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Originally written December 28, 2004. When Madonna appeared on Channel 4’s “Richard and Judy” show on November 22nd 2004, she admitted that she had only recently discovered what was really important in life. But now she understood the values of family, morality, honesty, faithfulness, truth and openness.
Britney Spears, perhaps as a result of her friendship with Madonna, appears to have reached that point in her life a whole lot earlier. It’s reassuring to discover that, beneath all the dramatic headlines and tabloid mayhem, lies the wholesome, sweet, kind, loving and generous girl we always thought she was.
From role model to hate-figure to role model again seems a strange route to take, but Britney seems to have come out of her years of belated teenage rebellion and her nights of wild adventuring with her soul intact and with a determination that the purpose of her life now is not to take but to give.
Britney’s recent letters on her fansite convey an extraordinary serenity and self-awareness for one who is still topping polls for scandalous behaviour. It’s a grim testimony to the cynical and perverted values of today’s popular media that they are unable to take it all in, mistaking her spirituality for weirdness and her rejection of material values for a trashy descent to the gutter.
Pop stars and celebrities in general are not supposed to be like this. We should be safe in the assumption that every transformation is a scam and every reinvention a carefully planned image makeover. Oh yes, isn’t “Britney Spears” an anagram of “Best PR in years”? Well, there ya go!
Her fans are taking things more seriously. She’s happy, and everyone is happy for her, but her new immersion in domestic bliss is still a worry. All that she has said and done over the past six months has led to an increasing belief that she has changed TOO much. So much, in fact, that she may no longer be that girl with the passion for music and dance, but a different creature altogether.
Although a few signs of renewed activity are stirring as I write, the letters she has written seem only to confirm that this new Britney is simply not a pop star at all, that that phase of her life is over now and she’s not particularly interested in revisiting it. She's already had a six-month break and she's not even pregnant yet. When that happens her REAL break will only be beginning. So is she still on a break UNTIL she's pregnant as well as after? She’s still a bundle of hyperactive energy and creativity, but now she seems to be looking around her and saying “Wow! Look at all those other things I could do!”
If she’s really slipping away from us, the danger signs will not be hard to see. If the letters gradually become less frequent, and eventually stop coming, that will be the time to worry, because it will mean that she no longer feels any need to keep the door on her career open. And if she does hardly any interviews and makes hardly any official public appearances throughout 2005, that will also be a sign that she isn’t really intending to come back except in her dreams.
If we don’t hear anything about a new management contract some time in 2005, that will be a sign that she isn’t intending to make plans even for the medium term, since if she was expecting to return to the fray in 2007, somebody would have to be working out some plans and contracts in 2006.
And some time in the New Year, the same reporters who knew before Larry Rudolph did that he had been sacked will be phoning Jive Records to find out if Britney Spears still has a recording contract. While My Prerogative and Greatest Hits are still in the chart, and Do Somethin' still in the pipeline, nobody’s admitting anything.
But that's the end of the doomsday stuff. We can't write off her career in music at this early stage. We don’t know what she told her management when her knee collapsed on the Outrageous video shoot, but it was probably something along the lines of “I need a complete break from work. I’m stressed out, I’m exhausted and my knee’s fucked up. I need to chill out and get my energy back. Just clear my diary. Don’t make any plans for me. I’ll know when I’m ready to work again.”
Back then, she had no need even to think about shutting down her career completely, since, for the time being, it would carry on under the momentum of deals Larry Rudolph had already made. The next few months would be filled with freebies, opportunities to earn without working, such as the fulfilment of her multi-million-dollar perfume deal and the scheduled launch of the Greatest Hits package.
When she had to work, she did so with her usual beauty and grace, as we saw in the My Prerogative video and the promotional video for her perfume. The old, glamorous Britney didn’t actually seem that far away, and could obviously be revived any time she wanted, at a moment’s notice.
It is also worth reflecting on the fact that, even during her period of self-enforced isolation, she has done two interviews in People magazine, and one on Cojo’s network TV show. And she made an appearance at the Billboard Awards. So there is some scanty evidence that she doesn't intend to disappear completely.
Even though her fortnightly updates are posted quietly on her fansite, they leak to the media almost immediately and are then subjected to a word by word analysis. She knows that too. And so long as she keeps posting them and saying what she wants people to believe about her, she can pull the media along by the nose and reconstruct her image completely without doing anything else. The process of reconstruction is already well under way.
We probably shouldn’t read too much into what Britney says. She seems to have wild romantic notions that soon give way to other considerations. For example, she didn’t want a pre-nup but she got one in the end. She had a dozen good reasons for wanting to be brunette, but now she’s blonde again. She was talking about becoming a woman and things being different, yet the video for My Prerogative still showed her rolling around in her underwear. And she was all for changing her name to Britney Federline - and we don't know what's happening with that plan!
So what would get her working again? Well, one factor is her growing confidence and awareness of her own celebrity. Gone is the haunted, anxious, excessively guarded and sometimes hostile Britney of 2002-3, and the stressed and nervous looking Britney of most of 2004, both now replaced by a happy-go-lucky character with a ready smile and kooky expressions for the paparazzi.
Since meeting Kevin Federline, and even more so since marrying him, she has looked like the cat that got the cream. When she wrote “Britney Spears wuz here” on the shop wall, a handwriting expert diagnosed a girl who was “full of herself” and that does seem to be true in the nicest sense that she is, at last, rightly conscious and proud of her achievements and ready to accept her iconic status.
Someone with a strong sense of their own place in the history and legends of showbiz, someone who was proud to be compared with her idol and role-model, Madonna, will begin eventually to give in to self-dramatisation and pondering how the iconic Britney Spears should continue to play her part in the tapestry of modern culture.
In that respect, the disappointing sales performance of both My Prerogative and Greatest Hits in her home territory could be - all at once - a blow to her pride, a wake-up call and an itch that has to be scratched. Maybe "Do Somethin'" will see her come out fighting. We will soon see.
Another factor in Britney’s make up is that she’s a Southern Baptist and comes from a tradition where the so-called “Protestant work ethic” is a reality - work is a moral obligation to those who wish to serve God, share in life’s riches and hold their heads up in society. At the moment she’s revelling in her time off, but in the back of her mind you can be sure there is a growing sense of guilt at not working and a nagging awareness that the holiday not only can’t but shouldn’t last forever.
Suppose, then, that the inner pressures to do some work become too strong to resist. She is faced with the problem that she has been dreaming of a comeback that will be both dramatic and spectacular. Not because she fears failure otherwise, but because drama and spectacle is what she does and who she is.
Such a comeback would require careful planning and precise timing. The reason why Britney has been keeping such a very low profile for the last few months is that she knows she is suffering from the after-effects of over-exposure. She knows that could kill her career, so she needs to continue to keep her head down most of the time till she senses that the cycle of demand is rising again.
Once she is certain that curiosity about her is strong and growing, she need do nothing for a while other than record new material and plan her next tour. But if she senses that public and media interest are still waning when the cycle of demand should be rising, she will have to make a few public appearances to stir up comment and create expectations.
She knows now that “less is more” so she won’t be everywhere, as she was in 2003. Media appearances by Britney Spears in future will be like gold dust, and instead of blitzing the public with her image and presence, she will try to build up a mystique around herself and maintain a trading position with her business where demand always exceeds supply.
The period of a year before her comeback would be the time to float ideas around and do some market research. Her record company would be talking to all the most fashionable and influential songwriters and asking them to send outline ideas to Britney. Everyone from Chris Martin to Missy Elliot would be on board. Some preliminary tracks could be mysteriously leaked on the internet to gauge public reaction.
Contrary to the hopes and expectations of some fans, Britney will not attempt to turn herself into a singer-songwriter or r’n’b star, or to present her as a vocalist. When Christina Aguilera walks on to a stage, what you see is the same Christina who was practising her scales in the dressing room a few minutes previously. She’s a singer, on and off stage. That’s not only what she does, but who she is. But Britney Spears is not like that.
Critics have often wondered why she’s successful at all. But they are thinking small and judging her simply as a pop singer. Britney is a performance artist, even more so than Madonna (who is still essentially a singer who stages spectacular shows). At Britney's level, performance artists think in terms of the big picture, of social trends, of cultural contexts, of semiotics, meanings and imagery.
Her current downmarket appearance and her letters to fans don’t just happen – they are part of the performance. Britney is a megastar because she operates at a level far beyond the understanding of the cultural commentators who regularly sneer at her. The Britney Spears phenomenon is an ongoing work of showbiz genius, all developed from a unique and amazing natural instinct which was apparent to the world from her very first video.
It would be literally impossible for one of the most successful performance artists the world has ever seen even to conceive of a show where she spends an hour singing songs at a piano, or stands at a microphone strumming three chords on a guitar. She will know that most of the data taken in by the human brain is visual, so a successful show is a feast for the eyes even more than the ears.
She has made it clear in interviews that she views herself as an artist, yet she doesn’t rate herself highly as a singer. How to resolve that paradox? Well, music is the unifying theme in what she does, but her artistry is expressed in the visualisation and realisation of total performance. So, like many of the recordings she has made in the past, her next album will be planned with thoughts of live performance very much in mind.
So her comeback will once again be an audio-visual spectacle, but this time she will take total creative control. With Kevin’s help, she will work on a new kind of stage presentation. She will be aware of the weakness of her left knee, and will enlist the aid of experts to help her work around that and avoid further injury.
She will certainly have to reduce the quantity and energy of her dancing, and to counterbalance that, she probably will sing more songs live - which means her shows will contain more songs that don’t require high-energy choreography. But she will not be content just to skip up and down the stage with a mic in her hand. Some songs will be much longer, to give her a chance to develop new and imaginative multi-media concepts far in advance of anything she has attempted in the past.
Her costumes will evolve from the informal teenage kit of DWAD and the unsubtle sex-shop of DWAD to something close to Kylie territory, sometimes concealing, sometimes revealing, always inventive and occasionally even elegant. For Britney, elegant does not mean long dresses – as we have seen when she has worn them in the past, they seem to invest her rear with J.Lo-like proportions.
Among the visual dimensions of her future shows will be elements of modern classical dance, where grace of line, elegance of form and lightness of movement will take the place of the overt athleticism of the past. It’s a happy synergy that eroticism, so much a part of Britney’s career, is at the heart of much modern dance and the athletic beauty and sexual allure of her body will still be well to the fore.
It's exciting, it will be the product of a rapidly developing and maturing young artist beginning to take control and really show what she can do, and it all seems set to push the boundaries of pop music even further. I can hardly wait to see what she comes up with!
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