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We are only weeks away now from the beginning of Britney’s endlessly awaited “Circus” tour. If we believe BreatheHeavy and the National Enquirer, she’s being blackmailed, forced, cajoled, brainwashed and drugged into going on the road when all she wants to do is be free to tool around LA in her car, screw Adnan, rehire Sam Lutfi, kick her father and Larry Rudolph out of her life and spend loads more time with her babies - presumably before slumping back to the depths she inhabited before her parents stepped in.
The alternative view is that Britney was so damaged and disorientated by the events of the last 6 or 7 years - from the split with Justin to post-partum depression to divorcing Kevin to losing custody of her children - that she no longer had the self-esteem or willpower to focus on what she needed to do, to recover either her once-stellar career OR her babies. It seemed as if her personality had broken down and she needed something like a conservatorship to give structure to her life and protect her from her own weakness.
In any event, whether Britney herself is willing or unwilling, it appears that the tour is going ahead. Reports from the “free Britney” campaign insist that she spends most of the time locked in her room in floods of tears until she’s injected with enough chemicals to face the world again. The alternative school of reporting is equally insistent that she’s fully committed to the tour, is rehearsing hard, is being a complete professional and is even showing signs of enjoying it.
The “free Britney” campaign argues that the whole thing is not - as we may imagine - about rebuilding Britney, both as a person and as a star, and giving her a sense of self-worth, but about money. Money greedily desired by her father, mother and brother, Larry Rudolph and a few dozen lawyers. Money they’re so keen to get that they don’t care what damage is done to Britney in the process. However, I have my doubts that Felicia Culotta would have left her lucrative position with the Jonas Brothers to get involved with a sleazy money-grabbing scam against someone she so clearly loves. Moreover, there are copious testimonials to the fact that Lynne was never a pushy "stage mom" while Jamie has never seemed the kind of guy who would willingly embrace a high-stress, high-visibility, highly structured lifestyle unless he absolutely had to.
Whatever may be the motivations, there is no doubt that the tour WILL earn a great deal of money. According to the advertisement for the “For The Record” DVD, half a million tickets have already been sold, and most dates are sell-outs. When it was rumored in the media that Britney would do 8 consecutive nights in the gigantic O2 Arena in London, many of us thought this was almost certainly untrue - and if it WAS true, a piece of ridiculous over-reaching. Yet the London season was conformed, and all dates are sell-outs there too. New dates are being added to the tour as negotiations are completed. And this time around, the tickets are nowhere near as inexpensive as they were on the Onyx tour. This tour is one BIG event.
So Britney’s profile stands to soar as the tour hits the road. Normally you’’d say chances are she’d be everywhere in the media, even if only making the news as the latest big celebrity in town. Even if she had nothing concrete to promote, this would be her chance to say the right things to all the right TV personalities in the US and Europe and leave no-one in any doubt that this is the new Queen of Pop, looking every inch a megastar and cementing her reputation for beauty and old-fashioned glamor.
Britney’s main PR job outside of what she does on stage is to make the world LOVE her again. But this is Britney 2009 and nobody knows right now if she’ll agree to any TV or radio interviews. Nobody would be in the least surprised if she led an extremely private life offstage, journeying to and from the various “hubs” where Kevin and the kids are installed and spending all her spare time with them. In recent years she has looked extremely uncomfortable in interviews anyway and highly unlikely to choose media events over family.
But nature abhors a vacuum. If Britney isn’t out there doing some positive schmoozing and spreading a little stardust all around, making everyone in the world of pop take notice and compare all new and existing artists to her gold standard, the way will lie open for all of the doubters, Brit-sceptics and assorted haters to put THEIR ten-cents-worth out there and over months little pieces of her reputation will be slowly chipped away until she returns home at the end bruised, battered, humiliated, hurt and probably vowing never to tour again.
Of course, none of this would even be in consideration if we could be sure that what she does on stage will be genuinely awesome. But most fans - even those who have bought tickets - seem to be filled more with hope, optimism and excuses than with expectation. Nothing is going to deter the faithful. Even bad reviews are not going to make them sell their tickets. Which is just as well, because nobody is expecting many good reviews.
Early US reviews will probably be mixed. To the sniffier, “look-at-me-I’m-kewl-as-f@ck” rock-oriented music critics, the show will be an unmitigated disaster. And that’s regardless of how it pans out in reality. Some writers will see a colorful and exciting audio-visual spectacle and be impressed - with some reservations. Others will be pleased and relieved enough to see the American Dream restored as the bloodied but unbowed figure of the erstwhile Pop Princess shows that she can still put on a show.
The UK and many other European media will be unremittingly hostile. As I mentioned in another article, the words “Brit me baby, one more mime” are already autotext on the showbiz column computers in quite a few tabloids. The European media will continue to describe her every show as a “debacle” or a “disaster” for as long as she maintains her practise of lip-synching. The simple fact is that singing has been demystified by the endless TV talent shows and the universal belief now is that anyone can do it. No other stars have a reputation for lip-synching, even if they are in fact guilty of it. So why should Britney alone be able to negotiate an opt-out?
It has to be said that even if she were to sing the entire show live it wouldn’t end the criticism. It would simply open a different can of worms. The TV talent shows have rejected and, in many cases, ridiculed everyone but the vocal divas, and nowadays only the most powerful of those can win the shows. We saw the (admittedly excellent) Leona Lewis win the UK’s “X Factor” in 2006 and instantly stand shoulder to shoulder with the big balladeers like Whitney, Celine and “Hero”-era Mariah. 2008’s winner, Alexandra Burke, takes the genre to another level and sounds perfectly capable of holding her own with anybody. One may wonder if only genuine opera singers will be able to win by 2010.
This is what is expected from pop singers now. So there’s little chance of Britney wowing the showbiz writers with her singing, whether she actually does any or not. But one thing is certain - if she were to sing most of the show live, her fans would be ecstatic. They already love her soft, sweet, subtle, tasteful, gentle, varied vocals on her recordings and if she could deliver the same thing live none of her fans would be looking for an ear-splitting Xtina-style belt-fest.
But nothing’s that simple in Britney-land. It’s strange and paradoxical that as singers in general dance less and less, Britney is expected to dance more and more. Her TV performances of “Womanizer” were treated, by fans as well as by critics, as if she’d stood motionless on stage, yet there the whole thing was a choreographed “show”. By that I mean that every move that she and her dancers made was pre-planned, written down and carefully rehearsed. But that’s not what fans want from choreography. They want full-on, energetic dancing and that’s been missing from Britney’s act since the promo for “In The Zone” ended. Most fans regarded the dancing on the Onyx Tour as minimal and falling well short of expectations.
The consensus view is that it might just be an acceptable trade-off if she lip-synched throughout so long as she danced like a dervish, but strutting, posing and mime-acting is only going to be acceptable if she sings live. We’ve all had worries about the state of her knee since mid-2004 and if she can’t risk going all out anymore she’d be better advised to give up any pretence at dancing and concentrate on singing. At least that way she’d be doing SOMETHING right, whereas the prevalent fear is that she’s going to fall between two stools and fail to deliver in either discipline.
She could take lessons from someone like Kylie Minogue, who has never been much of a dancer but always sings live while using her glamorous costumes and spectacular sets to create a “wow” factor and her dancers to create a sense of energy and constant motion. It works amazingly well and impresses music critics, showbiz writers AND audiences alike - even though Minogue is one of the world’s most monotonous, nasal, shrill and uninspired singers and has all the stage presence of a snail. Britney has effortless command of a stage, and the unique qualities of her singing - as she does it in the studio - are all she needs to satisfy an audience.
She needs lessons in personal warmth too. Despite her charisma, Britney has to be one of the most uncommunicative artists of all time and scarcely bothers to take a moment between songs to bond with the audience and let the warmth of affection and humanity flow between them. Back in 2004, her brief spoken moments were pre-scripted and as far from spontaneous as it’s possible to be. This has to change, or a proportion of fans who may already be sceptical will be thinking “She doesn’t give a **** about us and can’t even be bothered pretending, so why should I care about her?”
The world of pop music is a very demanding environment now, but most of the audiences for the Onyx Tour seemed pleased by what they saw. However, they were hardly likely to have been stunned by its visual impact and sexuality or captivated by its novelty, for the simple reason that most of them had already seen the show on TV, recorded it, watched it several times and hyper-analysed it before they ever saw it live. Shows like this are designed to be “all smoke and mirrors” and don’t really lend themselves to second-by-second deconstruction. To say that it kind of spoiled the excitement is a huge understatement. And yet there are rumors that one of the early US shows on the “Circus” tour will be broadcast worldwide. Do they never learn?
And finally, a few words about the “choreography” of the entire show, not just of Britney’s actions on stage. The UK Daily Mail’s critic said the Onyx Hotel show was like “an extended music video” rather than a live concert and that as a result, when it was over there was no huge acclamation for its star - people mostly just walked away when it was over, as if leaving a cinema. Somehow, standing ovations and multiple curtain calls were neither expected nor given. But this is all wrong. Every artist needs to make the audience validate its own experience by giving them every chance to applaud, stamp their feet, yell, whistle and go generally crazy. Britney must not neglect to do it this time.
We as fans want 2009 to end with Britney firmly enthroned as the Queen of Pop, accepted as such by a consenus in the music industry and the media. And she can get there, if she takes the right steps. But if she doesn’t, she’ll end 2009 as she ended her tour in 2004 - as a guilty pleasure for an ageing bunch of loyal fans who wouldn’t be seen dead with a Britney album on view in their houses when friends come to call.
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She's doing well!