In the summer of 2009, E! Online decided to make their website “Speidi-Free” — as in no coverage of Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt unless it was truly newsworthy. The trend quickly spread and suddenly the typical photo-ops of Speidi doing everything from visiting Disney World to eating hot dogs no longer marred the pages of celebrity glossies. The American public seemed rightfully sick of this atrocious couple.
For a long time the couple was strangely under the radar. That all changed, however, with Heidi’s infamous People magazine cover last month detailing her bizarre transformation. If you’ve been living under a rock, the blonde famous-for-being-famous celebrity underwent 10 plastic surgery procedures to improve herself and hone her pop star persona.
Heidi has received a ton of criticism about her new look, including hilarious (yet potentially hurtful) comparisons to Joan Rivers and “The Cat Lady,” a Manhattan-based socialite who has spent a reported $4 million on plastic surgery. The criticisms aren’t off target — Heidi looks awful and fake, and it’s clear she wasted her money. The week after Heidi made the cover, tons of people wrote scathing letters to the editor of People. The magazine ran one positive letter, and all I could think was, “How hard was it to find this?”
But another source of criticism for the “singer” is the convenient timing of her album — aptly named Superficial. Could the drastic surgery have been scheduled so that her recovery would coincide with the album’s release date? Most likely. There is absolutely no way Heidi didn’t take that into consideration. She and Spencer (who has kept suspiciously quiet about the topic) probably timed it to a tee. She wanted the surgeries, so why not try to promote her album while promoting her new look and her plastic surgeon, Dr. Frank Ryan, at the same time?
Unfortunately, despite Heidi’s best efforts to promote both aspects of her superficiality, only one succeeded — her People magazine cover. Heidi failed at music, selling only 658 copies of her album in the first week. I’m shocked she managed to sell even that many, and was pleased to have read a Time magazine article in which they interviewed people who had actually purchased the album (note: none of those fans were too enthusiastic about Heidi or her music, don’t worry).
Heidi’s failure seems to signify two things. First, that this train wreck needs to abandon her musical aspirations because her career is NEVER going to happen. Second, it seems to show the American public is getting smarter (and obviously, with the recession, cheaper) about what awful albums we spend money on. It takes more than someone shoving themselves down our throats to sell albums. Are we finally beginning to respect the real thing (in both beauty and music)? Hopefully.
While I am guilty of watching all of Heidi’s painful — as in painful to watch, and clearly painful for her to do them — interviews, I am not watching, listening or buying anything that helps her out and supports her. This is not intentional; it is because none of it interests me. Watching someone so desperately try to create a persona of “pop star” or “celebrity” is pitiful. It is time to support people with real talent, whether that talent be singing, acting or just plain entertaining (a justification for supporting the cast of Jersey Shore). RLD
Original Author: Cara Sprunk