Tone Deaf Summer Jam 2011: Countess Luann’s “Chic C’est La Vie”

There’s a particular strain of house music that blooms best when fertilized with negative amounts of talent and energy. Its vocals are spoken instead of sung, its lyrics a rote laundry list of empty signifiers, its videos confusion-based paeans to non-activity, its performers occupying a less earnest cultural niche than TV actors of the 1970s and 80s whose egos demanded that they be known as more than merely “the lady who replaced Farrah Fawcett on Charlie’s Angels.”

And that is the garden in which Real Housewives of New York City‘s Countess Luann De Lesseps grows.

For your inspection, here is “Chic C’est La Vie,” her follow-up to “Money Can’t Buy You Class.” It’s a Barney’s perfume counter of competing odors. There’s talk-singing, there’s champagne-suctioning, there’s the stamping the CL logo on everything, there’s just-effed hair and extra Housewives whose names are or are not important at all, some Dale Chihuly ceiling lamp-topuses, a couple of servants lining up to offer even more bottles of booze and trays of freshly baked alcohol-squares, as well as spa days spent wrapped in terry cloth robes next to platters stocked with Gross Black Shoepolish-brand caviar, silver dollar pancakes and tiny ramekins of inedibles decorated with little shiny, mismatched, CL-stamped “PROPERTY OF” cards to remind others that they must ask before even looking at The Prop Fish Eggs of The Countess.

Bonus: A variety of demonstrations of that kind of seated dancing that glammy women do to avoid actual sweaty real dancing, as well as the peer-pressuring of others in the shot to comply with the habit of seated dancing (if you’re a guy you’re allowed to do some pointing at the DJ to prove that you own balls).

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Moral: Appearing on a scripted reality television series infuses its participants with “confidence,” “cool,” “passion,” “eleGANCE” and, best of all, “no sympathy.”

Hooray for no sympathy.

Meanwhile, in other non-news over at CNN, Anderson Cooper, the man who may be the most ardent celebrity publicist for all the various strains of Housewifery outside of Andy Cohen, is pretending to hold his nose about this song (click here for that). Good one, A.C.