You're the top! / You're the Coliseum / You're the top! / You're the Louver museum / You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss / You're a Bendel bonnet / A Shakespeare's sonnet / You're Mickey Mouse / You're the Nile / You're the Tower of Pisa / You're the smile on the Mona Lisa…
Those, pop pickers, were the musical stylings of Mr Cole Porter, which last week showed once again how desperately they have dated as Forbes named Michelle Obama the most powerful woman in the world. Naturally, the Forbes rankings were far from the only power list gifted to a grateful planet – Entertainment Weekly slung one out, in which Johnny Depp was voted the most powerful entertainer (sorry, Oprah), plus there was an art power list, and a Bald 100 for the follically challenged, while football commentators were able to gibber that Montenegro is ranked 40th in the world, below even Burkina Faso.
Clearly, it would take all of Porter's genius to rhyme the likes of "You're the unpopular president's missus", "You're the slaphead from the Federal Reserve" and "You're Spain until the 58th minute". But much more importantly – in fact, call it seven arbitrary rankings more importantly – it would be an utter waste of his time, because the one thing we know about the modern pestilence of the "power" list is that the strain will have mutated by next week, when poor old Cole would be obliged to apply scansion to Lee Westwood, or musically digest the fact that Lady Gaga has been deemed more influential than China.
May I hasten to say right from the start that this is the type of column always ghettoised with the tag "a very personal view", as this newspaper is of course no stranger to the power list format. I did enjoy the recent movie one, in which Johnny Depp was deemed to have more influence over film viewing in the UK than the bosses of Warner Bros, Disney, Fox, Universal and Paramount.
I must also foreground the fact that the silliness of such lists is a theme to which I have warmed previously in this space – so, given the sheer volume of power lists that have appeared since its last outing, do consider it one of the top 10 most profoundly uninfluential themes abroad in the world of newspaper comment today, placing above even Melanie Phillips's Londonistan thesis, and stuff the ladies at the Telegraph did last weekend.
Obtaining definitive figures on the allure of these endless lists is three spots above my pay grade, yet the heartbreaking assumption must be that they are an excellent way of driving traffic and selling papers or magazines. But at what cost? There must come some notional point at which publishing animal porn is marginally less intellectually compromising, and though I'm loath to make a definitive call on where that point lies, I'd guess it's about the moment you start deciding that model-turned-telly presenter Heidi Klum is the 39th most influential woman on the entire planet.
Naturally, one can sympathise with the doomed desire to impose order on the formless tide of human experience. But in any civilised world, the only people who could thrill to such lists would be the 100 or so who make the cut – a journalist once sent to interview John Madejski clocked that a copy of the Sunday Times Rich List had been placed conveniently on a table nearby the charmless Reading Football Club owner, presumably to draw attention to his entry. (Note: this list is known as the Rich List simply because People With Lots of Money Who Journalists Have Heard Of is less catchy, even though its compilers are still obliged to come up with ways that enable them to print a picture of Cheryl Cole, which is why we get subcategories like Successful Singing TV Presenters Under the Age of 28).
Still, as indicated, such confected "publishing events" really must draw the readers, meaning that they do provide a definitive perspective of a sort. To wit: in terms of shifting copies or garnering hits, anything I could possibly write, ever, will rank an innumerable amount of spots below the notion that Heidi Klum is the 39th most influential woman in the world.
That is not, as Spinal Tap's David St Hubbins once remarked, "too much fucking perspective". It is a most seemly amount of perspective for the majority of us members of the so-called fourth estate – anyone not engaged in war reporting or campaigning for justice, basically – who should be powerfully aware that the most important thing we will ever do in our careers will be infinitely less important than the least important thing happening anywhere else in the world at the same time.
Indeed, even among all the almost dizzyingly unimportant things one can ever do as a journalist, being involved in the construction of a power list is not merely up there – or rather down there – with the best of them. It is the absolute, undefeatable zenith of pointlessness – the Rupert Murdoch of inanity, the Bill Gates of meaninglessness, the Rafael Nadal of inconsequentiality, the Warren Buffett of triviality. I can only urge the serial listocrats to accept the honour – this is really no time for delusions of self-respect.
Those, pop pickers, were the musical stylings of Mr Cole Porter, which last week showed once again how desperately they have dated as Forbes named Michelle Obama the most powerful woman in the world. Naturally, the Forbes rankings were far from the only power list gifted to a grateful planet – Entertainment Weekly slung one out, in which Johnny Depp was voted the most powerful entertainer (sorry, Oprah), plus there was an art power list, and a Bald 100 for the follically challenged, while football commentators were able to gibber that Montenegro is ranked 40th in the world, below even Burkina Faso.
Clearly, it would take all of Porter's genius to rhyme the likes of "You're the unpopular president's missus", "You're the slaphead from the Federal Reserve" and "You're Spain until the 58th minute". But much more importantly – in fact, call it seven arbitrary rankings more importantly – it would be an utter waste of his time, because the one thing we know about the modern pestilence of the "power" list is that the strain will have mutated by next week, when poor old Cole would be obliged to apply scansion to Lee Westwood, or musically digest the fact that Lady Gaga has been deemed more influential than China.
May I hasten to say right from the start that this is the type of column always ghettoised with the tag "a very personal view", as this newspaper is of course no stranger to the power list format. I did enjoy the recent movie one, in which Johnny Depp was deemed to have more influence over film viewing in the UK than the bosses of Warner Bros, Disney, Fox, Universal and Paramount.
I must also foreground the fact that the silliness of such lists is a theme to which I have warmed previously in this space – so, given the sheer volume of power lists that have appeared since its last outing, do consider it one of the top 10 most profoundly uninfluential themes abroad in the world of newspaper comment today, placing above even Melanie Phillips's Londonistan thesis, and stuff the ladies at the Telegraph did last weekend.
Obtaining definitive figures on the allure of these endless lists is three spots above my pay grade, yet the heartbreaking assumption must be that they are an excellent way of driving traffic and selling papers or magazines. But at what cost? There must come some notional point at which publishing animal porn is marginally less intellectually compromising, and though I'm loath to make a definitive call on where that point lies, I'd guess it's about the moment you start deciding that model-turned-telly presenter Heidi Klum is the 39th most influential woman on the entire planet.
Naturally, one can sympathise with the doomed desire to impose order on the formless tide of human experience. But in any civilised world, the only people who could thrill to such lists would be the 100 or so who make the cut – a journalist once sent to interview John Madejski clocked that a copy of the Sunday Times Rich List had been placed conveniently on a table nearby the charmless Reading Football Club owner, presumably to draw attention to his entry. (Note: this list is known as the Rich List simply because People With Lots of Money Who Journalists Have Heard Of is less catchy, even though its compilers are still obliged to come up with ways that enable them to print a picture of Cheryl Cole, which is why we get subcategories like Successful Singing TV Presenters Under the Age of 28).
Still, as indicated, such confected "publishing events" really must draw the readers, meaning that they do provide a definitive perspective of a sort. To wit: in terms of shifting copies or garnering hits, anything I could possibly write, ever, will rank an innumerable amount of spots below the notion that Heidi Klum is the 39th most influential woman in the world.
That is not, as Spinal Tap's David St Hubbins once remarked, "too much fucking perspective". It is a most seemly amount of perspective for the majority of us members of the so-called fourth estate – anyone not engaged in war reporting or campaigning for justice, basically – who should be powerfully aware that the most important thing we will ever do in our careers will be infinitely less important than the least important thing happening anywhere else in the world at the same time.
Indeed, even among all the almost dizzyingly unimportant things one can ever do as a journalist, being involved in the construction of a power list is not merely up there – or rather down there – with the best of them. It is the absolute, undefeatable zenith of pointlessness – the Rupert Murdoch of inanity, the Bill Gates of meaninglessness, the Rafael Nadal of inconsequentiality, the Warren Buffett of triviality. I can only urge the serial listocrats to accept the honour – this is really no time for delusions of self-respect.
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