We’ve all heard her story by now as each chapter of the Britney saga—a fairytale turned tawdry tabloid—has been meticulously recorded by the media. First, she was an innocent Mouseketeer, then the Bubblegum Pop Princess, and now she’s a pudgy has-been, a drug addict, and a bad mother. She’s gossiped about like the high school slut. People think she’s mentally ill. But as someone who has always been a fan, I’m rooting for her. I get sad when I watch her music videos because they’ve become a documentary of her downfall, her disgrace.
It seemed like Britney happened overnight. Her wave crested and all of sudden there was a deluge of saccharin sweet pop flooding the radio and TV airwaves. Then again, nobody notices the plates shifting on the ocean floor until the tsunami hits. When I saw the video for …Baby One More Time, I wondered whose genius idea was it to play up the Lolita, catholic school girl stereotype in order to sell Britney. With one video, Britney Spears usurped the Spice Girls to become my new guilty pleasure. I loved it and I wasn’t the only one. Baby debuted as No. 1 on the Billboard charts and to this day has sold 13 million copies. She was only 17 years-old when she became an international superstar.
As with all of her songs, Baby is overproduced, especially the vocals. Her alto voice deepened to evoke a sultrier tone. Sometimes her vibrato sounds like a bleat. None of her songs are vocally demanding because she’s not a strong singer. You want powerhouse vocals? Bop over the pop aisle and play Christina Aguilera. If you want to be entertained, stay with Spears. She has the ability to look past the camera and fix her brown-eyed gaze at the viewer. In all of her music videos, Britney uses tricks she learned from her small town dance studio to connect with her audience and each move is calibrated to appeal to young girls and to pervy old men. The exaggerated lip-synching conveys the agony of teenage of crushes and draws attention to her glossy, shellacked mouth.
Britney is a talented dancer and her gift is displayed in all of her performances. She moves through the music fluidly, confidently. The years of marking 8-counts have instilled rhythm in her bones; the result being that she’s never worried about getting off-beat. Her certitude gives her time to maximize and accessorize each movement with finishing touches—a wink, an impertinent lift of the chin, a giggle. She demands your attention. The choreography in the final dance combination of the Baby video is particularly demanding with a lot of level changes. In sixteen beats, Britney slides on the floor, where she does a knee spin that flows directly into a deep lunge, which launches her into a triple pirouette. She spots the whole time she’s stretching and spinning to maintain the connection with the camera.
In Baby, Britney captivates her audience but in Prerogative, her audience is confronted. As she states in the Gimme More introduction, “It’s Britney, Bitch.” In hindsight, the car crash in the opening scene of the My Prerogative video foreshadowed current news stories. We are bombarded with stories detailing Britney’s vehicular mishaps: driving with her baby on her lap, a fender bender, assaulting a paparazzo’s SUV with an umbrella. In Prerogative, the dancing and bubbly charm is replaced by fetishism. At one point, she’s wearing black lace lingerie and brandishing a whip as she poses in front of a screen which shows flashes of her writhing on a bed in matching white bra and panties. The tease has been replaced by a dominatrix. Prerogative is the beginning of the end of Britney’s reign. Her relationship with Justin Timberlake ended, her 24-hour Vegas marriage to a high school boyfriend was annulled, and people were taking bets as to how long her marriage to backup dancer Kevin Federline would last. Prerogative was her three-minute response to all the Britney haters: “The say I’m crazy, I really don’t care.”
But does she? Can you go from pop star to burnout and not care? I like to think that Blackout (2007 Jive Records) is evidence proving that she does. If she didn’t care about her career, she wouldn’t have agreed to do the album, especially one that caters to her fan base. The bass-heavy, danceable tracks and the half-sung, half-spoken come-ons are all for Team Britney. There are no PG-13 filler songs like Sometimes or Lucky that exist to suck up to parents and tone down her sex appeal. We like it when she’s sexy. We don’t like it when she’s white trash.
Which is the real Britney? The charming Louisianan or the one who walks barefoot around gas stations? I’m making the assumption, of course, that Britney the performer, and Britney Lynn Spears is the same person. But the dividing line separating the persona and person becomes more porous as we continue to be inundated with Britney news, both private and professional. In order for her to make a comeback, the line must be re-drawn which means the parasitic relationship between Britney and the paparazzi must end. Once that happens, I forecast a resurgence. At this moment, Britney is just off-beat, but I’m sure she’ll get back on rhythm.
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