Our blogger Alex hands Beth Ditto 10,000 words about herself. She was probably a bit scared Hello there. My name's Alex and as one of the most earnestly academic music scribes on the planet I've earned myself many belittling titles, from the not-really-that offensive "fifth member of Vampire Weekend" to the quite too-the-point label of "the one with a shit haircut who thinks he's James Joyce." But it's this high level of nerdiness that led me to fulfilling a personal ambition: this year I got to hand Beth Ditto the dissertation I wrote about, erm, Beth Ditto. Allow me to explain...
Part of the process of me getting an English degree (I graduate next week) involved writing a dissertation - I'm sure all you long-lost graduates remember this tedious burden. Always keen to piss my stuffy lecturers off, I shoved aside the Chaucer and Chekovs, and instead settled on a more contemporary subject - our gender subverting, lesbian trailblazer Beth Ditto of The Gossip.
Under the title Future Gender Context: Expression of The Self in Contemporary Cultural Discourse I tore through 10,000 words of close analysis, linking Ms Ditto's gender representations on stage and in print to the writings of post-structuralist theorists Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and, everyone's favourite French brain-cell burner, Jacques Derrida. The aim was to determine the extent to which a more wide-spread knowledge of post-structuralist principals such as the constantly fluctuating nature of "context" can help aid the liberation of suppressed or marginalised individuals or groups. And without meaning to sound like any more of a self-congratulating penis, I got top marks - woo-hoo!
So, when my Glastonbury work brief included the task of interviewing Beth, I knew this was my best chance of getting one over a friend of mine who'd been honoured enough to present her Julian Barnes-based disseration to the man himself at what I imagine was a cranium-crumblingly dull literary conference.
And it happened, just as I imagined. Entering her dressing room she fanned herself forward in a breezy floral dress like a new Aphrodite against which beauty must be measured. Many platitudes were exchanged as I handed her the chalice of my endeavours and, visibly enthused by the whole situation, she promised to read it and get back in touch to let me know what she thought.
If she does email me back, I'll let you all know. But for now it's enough to prove to the world that I had my peculiar moment, where the nerd did inherit the earth, as I presented Beth Ditto with my Beth Ditto dissertation.
