Ugly Barbie

I almost fell off my chair when I heard Lady Gaga – in an interview – say, “I’m not worried about what people think of me today. I only care about how I’m seen a hundred years from now.”

You having a grin, love? If anything defines plastic, throwaway, commercial rubbish it’s you.

I feel bad saying that because for the rest of the interview she seemed rather nice, if a tad too attention-seeking.

The thought linked to the BBC’s 100 best books, which was peppered with most of the Harry Potter novels. Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading about the four-eyed pipsqueak and his battle with old baldy-flatnose, but I’d hesitate to say that amongst all the millions of books written they’re in the top hundred.

The BBC’s list only featured one Salman Rushdie epic (‘Midnight’s Children’ – brilliant) and the short ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell (what, no ‘1984’?).

And of course these ponderings led me to question the very fabric of our democratic culture. How on earth could we believe that popularity equals substance?

If the biggest selling musician of all time is Lady Gaga and the ‘Top 100 Reads’ have so many glaring omissions, then maybe the way we decide everything is wrong!

But then, I mused, the findings might be skewed if we asked music and literary scholars for their opinions and their opinions alone. You can imagine all the bitterness (they haven’t made it, after all); we’d be flooded with obscure emo bands and unknown e-book authors.

And predictably, all this staring-off-into-space-deliberation whisked me back to junior school history class. I was sitting there in my shorts and tie, reading out loud from the text book, when I came across the word ‘chaos’. The teacher stopped me and said, “It’s not pronounced ‘chaos’, it’s ‘chaos.”

The thing is, he said it the way you’d say ‘cheese’ or ‘chesticles’. I’d pronounced it correctly, like ‘character’ or ‘cholesterol’.

When I disagreed he wrote it on the board and asked the class. They all parroted him, and turned to have a guffaw at poor ten-year-old me.

My vision panned across the room full of rich, over-privileged idiots and I realised that the majority was not always right.

But then, I gasped, who shall decide our fate when it comes time to decide upon our leaders? Do we bend to the will of our intelligentsia? Does one have to have reached a certain level of education before they can squiggle an X next to the smarmy picture of a grinning candidate? Should age and wisdom be a factor?

I couldn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion so I opened another beer and forgot about it.

Later, my head down the pub toilet, epiphany struck – If Elvis is still imitated, and Madonna is still going strong after she’s so long in the tooth, then maybe Lady Gaga will be remembered one hundred years from now.

Maybe she’s not just an ugly Barbie doll with lots of outfits.

Maybe popularity is the answer.

If only I’d realised this at the tender age of ten, I groaned into the porcelain vomit-receptacle, I wouldn’t have given my peers the middle finger and ostracised myself from their games of marbles.