The radio station i'm forced to listen to at work is currently loving the new Mika single. I, it must be said, am not. "Big Girls (You Are Beautiful)". Hmmm. I have a few questions that I want to pose based on listening to this song over and over (like three times a night they play it) and attempting to think the pain away:
1) The marketing angle? Is this song just some cheap attempt to get in on some of the burgeoning "big girl" market action? I'm suggesting some cynical ploy whereby mika (and/or advisors) sat and wondered how to corner the saturday-night-cheesy-nightclub-loving crowd: "So, we have a load of overweight woman dancing to any old rubbish and a load of pissed up blokes trying to score with anything that moves, how on earth do we get them to join our project, noting, no offence, your peculiar, how do i say this, feyness?", "do we need these people?", "Need? Need is strong, but this a HUGE demographic, please ... pardon that almost unintentional gag. Seriously though, this is the demographic that still actually buys cds, we ne... could do with their love", "well I guess I could write an uptempo dance number about dancing itself, has that been ...", "I've got it! uptempo dance number, fine, but uptempo dance number about how great fat birds are!!!! "Are you sure?", "Yes! It's genius. The girls love you, for obvious reasons, you make them feel good about themselves, plus, the lads get into it because they have a way into the fat birds' knickers, and this feeling they carry through, still humming your tune on monday morning, when they decide to, get this, actually BUY THE CD!!", OK I'll buy into that. Just give me a moment ... need to get my artists head on ... how can i do this with artistry, integrety and subtlety ... let me think ... ummmm, fat girls ... no, too obvious ... YES Big girls, that the word! Big! 'I love Big girls', that's what I can call it ... too unsubtle? ummm, I know 'Big Girls you are beautiful'", "Brilliant! you've done it again. This is gonna be huge" (Everyone rubs their hands together and licks their lips, dreams of martinis by the pool...)
2) I thought Mika was gay? I mean, fair enough, i got this info off Perez (and yes, I do read other websites, honest), but it is, after all, his job to know this shit. This obviously ties in with question one, because it becomes even more insane if he actually doesn't like big girls in that way (though I should probably admit here that I haven't actually listened with anything like attention to the lyrics, maybe he sings of a more pure love, and here I imagine the opposite of the more homoerotic passages of Walt Whitman; the abstract, pure love in Whitman as (official) heterosexual coming over as gay - in Mika, (officially, or whatever (the argument would be that in celebrity culture only the rumour is ever taken to be 'official')) this pure love is hetero), and with question three...
3) Is it possible to imagine a song entitled "Big Boys (you are Beautiful)" about fat blokes? By either a male or a female? It's imaginable as the title of a song about muscley blokes, or big cocked blokes, but fat blokes? I'm not even sure it's a possibility that it could be released as something tongue in cheek with a video of disgusting (and they'd probably be represented as working class) sweaty and hairy topless blokes eating burgers etc. I somehow think not...
I haven't given this a lot of thought, maybe there's a song already existing like this, but I can't think of it and this lack of male version leads us nicely to question four...
4) Why celebrate fatness? And i'm sure there's a load of people saying that because there's so much pressure on women to conform to an image of the perfect woman as thin anything that redresses this balance has to be a good thing. But that's not it is it? That would be "Girls, you are beautiful", woudn't it? Irrespective of size I love women, that would be the message wouldn't it? And a good message too, I imagine.
Except the modern version of this would have to be "Girls, you are beautiful, unless you are pretty thin, and a model, OK?" The only size woman it is now acceptable to slag off is thin women. And I don't really think that this point needs a whole lot of commentary, so obvious is it, all I will say is that it seems a little bizarre, given the huge amount of time the government spends telling us to exercise, eat healthily; and the proposals to ban the advertising of "junk food" on childrens tv; and the pressuring of food manufacturers to "traffic light" their products, that they should a) at the same time tell us it's great to be fat; and b) not use these very thin people as examples of model citizens.
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