For Jennilee
Nov. 22nd, 2004 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbWell, Jennilee, I have had a good look at Britney Spears' video for MY PREROGATIVE; and here are my thoughts, for what they are worth.
I am not one of those people who say that Spears "can't sing" or "can't dance". The young lady has been through years of rigorous apprenticeship in the Mickey Mouse farm, and is perfectly competent at her trade. I am sure, for instance, that she is quite capable of singing on stage without lip-synch and without slips, if she has to. This is not an issue as far as this song is concerned, since it decidedly is not an acoustic or improvisatory kind of thing. Indeed, I would say that it is not a song at all, but something in the nature of a mini-soundtrack. It exists for the sake of the video rather than the reverse - it is the video, rather than the song alone, that is the full artistic package. What I mean is rather that Ms.Spears' competence is enough to assure that, purely as music, it is not grossly unsatisfactory. It is not a memorable tune, it could never stand on its own or be noticed without the video, but it is nicely constructed to build up to a climax and die down over a good long arch of melody, thus providing a solid backbone for the video.
The first question that this begs is about Ms.Spears' commercial, rather than artistic, priorities. It is not the video that she is selling; the video is available free of charge on TV and on the Net, and should be in the service of the song, not the reverse. The fact that the video so dominates the song, that, in effect, the song exists to draw attention to the video, asks questions about Ms.Spears' business sense. If she has a competent marketing man, he ought to have words with her.
In my view, indeed, this song does not exist to sell itself at all. It exists to draw attention to the video; and the video exists to draw attention to itself. I would say, then, that Ms.Spears' priority is no longer, if it ever was, to sell records. Consciously or unconsciously, the choices she has made in assembling this highly expensive production do not have to do with getting a return on investment. What, then, is she trying to do?
If the song is decently made, the visual quality of the video is fantastic. Photography, pacing, cutting, are all superlative. Ms.Spears must have hired the very best director and cinematographer - and God knows what she paid them - to produce something that, technically speaking, cannot be improved upon. And this, again, tells us that the priority, in her mind, was not with the song, but with the video as a whole. It was the video that she wanted the world to pay attention to.
And the message of the video can be summed up very simply - if not at all logically. It is: leave me alone; look at me. The words of the song are all a deliberately infantile rant about asking to be let alone to make her own mistakes, not to be constantly stared at and judged - it's none of your business. It is clearly to do with Ms.Spears' own recent experiences; she is addressing the public, and even more the media, complaining about their interest in her very public - shall we say - adventures; complaining, above all, that they should take it on themselves to judge and condem her. ("It is my prerogative!) This is the classic tone of a resentful teen-ager ranting at her parents, and it is interesting that she should address, not her parents, but the media and public, in this way; it is almost as though these entities had replaced, in her life, the parental function - as if she related to TV, press and public as most normal teens relate to their parents, with the same tension between authority and instinctive rebellion.
We ought to be careful how literally we take all this, however. For a start, Ms.Spears is a few years too old to be wholly convincing as a rebellious teen (although this has always been a problem with rock and pop singers of all ages), whether against parents or against an intrusive and judgmental Press in loco parentis. And we should be clear that it is she herself who has set the stage. From her very first hit, Ms.Spears has dictated the way she presented herself to the public, and it was never as an innocent. It was she who demanded that her first video should present her and all her dancers as underdressed schoolgirls, in a genuine hymn to paedophilia, telling her producer that she wanted the video to be more stimulating. As she sang a few months later, she was not that innocent. Indeed, in using sex to get an audience, she was never innocent at all.
At the same time, it is nothing but true that this is a girl who has done all her growing up in public; and by this I do not only mean her international pop career as an underdressed dirty old man's dream, but her previous years in Mas'Disney's plantation, where she was for all intents and purposes a professional entertainer since before puberty. Although not everyone knew it, the real shock of that first video was to see the pretty Mickey Mouse child entertainer as a teen-age slut - by her choice, but at an age where it is legitimate to doubt whether she fully understood the meaning of her choice. In short, her whole life has been one long public exhibition.
And there is where the core of the video's meaning is. It is in an inextricable confusion between treating the public as a disapproving parent, screaming and shouting to leave her alone, and treating it as a prospective lover, or indeed client, exhibiting herself as available, as ready, with every trick of soft-focus, soft-core pornography managed by expert hands. I have said that her purpose in making this video was not primarily to sell records; that she had in effect made the song as a support for the video, rather than the reverse - a gross professional error. It seems that this mental confusion extends to the relationship that the video tries to establish with her public - she treats us both as disapproving parents and as objects of seduction. In other words, this video was made not to sell but to be seen, to end up in the news and in newspaper pages, and to carry there her inextricably confused attitude to her public. In all her singing career, from the start, Ms.Spears has represented herself as growing up in public, informing the public of the various stages of her personal evolution (which is most unlike her rival Christina Aguilera, trampy though she might otherwise be). This involves unmanageable riddles of sincerity and self-representation, of deliberate self-management and of the use of self-management as self-excuse. (That is, if anyone complains about her notorious visits to lesbian bars and stripper clubs, she might say - "I'm just getting publicity and developing an image"; but that, in turn, might only be an excuse to indulge her lusts in public.)
Since she was 16, Britney Spears has communicated with the world exclusively through sexual means. Sex is addictive. She believes herself to be in control; I do not think she is. She presents herself as experimenting and growing up in public; but to most of us, this is the painfully confused public disintegration of a desperately confused personality.
I am not one of those people who say that Spears "can't sing" or "can't dance". The young lady has been through years of rigorous apprenticeship in the Mickey Mouse farm, and is perfectly competent at her trade. I am sure, for instance, that she is quite capable of singing on stage without lip-synch and without slips, if she has to. This is not an issue as far as this song is concerned, since it decidedly is not an acoustic or improvisatory kind of thing. Indeed, I would say that it is not a song at all, but something in the nature of a mini-soundtrack. It exists for the sake of the video rather than the reverse - it is the video, rather than the song alone, that is the full artistic package. What I mean is rather that Ms.Spears' competence is enough to assure that, purely as music, it is not grossly unsatisfactory. It is not a memorable tune, it could never stand on its own or be noticed without the video, but it is nicely constructed to build up to a climax and die down over a good long arch of melody, thus providing a solid backbone for the video.
The first question that this begs is about Ms.Spears' commercial, rather than artistic, priorities. It is not the video that she is selling; the video is available free of charge on TV and on the Net, and should be in the service of the song, not the reverse. The fact that the video so dominates the song, that, in effect, the song exists to draw attention to the video, asks questions about Ms.Spears' business sense. If she has a competent marketing man, he ought to have words with her.
In my view, indeed, this song does not exist to sell itself at all. It exists to draw attention to the video; and the video exists to draw attention to itself. I would say, then, that Ms.Spears' priority is no longer, if it ever was, to sell records. Consciously or unconsciously, the choices she has made in assembling this highly expensive production do not have to do with getting a return on investment. What, then, is she trying to do?
If the song is decently made, the visual quality of the video is fantastic. Photography, pacing, cutting, are all superlative. Ms.Spears must have hired the very best director and cinematographer - and God knows what she paid them - to produce something that, technically speaking, cannot be improved upon. And this, again, tells us that the priority, in her mind, was not with the song, but with the video as a whole. It was the video that she wanted the world to pay attention to.
And the message of the video can be summed up very simply - if not at all logically. It is: leave me alone; look at me. The words of the song are all a deliberately infantile rant about asking to be let alone to make her own mistakes, not to be constantly stared at and judged - it's none of your business. It is clearly to do with Ms.Spears' own recent experiences; she is addressing the public, and even more the media, complaining about their interest in her very public - shall we say - adventures; complaining, above all, that they should take it on themselves to judge and condem her. ("It is my prerogative!) This is the classic tone of a resentful teen-ager ranting at her parents, and it is interesting that she should address, not her parents, but the media and public, in this way; it is almost as though these entities had replaced, in her life, the parental function - as if she related to TV, press and public as most normal teens relate to their parents, with the same tension between authority and instinctive rebellion.
We ought to be careful how literally we take all this, however. For a start, Ms.Spears is a few years too old to be wholly convincing as a rebellious teen (although this has always been a problem with rock and pop singers of all ages), whether against parents or against an intrusive and judgmental Press in loco parentis. And we should be clear that it is she herself who has set the stage. From her very first hit, Ms.Spears has dictated the way she presented herself to the public, and it was never as an innocent. It was she who demanded that her first video should present her and all her dancers as underdressed schoolgirls, in a genuine hymn to paedophilia, telling her producer that she wanted the video to be more stimulating. As she sang a few months later, she was not that innocent. Indeed, in using sex to get an audience, she was never innocent at all.
At the same time, it is nothing but true that this is a girl who has done all her growing up in public; and by this I do not only mean her international pop career as an underdressed dirty old man's dream, but her previous years in Mas'Disney's plantation, where she was for all intents and purposes a professional entertainer since before puberty. Although not everyone knew it, the real shock of that first video was to see the pretty Mickey Mouse child entertainer as a teen-age slut - by her choice, but at an age where it is legitimate to doubt whether she fully understood the meaning of her choice. In short, her whole life has been one long public exhibition.
And there is where the core of the video's meaning is. It is in an inextricable confusion between treating the public as a disapproving parent, screaming and shouting to leave her alone, and treating it as a prospective lover, or indeed client, exhibiting herself as available, as ready, with every trick of soft-focus, soft-core pornography managed by expert hands. I have said that her purpose in making this video was not primarily to sell records; that she had in effect made the song as a support for the video, rather than the reverse - a gross professional error. It seems that this mental confusion extends to the relationship that the video tries to establish with her public - she treats us both as disapproving parents and as objects of seduction. In other words, this video was made not to sell but to be seen, to end up in the news and in newspaper pages, and to carry there her inextricably confused attitude to her public. In all her singing career, from the start, Ms.Spears has represented herself as growing up in public, informing the public of the various stages of her personal evolution (which is most unlike her rival Christina Aguilera, trampy though she might otherwise be). This involves unmanageable riddles of sincerity and self-representation, of deliberate self-management and of the use of self-management as self-excuse. (That is, if anyone complains about her notorious visits to lesbian bars and stripper clubs, she might say - "I'm just getting publicity and developing an image"; but that, in turn, might only be an excuse to indulge her lusts in public.)
Since she was 16, Britney Spears has communicated with the world exclusively through sexual means. Sex is addictive. She believes herself to be in control; I do not think she is. She presents herself as experimenting and growing up in public; but to most of us, this is the painfully confused public disintegration of a desperately confused personality.
