Keith Bourbon won a CMA for Male Vocalist of the Year the other night, but he wasn’t there to accept it because he was in rehab. Lucky him. The show was more boring than watching Kelly Ripa’s spray on tan dry. Okay, I’m lying there. I’d give my left arm to watch that. How about more mind numbing than listening to Kelly Ripa speak. The CMA’s, okay - I didn’t watch it. But I know it was terrible based on the assumption that 1) all awards shows fill me with that embarrassed self-loathing reminder that I gave any of these people any of my time or money throughout the year, and that now they have misinterpreted that into thinking they are better than me and/or the rest of us hard working schlubs - so much so that they think that we want to watch them award one and other and self-congratulate like a sex-addict in a dressing room at the Hustler Store, and 2) modern country music has become the most predictable, repetitive, oversimplified and commercialized bastardization of an art form put out by soulless pretty people since Ramona the Elephant’s zookeeper started selling the abstract art she’d painted with her trunk. But the focus the day after this year’s CMA’s was all about Keith Bourban. **(I must digress to acknowledge that some attention went to Faith Hill for her caught-on-camera angry howl upon losing one award (she has won 3 CMA’s and 3 Grammy’s already by the way) was clipped and posted on YouTube, but I actually saw that as the one honest and non-hypocritically plastic moments of live TV that anyone has seen in a long time. I’m sure her personal assistant sees that howling, angry face much more often than the one that graces her dozen or so magazine covers each year. She should be upset for having been nominated for something and not having won. What would we do without Faith Hill? How on earth will she make it now?)** But Keith Bourbon wasn’t able to attend the show and accept his second Male Vocalist of the Year CMA because he was in rehab. A rehab so vital and urgent that it sadly had to be timed exactly with the voting period preceding the CMA’s. In a statement in an article given to Best Life magazine just before entering rehab, Bourbon said that he felt like he was “lost at sea… like a drowning man.” Drowning? Drowning in what? - Success? Recognition? Money? Gold Records? CMA’s? Clichés?… I don’t care what his childhood may have been like or what demons tickle his attention bone. Simply put, he should be finding happiness in his money, his houses, his personal staff, his cars and his clothes. You want to be depressed? First, try to sense what’s it like not getting everything what you want out of life and then having to turn to the Pittsburgh Steelers to squeeze any joy out of a miserable and painfully disappointing existence. And then they go 2-6 on you!!
Even without any CMA’s, Keith Bourbon is probably the second best looking man in America - first when Brad Pitt is out-of-country carrying orphans through airports. And he’s married to Nicole Kidman. That on one hand may be among the highest accomplishments achievable by a dude - or more likely… perhaps he should openly admit that he drinks and does line after line of cocaine to escape the crushing misery of having married a neurotic, animatronic, narcissistic, crazy-eyed, ghost-like, frigid, ice queen, still-obsessed-with-Tom-Cruise woman who has probably put the clamp on his having any good times at all. Why would I automatically blame the woman? I’ve seen it too many times, my friends, good times deemed ‘dangerous.’ A guy being happy deemed a threat. This is not misogyny, it’s women misunderstanding guys. It’s marriage.
Or maybe if he didn’t say on his website about his latest album, “Of Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing”: “It’s just an accurate reflection of where I am now. I think it’s the sound of being happy with my life and passionate about the music that I’m making… When the title came to me, it was obvious – it seemed to fit.” (Was that before he got married?) He’s not in rehab for happiness and passion, is he? Yet in the Best Life article, he’s trying to give us plebeians some good advice: “start communicating with the people around you.” I say start hiding things from them, Keith.
Or maybe I’d have more sympathy for Bourbon if he didn’t refer to himself on his website as “a global musical force.” Next step: inter-galactic musical act-of-God.
He also adds about his new (undoubtedly just one of his) house(s), “I found this house in Nashville that had a great room in the front of it, with windows all around and amazing views, here I could set up my studio. It was supposed to be the dining room, but I sacrificed that for the music.” Can you imagine having sacrificed his dining room for his music studio? Can you imagine sacrificing your own dining room for anything but dining? Why does God bless only such geniuses with that kind of vision and leave the rest of us wallowing? But then, where on earth can he and Nicole possibly entertain guests then? It’s mind-boggling. Of all the mistakes I’ve made in my life, now I look at the dining room that I don’t have in the house I can’t afford and I realize that I never hypothetically converted it to a studio or anything useful. I’m drowning.
That’s it. I’m starting a new club in Hollywood, and I’m going to call it REHAB. Then I’ll get headlines too every time Keith Urban or Lindsay Lohan comes in and gets drunk at REHAB. Maybe I can get in on this eternal and never failing PR machine (see ‘Sucker Free Countdown’).
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