![\"bolton1\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolton1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\u2018What do you see when you look at Michael Bolton?\u2019 the writer asked, accidentally paraphrasing a Michael Bolton song that probably exists.<\/p>\n
If you are watching a Bolton music video, what are you looking at? If you\u2019re watching The Lonely Island\u2019s Jack Sparrow, or Bolton\u2019s Lonely Island-produced Big Sexy Valentine\u2019s Day Special, are you laughing? What about when he features on Kid Cudi\u2019s 2013 song \u201cAfterwards (Bring Yo Friends)?\u201d Why? Are you laughing with Lord Boltron? Or at him?<\/p>\n
These are all questions I have asked myself more than once, more times than 1000. Michael Bolton, to these hazel eyes, is one of the funniest comedians operating. Even though he would presumably not describe himself as a comedian, everything he does in front of a camera makes me laugh. When he\u2019s dressed as Erin Brockovich in service of The Lonely Island, I laugh. When he\u2019s dressed as Forrest Gump in service of The Lonely Island, I laugh harder. When he\u2019s giving an interview on Today, I laugh. When I watch his own, seemingly serious music videos, I laugh. Every single time Michael Bolton performs an action on camera, it looks like he has never done it before in his life, no matter what that act is. Thinking about whether or not Bolton is actually in on the joke simply adds another scoop to this sundae of hilarity.<\/p>\n
Presumably, Bolton\u2019s music videos are not meant to be funny \u2013 I have a hard time believing he has been making music videos for 30 years in the hopes an unemployed writer would one day write a piece asking \u201cbut what if they\u2019re actually comedy?<\/a>\u201d That\u2019s some Andy Kaufman shit. There\u2019s no way Bolton is giving interviews and clearly being incredibly honest and also intentionally trying to make me laugh. I believe he understands what the joke of Jack Sparrow<\/a> is, but only barely, because I can never see any of it registering on his face. I can never really see anything registering on his face – thus the basis of his appeal.<\/p>\n While playing a Two Truths and a Lie-style game on The Talk earlier this year, Michael Bolton told host Sara Gilbert was tasked with convincing Gilbert that his birth name was Michael Bolotin. Her response to the statement?<\/p>\n \u201cYou look like you\u2019re lying, but I\u2019m going to say [that\u2019s] true.\u201d<\/p>\n She was right.<\/p>\n There has never been a more perfect summation of looking at Michael Bolton: you believe that he\u2019s giving you everything he has, but it still looks like a lie.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a worry underneath everything I\u2019m writing here, a singular concern: does it sound like I\u2019m trying to make Michael Bolton seem like an idiot? I don\u2019t know for sure, but everything I have written thus far seems to hinge on that idea. This is a piece about somebody (and admittedly, the various members of their \u201cteam\u201d) not understanding how they\u2019re seen, and therefore making essentially the same music video over and over despite it being hysterical nonsense every time. <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n But then there\u2019s another, more obvious point to be made: I could not be further from Michael Bolton\u2019s target audience. I\u2019m at least thirty years too young and always have been. I have never owned a Toyota Previa, and never once recorded an episode of Oprah to VHS. Bolton is simply not making music for me, minus the rare exceptions this decade when he has been asked by Andy Samberg to do so. When Bolton is giving an interview, it\u2019s for the people that like his – as I\u2019m sure he would prefer I call it – real music.<\/em><\/p>\n I think everything Michael Bolton does is hilarious. Choke on a hamburger, spit take a Pepsi all over your Apple TV-levels of hilarious. But is Bolton funny because he\u2019s ignorant, or is he funny because I am?<\/em><\/p>\n There\u2019s a difference between looking silly and looking like you have never been on camera before, despite mounds of documented evidence proving that you have been. To wit, Jeremy Renner is making music now. It\u2019s hilarious. He has a single called Heaven Don\u2019t Have a Name, a video called Main Attraction, and another track named Nomad. All of these songs are terrible, and it\u2019s funny that they exist. It\u2019s funny that a person who has been nominated for an Oscar for acting feels compelled to make – to use the comparison everybody else has – Imagine Dragons songs that sound shittier than actual Imagine Dragons songs. When we send around links to Jeremy Renner\u2019s video, we are implicitly saying \u201cthis guy has everything, so why does he do this?\u201d Why does he still feel compelled to open himself up to this level of embarrassment? I don\u2019t know, none of us know, but we all love watching this type of stuff happen. (If Leonardo DiCaprio followed up Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by starting a Taking Back Sunday cover band, it would be the only thing the pop culture corner of the internet talked about for the rest of the year.)<\/p>\n Jeremy Renner and Michael Bolton both make dumb music, and they make dumb music videos to go with them. But there\u2019s a difference. Renner is doing this because he wants something he can\u2019t have, or at least wants people to view him as a diversified human, a so-called multihyphenate. Bolton is doing this because this is who he is all the time.<\/p>\n When I watch Renner\u2019s Main Attraction video, it\u2019s fine. Renner understands how to be on camera. The whole thing is most certainly stupid, and it looks incongruent watching Hawkeye perform with a band, but he can sell all that shit of him walking in the desert and touching blue light rods or whatever. Anybody would look stupid doing that, but Renner manages to look slightly less so. Renner looks like a human being reaching only slightly out of the confines he has the ability to occupy, whereas if Michael Bolton had made this exact music video I would still be laughing too hard to write a paragraph about it.<\/p>\n If you look at an old Bolton video \u2013 Said I Loved You\u2026 But I Lied<\/a>, for example \u2013he\u2019s doing different versions of the same things Renner does. He\u2019s in a desert, reaching out to nature, standing on a cliff face, wearing a shirt with a comical lack of done up buttons. Every shot looks like a manufacturer\u2019s default for a computer desktop background.<\/p>\n Or perhaps it\u2019s one of the videos featuring a little acting, where he romances Teri Hatcher at her father\u2019s gas station<\/a> before engaging in some truly repulsive kissing. Intercut with this are images of Bolton, alone in a room with shafts of light peeking through the thickest smoke machine clouds you\u2019ve seen outside of Blade Runner. And he\u2019s singing, looking so deeply uncomfortable doing so. Bolton in these music videos is a megastar, performing a song to his fans for maybe the millionth time. Yet he looks like this<\/em>. And this awkwardness has never truly gone away. This is who he is.<\/p>\n Michael Bolton never looks like he belongs, even when in the arena that is his only real occupation. He has performed When a Man Loves a Woman for a paying audience more times than you have brushed your teeth, yet he seemingly has not found a way to look comfortable performing it. And, as you can figure out, I am obsessed with this.<\/p>\n In my world, obsession brings Googling. Searching for Michael Bolton interviews, however, results in not a lot of options from the distant past. Most of what I can find is within the last six years, and most of that is essentially the same. Bolton did a significant morning show tour earlier this year, because he plays music for people who still watch morning shows. He was promoting his \u201c50th<\/sup> anniversary of working in showbiz,\u201d which is hilarious on its own, but whatever, people in their 60s tend to think weird shit is a good idea. (At least one of your parents will probably announce an intention to try \u201csnowshoe golfing\u201d by the end of this winter.)<\/p>\n The point is this: Michael Bolton was so famous that a plethora of interviews with him from the 1980s and 1990s must exist. Mary Hart interviewed him on Entertainment Tonight at least once, I\u2019m sure. If I was a proper scholar with a NexisLexis password (or a proper writer with a willingness to travel to a library), I\u2019m sure I could uncover a handful of Billboard pieces about Bolton, perhaps a \u201clet\u2019s investigate this bizarre phenomenon\u201d sort of Rolling Stone piece, and a bunch of selections from printed publications that have since gone extinct. Bolton was too famous for people to not interview him. He has sold 75 million records, which must have been interesting to at least one <\/em>journalistic contemporary. But he wasn\u2019t famous to the right people, the people who would bring Bolton into the future with them.<\/p>\n When I research one of these essays, a more-personal-than-scholarly-but-still-a-little-scholarly sort of thing, I do what most would do. I look at the subject\u2019s Wikipedia citations. It\u2019s the quickest place to find a diverse group of sources over a diverse time period, with infinitely more variance than a Google search would provide. From there, I follow all the leads I can find in these pieces, and use the most interesting phrases to accentuate secondary Google searches, to help me properly dive deep.<\/p>\n This strategy works as a jumping off point, almost without fail. In order for this strategy to work, you need the type of person who cares about Wikipedia, or who cares about the subject, to add these citations to the subject\u2019s article. And perhaps unsurprisingly given his presumed audience, nobody seems to have done that for Bolton. The people who love Michael Bolton love him for his music, perhaps love to see him live, and that\u2019s about it. I just wrote about Don Cherry – who theoretically plays to an audience not excited about extending with his Wikipedia entry – and yet this strategy worked just like it always does. I found plenty of diverse material on Grapes, relatively easily. Almost every sort of even minor celebrity has somebody willing to make sure their life is actively archived in a general, Wikipedia sort of sense but, as always, Bolton remains an indecipherable exception.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what makes this 50th<\/sup> anniversary tour as interesting as it is: for once, it seems a celebrity gets to truly write their own history. Bolton controls the narrative, because nobody else ever cared to try. He is the type of performer he is, and that can never change because we actually remember him, but beyond that, it\u2019s all up for grabs. If Bolton wants to exclusively talk about his work as a philanthropist, he can, and it will actively become difficult to find anything else about him without digging deep. (Like, for example, some scandalous investing done by his foundation in the 1990s.)<\/p>\n When you know one thing, expect one thing, and get one thing for long enough, the person giving it to you will be so deeply uncool that he will one day get to control everything.<\/p>\n One thing that Wikipedia citations has been helpful for, however, is Lonely Island-related research. It turns out Akiva, Andy, and Jorma have at least a couple of people who want to remember their history. Michael Bolton, for one: he loves telling the story of their inaugural collaboration on talk shows, it seems.<\/p>\n In the summer of 2010, the Lonely Island were writing the song that would end up being Jack Sparrow, and were trying to find a guest that fit what they were looking for, collectively deciding Bolton was the perfect option upon his name being mentioned by Akiva Schaffer. They then pursued Bolton until he agreed to perform on the track, after a series of rewrites to tone down language Bolton felt his fans wouldn\u2019t support. On May 7, 2011 the music video was released as a Digital Short on Saturday Night Live, and everybody laughed. The song was funny enough as written, with Bolton\u2019s true commitment to the bit sending it over the top.<\/p>\n The core of Bolton being funny in the Jack Sparrow video lies within one fact: we all knew who Michael Bolton was somehow, but he had also been absent enough from our lives to never have to think about him. That way, when he pops up, it\u2019s odd, and then it only gets odder to watch him sing lyrics that are so incongruent with how we understand his place. Bolton is a forgotten but not forgotten man, because he was once so famous that some people will never forget him.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n