to do so.
I feel a responsibility to address the most bizarre element of the album: the features list. For a former TV actor’s vanity project, Shatner Claus pulled an impressive and borderline surreal collection of collaborators: Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, Brad Paisley, and Judy Collins, not to mention members of King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, The Cars, and Yes, among others. You’re forced to wonder who’s a personal friend of Shatner, and who held a morbid curiosity about the proceedings. It’s a smart strategy— his version of Pulp’s “Common People'' with Ben Folds was his only genuine hit, not to mention an unironically good song. Unfortunately, Shatner seems to be far too aware that he can lean on his guest vocalists, who frequently take up at least half of their tracks. So many Shatner songs have been hand-wrapped gifts of camp that it almost feels like a waste of potential.
When we do get a taste of Shatner’s musical stylings, however, they have thankfully remained as off-kilter and bizarre as they were in the 60’s. He remains dedicated in his attempts to apply his Shakespearean training to his lyrics instead of singing them. The result: deeply passionate spoken-word covers of Christmas standards. If you’re familiar with his ponderous acting sensibilities, his singing is identical. At their best— and by best, I mean most entertaining— Shatner’s covers have the quality of a Joe Biden stump speech, veering wildly off course in favor of vaguely-folksy interjections. (A personal favorite: “Shut up, you guys, will you? Let me have my moment! I’m dreaming… of a White Christmas!”) On the songs that require some energy from the 89-year old actor, he careens wildly between two personas: the drunken grandfather hooting-and-hollering through “Jingle Bells - Punk Rock Version” and “Feliz Navidad”, and the slightly-too-handsy-mall-Santa of “Winter Wonderland” and “Blue Christmas.” Shatner has never heard of the word subtlety, and for better or for worse he fills every word with as much emotion as possible. Were he to ever cover a Phoebe Bridgers song, he would probably weep throughout.
The problem with Shatner Claus is that Bill can only be so self-aware. There has been much debate as to whether Shatner is “in on the joke” of his five-decade musical career. Given the number of deadly serious ballads that he tackles, I don’t believe that for a second. Yes, Shatner’s attempts to rock and roll aren’t per se good, but they are fun. There’s little camp to be found in his dragging covers of “Silver Bells'' or “O Come Emmanuel”. If you told me that a version of “Silent Night” by Captain Kirk and Iggy Pop would be boring, I would never believe you. Shatner is, to put it gently, not famous for his humility, and on these tracks you get the impression that he truly believes that this is the performance where the critics will finally recognize him for the talent he is. These efforts make up enough of the album that I cannot, in good faith, recommend Shatner Claus as a pure exercise in irony. And that’s fine. I imagine Trek residuals are hefty enough to fuel vanity albums for the rest of Shatner’s life, and I can’t pretend that that doesn’t provide a strange comfort. That being said, if you absolutely must hear an officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise singing today, just check out Leonard Nimoy’s music instead.
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