Long after people have forgotten that Barbra Streisand was a great singer (let’s face it, younger people don’t realize it now), she will be remembered for giving her name to the Streisand Effect. That’s what people call it when an attempt to censor something results in greater publicity for it.
The incident that spawned the label happened so long ago I had forgotten the details: A project to document erosion along the entire California coastline comprising 12,000 photographs, including one of Streisand’s cliffside mansion in Malibu. The caption identified the property as hers, and she wanted her name taken off it. Her lawyers went overboard, filing a lawsuit in 2003 for $50 million that drew plenty of media attention. As a result, the photo, previously downloaded a total of six times, two of them by her legal team, was viewed 420,000 times within the next month. (The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand had to pay the photographer’s $177,000 legal bill.)
The phenomenon has been repeated hundreds of times since. We’re getting a good example of it this week from Republicans who are apoplectic about Jon Ossoff’s wisecrack that Donald Trump doesn’t want to do his job, he just wants to “travel with Natalie.” MAGAts immediately criticized him for claiming that Trump and his assistant Natalie Harp are having an affair, which Ossoff never said – they leapt to that conclusion because their minds never leave the gutter. Google searches for “Natalie Harp” jumped 1,600%.
Streisand’s vocal skill helped get her start on Broadway, but her decades as an actress and producer in Hollywood tend to overshadow a singing career that produced eight No. 1 LPs spanning six decades. One of them was “Guilty,” her 1980 album written by Barry Gibb, who also sang two duets with her and background vocals on the other tracks. “Woman in Love” spent three weeks atop the Hot 100, and the lyrics certainly fit Natalie Hart.
