MUSIC NAVbarz 2
BRITNEY IN THE MIRROR

By Polar Levine, September 12, 2007
Yeah, I saw The Comeback. It was like watching somebody commit hara-kiri with a butterknife. And we all wet our panties laughing at this lost person. The summer-long hysterical nastiness of the Britney Watch served as the perfect trailer for her anticipated career demolition at the MTV Video Awards show. I’ll confess to a certain seratonin rush watching the poster girl for America’s corporate-driven music and celebrity culture flop around the multi-tiered stage like a mechanical sausage. I also felt a certain ugly satisfaction sensing that I was also witnessing the perfect symbol of the flame-out of the American Empire which, like Britney, has lost its power to ba-da-boom the rest of the world into submission. I’m not proud of the latter source of pleasure since people with more guts than I have are out there getting their legs and faces blown off for the Empire’s sake. But I couldn't summon up enough pleasure to laugh out loud because in my guts and bones I loathe the way we entertain ourselves by trashing people in a global media arena when they’re at the lowest point in their lives. This same feeling of empathy even goes out to low-lifes like Larry Craig -- and Craig, unlike the Britney types, actually causes harm in the course of a day’s work to people other than himself.

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It’s true that Britney Spears gratefully took the gasoline shampoo and then flicked the Bic with whatever hand wasn’t holding her brew of choice. Every living organism on the planet got to see a mother of two kids in a space bikini boozily clomping around on heels a half-foot high. She’s been unfairly described as “overweight” (as though that were a felony). In fact she was probably trimmer than 95% of the 25 year olds watching from the safety of their earned anonymity -- sitting there with their own collections of embarrassing defects which have -- so far -- escaped online posting. Spears’ real problem was that she was out of shape and out of mind -- a condition that rendered her unqualified for the task she was hired to execute. Not to mention under-rehearsed and unable to remember the few lines of retarded lyrics she was paid to lip-synch -- but was not even required to sing. She couldn’t even navigate the risers without assistance. Her only crime was being unprofessional in a venue that places no value in professionalism, craft or vision. Without the Britney trailer there would have been no Britney Event to laugh about. No one would have noticed.

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Here was a pimped-up ride of a person who no longer likes to work, preferring to drink and party and breed. And -- as long as somebody not brain-dead is minding the kids -- that’s perfectly ok with me. She worked hard for the money and deserves her down time. She even deserves to fuck whomever she pleases or leave her underwear at home without a jury of info-idiots passing judgment on every tv and web browser in the world. But our sad girl transgressed if she assumed that high-budget fakery would shock & awe the world into buying product. The real joke of the performance was the expectation that the citizens of Earth were going to be scandalized over the sight of a young female in her underwear pantomiming a sequence of off-the-rack sexual signifiers. Oy! On TV yet!

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- - - We’ll be right back after this message. I’ll just insert here that my thoughts on this issue are colored by something very personal. Besides my primary occupation and pre-occupation with all things musical, visual and media rendered, much of my gray matter is wrapped around stuff like my country’s investment in domestic and global mayhem. In four years my kid will be draft age. [pause to reflect] So my patience is lite with a society that has less curiosity about American foreign and energy policy than about whether or not Britney’s twat is feeling a breeze when she steps out of her limo. And now back to our commentary. - - -

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Britney was just the opening act of a hokey Fifties era TV “Variety” extravaganza. MTV is now as fresh and revolutionary as rap -- both of which were news 25 to 30 years ago and back when saying dirty words on a record was interesting. MTV and mainstream American rap now kick it to you with that bubble gum flava. Like the leaders we elect, these cultural dinosaurs can’t think and chew at the same time. We barely need to mention the biggest dinosaur in the house -- rock -- which, in its current geriatric stage, is as counter-culture as Fonzi. The awards show presented its predictable cast of icons that blandly signifiy “danger” in a format that resembled the same TV shit I used to laugh at as a kid while my parents and grandparents swooned. The kitschy dance routines, lip-synching, teleprompted “ad-libs” and every worn out gesture of cheesy show-biz gas. Even the live performers got the Liza Minelli treatment with a few Twenty-first Century touches that said “edge” with pizazz.

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What’s most pathetic and enraging about the public flaying of Spears -- for the crime of being normal -- is an over-stuffed populace addicted to comfort, hubris and the woozy narcotics of fat-free theology and patriotism laughing at a real live person’s self-destruction. She’s a person who, regardless of the value of her work, did at one time work hard and she achieved what her jury could only dream about. But now she’s like us, getting her cuteness banged up by living day-to-day in the REAL reality show -- kid-raising, failed relationships, being over 20 and staying there, career worries and trying to take some of the edge off with a drug of choice (pharmaceutical or theological). We laugh at Britney because we’re too fucking terrorized and terrified to laugh at ourselves.

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A society that can’t laugh at itself is one that is not equipped to recognize what’s broken or to summon the wit, creativity and effort to fix the damned thing. It’s a society that thinks it can orchestrate how the world behaves by making stuff explode. Like a film industry that thinks it can keep surprising us with the same old explosions at the same plot points year after year. Like a post-adolescent, addicted, spoiled single mom who thinks that by squeezing her baby-stretched body into nymphet-wear and drooling her way through a few pole dance moves she’ll convince us that she has talent, starpower and the primary currency that defines our value in this society -- sex appeal.

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The domestication of America’s culture for the sake of stockholders has made non-conformity, sexuality, creativity, personal tragedy, incompetance, sociopathic greed and catastrophic ignorance as denatured and consumable as American cheese. As I flip over to the celebrity media event on CSPAN -- the Petraeus Show -- I’m no longer laughing.

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By Polar Levine for polarity1.com

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