About Time...!

Ever heard of Nancy Gibbs? Neither had I until I searched page 44 of the latest Time Magazine to ascertain who exactly was responsible for the rockstar related quote that I found before me on the page…

“Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time”

I loved the quote and found it necessary to write a bit of my mind on it. Now Nancy Gibbs is not the kind of person you engage in a literary spat about the correct definition of a term with, no matter how strongly you feel about it. If I was to hurl e-mud at people I would choose an easy target like…say…AJ Venter! Well actually I wouldn’t cause that would be too easy, like taking the virginity from a Wynberg Girls High matric girl (assuming she still had it) and besides Seth at 2oceansvibe has already picked him as his starting nemesis.

As editor-in-chief of Time Magazine, Nancy is a bit of a rockstar herself in the literary world. She has degrees from Yale (cum laude) and from Oxford. She was also the professor of journalism at Princeton. Christ she has seen more IVY than will ever grow on the walls of where I got my little ass degree.

----------------------------------Probably not home-coming queen!
So I have established that when it comes to the English language she is going to kick my ass like I was Graeme Smith touring the antipodeans. However, I will not back down and take support from the fact that I am definitely better looking than her. Even if I was to level the playing fields and dressed up as a chick I would still be better looking than her…

Anyway the biggest gripe I have with her quote is not that I think her definition is incorrect. She was referring to Bono in her article ‘Persons of the Year’, so in this context she was defining the binge-drinking, drug-taking, hotelroom-trashing, sunglasses-wearing lead singers that fall under the generic term, rockstar.

What pisses me off is the confounding of this (admittedly more common) literal use of rockstar with the way we use it. [if you’re wanting a definition of how we use it, get the hell off our site] I suppose we use it figuratively. But I don’t like using the word figuratively as it is pretty fucking gay. It’s like holding up a banner saying “I am a pretentious literary git that reads the oxford concise instead of playboy before I go to bed at night and throw out any word cause I know you doubt that you can properly use it so won’t take me to task over it”.

Fuckin long banner I know, so in an effort to be less complex, it’s like using ‘furloughed’ when absent would have sufficed…

I am shiny and shallow though…