Why Britney Matters

It’s Britney, bitch. That’s the opening to the first single
released from Blackout, Britney Spears’s sex and drugs
masterpiece (though the drugs aren’t in the lyrics and “masterpiece” is
a bit of a stretch).

I’m not sure what led me to the point in life where I’m listening to
Britney Spears on repeat. It started while I was writing about a murder
trial, a trial that I almost got thrown out of—the judge calling
me to chambers, three lawyers and two cops sitting around his desk. He
wanted to know if I had been talking to a juror. I had seen the juror
at the train and said hello. The juror wrote a three-page memo
detailing our conversation, which the judge waved in front of me. He
was deciding whether or not to bar me from the court. All I could say
was, “I’m sorry.” I returned to my pew, passing the smiling accused
murderer seated at the end of a long table in the middle of the court.
It was a sympathetic smile, his bright-red lips twisted to points on
his cheeks, like Jack Nicholson’s Joker. He was commiserating with me,
trying to say: It sure is hard to stay out of trouble around
here!

But that doesn’t really explain Britney or her new album,
Blackout. That’s just where I was in my life, immersed in
crime, making bad decisions, scattered. Like the rest of America, I saw
Britney’s disaster on MTV, lazying around a stripper pole like a cat on
Valium. That was enough for me. I downloaded the rest of the album, and
then her earlier albums, and I started trying to understand what I had
been missing, what the teenage girls always knew.

Every day I woke before 6:00 a.m. to spend three to four hours
trying to place what I’d seen into a coherent narrative before heading
to court. I needed music that wouldn’t challenge me in any way. I sat
at the table in my small room staring at an air shaft, the sound of my
roommate shifting noisily on the other side of our thin wall replaced
with earbuds piping Britney Spears, who is 26 years old and the
seventh-best-selling female artist of all time.

It’s challenging to engage in a serious conversation about Britney
Spears. My friends are proud of their musical tastes and I frequently
embarrass them, but there are limits.
Over time, derivative acts
such as Stone
Temple Pilots and Everclear have gained a grudging
hipster acceptance. Ten years from now, I predict, we’ll think about
Nickelback in an entirely different way. Despite selling 80 million
albums, it’s doubtful Britney will ever be appraised as anything more
than a signifier of other, more relevant cultural trends. The
intelligentsia doesn’t even consider her a musician. She’s barely a
vessel. One friend tells me that Britney Spears is a wholly
manufactured sound, the only difference between Spears and a computer
program being her ability to walk onstage.

But it’s not true. Britney has a way of dipping at the end of a verb
like she’s having an orgasm so intense and fast the only thing to do is
dance right through it. Other times she’s forceful, or innocent; she
always feels it at
exactly the right time. She doesn’t
have “pipes” like Mariah or Christina. What she has is a sweet Southern
drawl that tells a story, which is strange, because it’s a story she
doesn’t seem to understand. Her songs contradict each other; and as she
gets older, her schoolgirl drawl is ripping in two, leaving a ragged,
adult edge evidenced on almost all the songs in Blackout, her
best album by far. It’s the sound of a voice at its peak, about to go
into steep decline.

A large part of the criticism of Britney comes from the fact that
she doesn’t write her own songs. If she did, it’s likely the rest of
her transgressions would be easily forgiven. After all, artists are
supposed to be self-centered and crazy. I have to remind people that
Elvis didn’t write his own songs, either.

“Are you comparing Britney to Elvis?”

“Yes, I am.”

Remember, Elvis wanted to lead the war on drugs. He arranged a
meeting with Richard Nixon on this very topic. He showed up to meet the
president of the United States stoned out of his mind and wearing a
cape. But not just any cape, a half cape that went to his elbows like
an unfinished Batman costume. Tell me Elvis is a genius, I’m not going
to disagree with you. But can we agree on what the word genius means?
The word genius almost always begs for a modifier—a “musical
genius,” a “physical genius,” an “empathic genius.” Sometimes I wonder
if these qualified terms aren’t interchangeable with “talented
idiot.”

I’m talking here about Britney Spears performing at the Super Bowl
wearing socks on her hands. Compare that high-energy performance with
the totem-faced members of the Rolling Stones swinging their guitars
over their craggy shoulder blades. Apples and oranges, of course. The
Stones write their own music and play their own instruments. They were
never chosen, they insisted on taking the stage. Without any help from
anyone else, the Rolling Stones are still a great band. Britney is just
a performer. It’s like comparing an actor and a director. Getting back
to that “genius” word again. Stanley Kubrick is indisputably a genius.
Tom Cruise, not so much. But I’d still rather hear Tom say, “Worship
the cock.” And I’d rather watch Spears dancing with socks on the wrong
appendages than four old men clapping their hands over their heads. And
I love the Rolling Stones. I’m just saying.

Her unquestioning trust in her producers is a hallmark of her sound.
A cluelessness pervades her music—a deliberate ignorance of
larger societal issues, lyrics shocking in their meanness, all of it
layered over a pitch-perfect delivery and simple, unforgettable beats.
How many people could remove themselves so entirely from the process
until called upon, at which point they slide into their role like a
spoon into soup?

Which is to say that Britney Spears is more complex than she’s given
credit for. Take her debut album, Baby, One More Time. At
first glance, the target audience would seem to be pedophiles. But it’s
not. There she is in her video in shiny, flat, round-toed shoes, socks
to her knees this time, a short skirt, a jacket open to expose her
belly button, dancing in the school hallway. She shakes her chest then
sways her hips in a way that’s more of a promise than a suggestion. Her
skirt flashes open baring the tops of her thighs. Inhibited schoolgirls
in starched button-ups look approvingly from behind open lockers, like
they’ve been given permission to live, though in real life they’re
professional dancers, some with coke habits. What’s going on here?
Britney is wearing pigtails with pink ribbons, and a quarter inch of
lipstick, singing, My loneliness is killing me. Not likely.
But that’s not what this is about. The call is to teen girls in
sheltered suburban environments prepping to break the chains of their
generation’s expectations. And they do, for a moment. Then they go back
to their schoolwork, then college, then married with a kid on the way.
Soon they’ll be chastising their own children, running out the door to
the Montessori school, screaming, “Come back here, little missy! You
look like a whore!”

Britney is the opposite of that. Britney doesn’t dissolve into
obscurity. Britney goes all the way.

At the end of that video, Britney is back in class. It was all just
a dream. Though obviously it wasn’t—she’s still wearing a full
tube of lipstick. In her next album, the pining schoolgirl returns in a
red-leather catsuit to tell us that she’s not that innocent,
that she’s a self-satisfied heartbreaker. She doesn’t care about other
people at all. She has the same inviting smile, but it’s no longer
friendly. In fact, she might not be capable of love. “Oops, I Did It
Again” has more to say about the Britney phenomenon, and perhaps why so
many smart people loathe her. It’s too much to be expected to empathize
with this greedy, beautiful creature. I played with your heart/Got
lost in the game. But hey, she’s just the messenger.

Fast-forward past the Pepsi commercial, though it is impressive to
note that Britney can sing a ballad about a soda with the same skill as
any of her songs. Her “genius” is interchangeable. My father used to
tell me a good writer can write about anything and make it interesting,
but I’ve never believed that. An author has to be interested in his
subject. Britney doesn’t have that problem, or else she’s passionate
about everything.

Fast-forward past In the Zone, a worthless album with the
exception of “Toxic.” Fast-forward past Britney’s cover of “I Love Rock
‘n’ Roll,” which should be enough to convince anyone that this no
longer a girl, not yet a woman is in possession of a unique and
terrifying talent, irrespective of the vacuum it may exist in. Pass the
marriage to the backup dancer and the two children. Land on the best
track on Blackout, “Piece of Me.”

Every star at this point in their career puts out a song like this,
an angry or wistful ballad about the difficulty of being recognized,
misunderstood, and exploited. But Britney’s version is one of the best.
This song is so infectious, so basic, that when you hear it the first
time it’s like you’ve heard it a hundred times before. In fact, you’ve
already got it memorized. It reminds me of a pornographic novel that
once caught my interest for a couple of years. I reread that book at
least once a month, despite its lack of any literary merit and no
ending (the author stopped at the halfway point, having painted himself
into a corner). I read it more than anything I’d read before or since.
“Piece of Me” has everything in common with that unfinished tome. A
pornographic novel doesn’t need to make sense; pornographic music
doesn’t, either. It just feels good. You don’t have to think about it
at all, just nod your head and do your work. Or you could listen
closer, fall off that ragged edge I was talking about, you might get an
idea of where this is going.

Britney is having her perfect moment. If you want a piece, the time
is right now. Despite shaving her head, flashing the paparazzi, losing
her children to K-Fed, or the other things that have absolutely no
relation to her music, when she says, You want a piece of me,
she’s right. The only flaw, the only line in the whole song that
accidentally snags on the listeners’ intellect, is when Britney says,
I’m Mrs. ‘Most likely to get on the TV’/When slipping on the
street/When getting the groceries/No, for real, are you kidding me?/No
wonder there’s panic in the industry/I mean, please. When you take
that last piece of Britney, the playful horror of grocery shopping,
there’s nothing to do but let it go—the synthetic slide guitar is
intersecting the sounds pouring from her beautiful lips at just that
moment. She’s been Ms. American Dream/since I was 17. Nine
years later, did you really think she was shopping for her own
groceries? Do you shop for yours?

Stephen Elliott is the author of six books including the
novel Happy Baby and the story collection My Girlfriend
Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. He is also the editor of two
collections to be released in February 2008, Sex for America
and Where to Invade Next.