It’s been an odd week in the world. Here in NZ there have been three big pop stories that in an odd way seem to interrelate. First up there is Susan Whatserface the Scottish singer who has had something like 100million youtube hits in the past fortnight. It’s extraordinary; it’s more hits then an Obama speech and a Britney shaving her head clip combined. Beyond the unprecedented response to it, what I find so interesting is the question of motivation. Meaning is the clip popular because she is an incredible singer (which is without question) or is it the idea that this extraordinary voice comes from a person who is , lets be honest not even close to attractive? I think there are some fascinating internal questions going on here when you see that clip for the first time, you expect her to be terrible, for the predisposed reason that ugly people of course can’t be talented. But then she starts to sing and your heart melts like a fucking Disney film.It’s the feel good clip of the year because ‘all of those nasty people expected her to suck, but oh no, not me, I was always gunning for her.’ But the thing is I’m going to have to call bullshit on everyone. Somehow we have become a society where we enjoy to watch people fail even more then we enjoy to see them succeed. Look at the popularity of blogs like failblog, fuckmylife, sorryimissedyourparty and sexypeople – these are all sights were you can go and laugh not with people but at them. So how does Susan play into this? Well she is the big un-groomed wake-up call that perhaps we all needed. Her story has nothing to do with singing, her story is our story – it’s a tale of misjudgment, high school attitudes and cruelty. Many will just think it’s cool that the fat broad can sing, but if that’s all people get out of this then its an opportunity wasted.
The other big story here lead the news yesterday (every day in NZ is a slow news day) is also all about beauty. The runner-up in the Miss Australia competition was the opposite of old Susan. Where Susan is talented and portly this girl is far from the sharpest tool in the shed and she is really, really fucking skinny – like scary concentration camp skinny. It was just gross to see this stick figure on the news talking about how she, “like totally eats every day” and try and defend herself against her critics. So we love Susan because she’s the ugly duckling and we hate this girl because she is too skinny and isn’t setting a good example to young girls out there. Sounds good on paper – but there is an important point to ponder if only for a moment. She came second in the competition. They chose some chick why was 5’9” and about 100lbs as the second most beautiful girl in Australia. That is where the real story is. Does our narrow view of beauty mean that the expectation of a beautiful woman is scary skinny? I mean it’s a beauty pageant – an antiquated relic of the 80’s where everyone had Dallas hair and got blasted on coke before hitting the stage. We shouldn’t really give a shit – in fact we shouldn’t even have these competitions anymore. Although you can imagine Susan in the sequel to Little Miss Sunshine titled, “Sunshine 2: The Eclipse.”
Ok third. Here in NZ we are crazy about dancing with the stars. Z-list celebrities dance it out every week to see who is the least washed up by the end. Last week we had the grand final where the openly gay weatherman from the morning show battled it out against the very tom-boyish 1984 Olympic ladies wind surfing champion. It really wasn’t much of a contest – the weatherman took it out without much trouble. I put it down to his unnatural sense of rhythm, perfect eyebrows and groovy haircut. I think half the ladies in the country are willing to turn gay for him. What I find so interesting is the public’s unending appetite for this rubbish TV. Lets be honest in NZ we don’t have celebrities. We have news presenters and rugby players – dancing with the stars is on like its 3rd season and the bottom of the celeb barrel was scraped clean a couple of years ago. I shutter to think who’ll be asked next. I’m hoping that if this blog gets enough hits I might get the call. I will of course have to do something about my eyebrows, haircut and lack of dancing skill. I wouldn’t even vote for me.So we have inner beauty, the warped perception of outer beauty and the fascination with pseudo-celebrity. What an interesting world we live in….
Scott
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