While driving down the highway in the middle of the night, listening to Blondie, an interesting and odd thought popped into my head and wouldn't go away. I now present it as an Axiom of Universal Truth:
Debbie Harry is one of the coolest people ever.
I'm just old enough to remember the “Blondie is a group” T-shirts, but not old enough to have ever had one. Back then (and we're talking elementary school here), just knowing that Blondie was a group went a long way toward making you cool.
Blondie would be shoved under “Alternative Rock,” if that somewhat-silly genre had yet been invented. Up against any of today's “alternative rock,” without handicap, Blondie puts most of it to utter shame. Test of time, indeed.
But this isn't why I find the thought (now the Axiom) so odd. No, the reason is simpler: I don't actually know anything about Debbie Harry. See, for me, being a “fan” of someone means I enjoy their work, maybe read an article, or catch an interview on the Letterman show if I happen to notice it. But I don't go out and look for personal tidbits about the person; that stuff just doesn't matter to me, about someone I will likely never meet in my life. All I know about this woman is her music, and what I saw on MTV, and I heard somewhere that she may have dated Penn Jillette at some point.
So, the truth of the matter is that my Axiom is based entirely on public persona. Someone could come along who actually knows Debbie Harry and tell us that she's a bitch.
But that doesn't matter, either. I have a corollary to my Axiom, which I shall now present:
Even if Debbie Harry is a bitch, she's still cooler than you are.
Of the people who are currently thought of as cool, which ones do you think someone will write something like this about, thirty years from now?
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