In the fast-paced world of celebrity crack-ups, this news may be long obsolete, but last week Britney Spears posted on her website something very much the opposite of a crack-up:
“Britney is asking her most die-hard fans for some assistance in order to name her upcoming album. Possible Album Titles: 1. Omg is Like Lindsay Lohan Like Okay Like; 2. What if the Joke is on You; 3. Down boy; 4. Integrity; 5. Dignity. Members of the Britney Spears Official Fan Club can vote by clicking here!”
Later in this column I’ll give some background as to what Britney is satirizing and why I think she’s being so blindingly, hilariously brilliant. But what I really want to ponder, and what will require further background, is why such satire is so much more powerful coming from Britney than it would be from someone like, say, Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, or Eminem.
What I’ve been asking in these columns is where does taste come from, and why does it tend to cluster along class lines? How do members of similar social groups come to feel music similarly? A point I made less strenuously is that, while having tastes in common with their group, people also emphasize where their tastes differ from the group’s. And what I’ve yet to bring up is that all this congruence and conflict occurs in a society that makes an ethic of nonconformity. But now a new question: If we tend to share tastes with people who are like us socially, are the artists we like also similar to us socially?
Looking at my own life, I’d say, sometimes yes, but often no. So the phenomenon I see isn’t that people only like performers who resemble them socially, but rather that people tend to like performers whom their friends like, which sometimes includes performers who are seen as emphatically different—though I’ll add, speaking for myself, that what I find really potent are artists who seem socially dissimilar to me but whom I identify with psychologically.
Several weeks ago a teenager named Jessica Popper asked a bunch of us online—adult males, intellectual types, some of us not even gay—“How did you end up liking teenpop? Why don’t you like what you’re supposed to like?” Quick answers would be that we’re supposed to like what we’re not supposed to (the ethic of nonconformity), that the creation myth of rock ’n’ roll can be summarized as “they liked what they weren’t supposed to” (white teens dancing to the music of black adults, black teen doo-woppers lifting song patterns from white pop guys Carmichael and Rodgers), and that when progressive or bohemian music goes sour, I recall the creation myth and go running back to the teen dance.
Now to Britney. First, the famous head-shave: Thing is, if a high-school punk girl shaved her head, it would certainly be a meaningful act for her, and there’s no way that a girl going out bald in a high school (even if she’s in Berkeley or some place like that) isn’t putting herself at risk and making herself a target. But nonetheless, the public meaning of her baldness is already pretty much defined and encapsulated: “Punk girl shaves head, punk girl acts punk, dog bites man, we know what this means.” So in effect whatever complexities might have gone into the individual act (her shaving her head), the bald head can’t travel far without being immediately “understood,” hence not thought about.
Now, I’m not saying that in contrast the tabloids are engaging in great thinking about Britney. They went for the mental-illness angle—“SNAPPED!”—and now are asking “What will happen to the children? Can Britney be a good mother? Will Britney reconcile with her own mom?” And of course they bring up alcoholism and/or drug addiction. But Britney’s head-shave still hasn’t computed, is still open to too many interpretations, its public meaning not finished. Is it insanity? Calculation (urban legend has it that drug traces remain a long time in hair, hence Britney shaved her head so as not to test positive and lose her kids)? Defiance? A friend of mine—a woman my age—called it “a big loud F--K YOU,” which seems right to me, though maybe that’s just what I want it to be. According to a customer in the tattoo parlor, “Britney didn’t want anybody to touch her. She said she was tired of people touching her and that sort of thing.” A “No!,” a denial, tired of being sexy. The thing is, as a personal last-straw desperate act, it actually conveys whatever impulses punk girls might have had for shaving their heads in the first place. So my point is that within punk “shave your head” is curtailed and limited as to what it can do, whereas within pop it’s still potent.
As for last week’s album-title poll, and what Britney is satirizing: There’s something of a trend where a performer will ask his or her fans for input on various commercial and aesthetic decisions, e.g., what do you think the title of my album should be? I suppose this can just be seen as a canny way to involve fans and keep them on your side, and it isn’t different in kind from companies testing their products on focus groups or even from radio stations counting down the five most requested songs of the day (our fans get to vote on what we play, at least what we play between 9 and 9:30 on weekday evenings). Nonetheless it really really bugs me that, for instance, Kelly Clarkson is asking her fans for help in picking her next single. Look, come on, make your own decisions, stop pretending that fan and artist are in a love-in.
And of course Britney is referring to her role in the great tabloid triumvirate of Lindsay-Paris-Britney messing up, breaking, behaving badly in public, objects of an incoherent mixture of public ridicule, envy, sympathy, contempt, fantasy and ghoulish preoccupation, the coverage of which gets under Britney’s skin. Recently Hilary Duff, in supposed contrast to all this conspicuous dysfunction, entitled her new album Dignity and posed on the cover in an elegant dark coiffure. Title song excoriates a Lindsay-type celeb, “Can’t buy respect but you can pick up the bills,”
“Where’s your dignity,” etc.
When Britney posted the album-title poll, AOL reported it by asking, “Is Britney mocking Lindsay?” which got me shouting at the screen, “No, you dumb f--ks, she’s mocking you and everyone like you”—mocking the whole media circus extravaganza that feeds off these women’s distress, and mocking Hilary, mocking the elegant pose, the idea of any useful model of dignity or sanity amidst this hullabaloo.
I’ve loved some of Britney’s music, but I’d never paid much attention to Britney the human being. I don’t suppose you can make consistently good music with a whole bunch of different collaborators without having some smarts, somewhere. But in her previous message to her fans, explaining the sojourn in rehab, she’d come across as a typically self-addled, self-deceiving ditz, apologizing for herself by blaming others, saying she’d trusted the wrong people, etc. So I wasn’t expecting this, wasn’t expecting her to suddenly throw darts right through the needle’s eye, with such social acuteness. This is like watching a basketball player pull a perfect fake, freeze the opposing players in their tracks, glide right by them for an emphatic bucket. A sudden leap into sanity, a young woman in the eye of the shitstorm calling bullshit on everybody.
But why does it seem so important to me—and so moving—that Britney’s the one saying this? A couple of days ago I told my friend Cat that the poll was the sort of thing that I’d expect from her, but not from Britney. And that’s maybe the difference: This is what people like Cat and I do, what we expect from each other, piercingly brilliant insights from our marginal position that have no impact except to confirm for us what we already know. “Piercingly brilliant insights” is part of our identity, our hairstyle. So the fact that critical insight is what we do almost ensures that the insights don’t do much. Whereas Britney’s satire matters, because it’s her own world she’s taking on, and from where she sits there’s something at stake, if only her own sanity. So this messed-up celeb, backed into a corner, at the end of her rope, shows brain. Reconfirms my faith that there’s something irrepressibly smart in the species. But sometimes for the smarts to be potent, I have to hear them from a distance.
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