Backwoods Barbie

Lyrics

[Intro]
(sequins, if sequins had a downbeat)

[Verse 1]
They underestimated her for sixty years and she let them, on purpose,
because a woman who is being underestimated is a woman who is being left alone,
and a woman who is left alone can buy her publishing, and her masters,
and a theme park, and a production company, while everybody discusses her figure.

[Chorus]
Backwoods Barbie. She picked the phrase herself and put it on a record.
Every insult available, she got to first, and made it a title, and sold it back to you.
There is no angle of attack she had not already occupied and fortified
before you thought of it, and she did it while appearing to be very nice.

[Verse 2]
Interviewers asked her about her body for four straight decades.
Grown men, on television, with a woman who had written a thousand songs,
asking about her chest, and she answered every time with a joke so good
that the joke is what got printed, and the question disappeared inside it.

[Chorus]
Backwoods Barbie. And the jokes were a door that only opened one way —
you got the laugh, you did not get anything else, and you left thinking you had.
She gave interviews for sixty years and gave away almost nothing.
Ask anybody what she actually believed about anything difficult. Go on.

[Bridge]
She would not talk politics. Would not endorse. Would not be recruited,
by anyone, ever, in either direction, and was pressured constantly.
She said her job was that everybody could come to the show,
and she held that line through decades that made it very expensive to hold.

[Outro]
(the sequins land)
Backwoods Barbie.
She got there before you every single time.