Is there anyone from reality television not releasing a dance track lately? Sure, it was pathetic and sad when Kim Zolciak from The Real Housewives of Atlanta recorded “Tardy for the Party”, a song from which we are all still in recovery. But at least she’s out in the clubs, chain-smoking Parliaments and drinking wine from a box. Inappropriate behavior is her thing. But when Countess Luann de Lesseps, stripped of her wedding ring but not her title, a woman who literally wrote a book about etiquette and cleverly titled it “Class with the Countess”, decides that she’s going to hit the recording studio, well, there are no words.
Yes, there are. “Why?” is an excellent place to start. What would make Countess Luann wake up one morning and say “I want a record deal”? Tired of all the attention that Bethenny is getting because of the pregnancy, the wedding, the naked pictures? Sick of the fawning over Kelly because of the diva-like behavior, the name-dropping, the naked pictures? All of the Housewives have their little gimmick, and I guess that, once you’ve divorced the Count, you have to do something drastic.
"For the love of God, pay attention to ME!"
And, true to Real Housewives history, public humiliation is still public, and that’s good enough. Hence, a song called “Money Can’t Buy You Class”, by Countess Luann. That’s the name she’s chosen for her career as a recording artist, maybe because it sounds so, um, classy. The song, on the other hand, no matter how intense the use of Auto-Tune (Jay-Z, where are you when we need you?) is still beyond awful. When Luann actually did any singing, her voice was carefully distorted to sound like something less in the neighborhood of tone-deaf. Most of the track is more spoken word, like something she could perform at a poetry slam that doesn’t have very high standards. I’m sure she was going for Madonna’s “Vogue” (Greta Garbo and Monroe/ Dietrich and DiMaggio/ Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean/ On the cover of a magazine), but managed to fall short by a unit of measure not yet defined by science.
And it’s almost four minutes of an etiquette lesson. She does reassure us that “elegance is learned” over and over, following it up with her real live throaty, borderline masculine voice saying “my friends” in a way that makes one not want to be her friend. She goes on about men texting while on dates, how to tell if a man is well-bred, and how a woman should behave at a party. Although the Countess seems totally confident in her lyrics, she leaves us wondering exactly what is classy about this song. I could go a lifetime without ever hearing her “oh yeah” even one more time.
I want my 3 minutes and 44 seconds back.