Telling our "COVID lockdown stories" is going to be the equivalent to the generations before us telling their "September 11th stories." No one actually has a good story. They are all banal and extremely normal but people feel the need to tell them anyway because the event itself was so weird and horrifying and world-altering. But the banality comes in from everyone having the same story. "I had to stay in my house for two months straight!" is not unique. The specifics start to blend together with everyone else's specifics.
But someone out there somewhere has a weird one, and it's one I'd like to hear. There's an individual—maybe more than one, but probably closer to one than not—who—and she's probably a she, and probably middle-aged, and probably has a propensity for forming pararsocial relationships with male celebrities that she'll never meet—has a story that goes like this: "When I found out that we were going to be stuck in the house for the foreseeable future, I was listening to The Medicine, Jeremy Renner's EP, which had just been released."
I'm not saying that I want to hear this story because it's fun or unique. I'm saying that I want to hear this story because I want The Medicine to have meaning beyond "this is a shitty pop album from some random fucking actor dude," and pretending that Jeremy Renner is somehow involved in someone's otherwise hackneyed COVID story is literally the only way I can imagine that happening.
The best thing I can say about this album is that it is short. The next best thing I can say about this album is that its singer is a competent singer, which more than we could say about any of the other albums we've covered in this vein. The final best thing I can say about The Medicine EP is that sometimes bad albums inspire good album reviews. I'm not that guy this week, but I hope that for others, The Medicine is a nice juicy meatball down the middle of the plate for you to smack out of the park.
Picture yourself at karaoke night. There are some bad singers there who are having fun. There are some drunks there who are pretending that they are good singers for just one night. And then there are the ringers, those who are actually good singers, who fucking nail whatever song they are singing, there in the dull spotlight on the small stage in the corner of your favorite dive bar. And now imagine that this singer has the means and the money and the time and the ego to actually become a commercially-published musician. What you'll find, in that not-so-hypothetical situation, is that just because a person is good singer doesn't mean that the songs they are singing are good or at all worthy of even the minimum of your attention. For most great singers, it's not a problem, because those great singers whom you saw perform admirably at McGillin's Sunday Night Karaoke are waking up the next morning and heading to their office job and just barely making ends meet. Most great singers at karaoke night are not also millionaire celebrities with great gleaming paychecks filled with many zeroes earned by pretending to shoot arrows in front of a green screen. What I'm saying is that we wouldn't even be here if the artist in question wasn't Jeremy Renner, and that is to his album's detriment.
The songwriting is terrible, is the main issue. Yes, fine, the man can croon, but to what end? Crooning competently over what sounds to my ears like a rejected Adele ballad? Blasting his pipes in service of the worst fucking Imagine Dragons song you've ever heard? I think there's value in being the songwriter on your own album, as opposed to using that Hawkeye money to hire someone from the pop music machine to write them for you, and hey, maybe even a bit of courage to put yourself out there like that. But at the same time, it's like, have some fucking humility, man. Know where your strengths are. Know when you're bad at something. Jeremy Renner is bad at writing songs, and if I gave a single shit about this fucking guy, then maybe I'd wish that he didn't have so many sycophants surrounding him, encouraging this bullshit.
Sometimes, I daydream about what kind of vanity projects I'd get into with me and my friends if I ever found myself in a position where I had unlimited funds. I don't think I'd be able to make anything good, per se. But maybe it would at least be fun and personally fulfilling to make that movie, or write that book. So maybe that's what we have here. A vanity project that Jeremy Renner did for fun, with no expectations of success. Okay, that's all fine and well, but the problem is that this album was published, clearly with intentions of mass consumption. And so it's not shielded from due criticism. If you're going to be the type of person who is going to say "Look at this thing I made," then you can't be butthurt when the person whom you made look at that thing in fact thinks that the thing is a piece of shit.
Anyways, I've already spent too much time on this worthless act of hubris, so let's just say that I think it's bad and move on. I'm going to lay the thickest brickbat I can on this motherfucker, and then we can dip out. Here it is: at this point, after two COVID shots and two boosters, and after WHO has officially declared the pandemic over, meaning that COVID exists but is no longer a public health crisis, I can honestly and truthfully say that I would rather contract the newest COVID variant and be sick in bed for a week than to consume this Medicine ever again.
GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5
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