In Your Ear

I’m unreasonably fascinated by Britney Spears. It’s not because she’s especially comely, indeed her very plainness makes her beautiful to society and truthfully not very interesting to (I suspect) many of the rest of us. Nor is it because her train wreck of a life is anything new or, at this stage of the tabloid media frenzy one-up-manship game, especially shocking (after all, you’ve seen one 20-something tabloid darling’s completely bare pubes underneath a mini-skirt (SFW) you’ve pretty much seen them all) No, I’m fascinated by Britney because she is totally, utterly constructed. And nothing proves that more than her new album Blackout.

Entertainment Weekly says,

Still, there is something delightfully escapist about Blackout, a perfectly serviceable dance album abundant in the kind of bouncy electro elements that buttressed her hottest hits (”I’m a Slave 4 U,” ”Toxic”). Say what you will about Spears’ personal life, but there’s no denying that the girl knows how to have a good time.

Newsday writes,

The new Britney Spears album “Blackout” (Jive) is terrible. But how could it not be?

After all, music was never really the strongest part of the Britney Spears package in the first place. She was more about, well, packaging – the look, the videos, the personal life, everything that surrounded the music.

J. Freedom du Lac, who has possibly the most pretentious name of any music critic I’ve ever read, wrote this in The Washington Post

Britney isn’t really Britney on “Blackout” — her voice has been digitally distorted to the point that she sounds like a cooing cyborg.

Spears sounds like an extra on her new CD, with a digitally altered voice and no songwriting credits. (Jive Records — Sony)

She also sounds like a supporting player on her own comeback album. With studio software manipulating her voice and stripping it of any real human characteristics, it becomes a somewhat faceless digital instrument for “Blackout’s” sprawling team of producers to sprinkle between the album’s pounding programmed drums, squiggly bass lines, synth stabs and such. Were “More Vocoder!” T-shirts being passed out in the studio or something? The end result is (mostly) state-of-the-art dance-pop in which the singer is secondary. This is fine if you’re a random Euro-pop singer; not so much if you’re Britney Spears and you’re attempting to resurrect your brand.

Spears mostly sat out the songwriting process after becoming increasingly engaged in that element over the course of her two previous albums. Nobody will ever confuse her with Carole King, but one would think that Spears might have some thoughts of her own about K-Fed or her life in the boiling water of the celebrity fishbowl. And yet, her name is nowhere to be found on the writing credits for the “Blackout” songs that address those topics as she instead relies on others to get in touch with her innermost feelings.

And even though his pretentious name bothers me, Mr. du Lac’s review got me to realize that there was another category of album beyond the “Yeah, I’ll shell out money for the CD” and “I wouldn’t be caught dead with that in my music collection.” There is: I’ll see if I can get it off a torrent.

The video for “Gimme More,” the first single from Blackout, sets up and interesting visual dichotomy that both reenforces and totally subverts dominant cultural expectations about women’s appearances. It has long been said that “blondes have more fun” which is utterly subverted in the Gimme More video. Indeed, blonde Britney is portrayed as the pure one, the one simply viewing the spectacle where as brunette Britney is the temptress, the naughty, pole-dancing hussy in hot pants and fishnets, a veritable parody of herself as she burst on to the screen and evolved. (Check out Rolling Stone’s video history for a complete look)

What’s more interesting than her videos, though, is an assertion in Rolling Stone that Britney isn’t “…a puppet, a grinning blonde without a cool thought in her head, a teasing coquette clueless to her own sexual power — none of this would have happened. She is not book-smart, granted. But she is intelligent enough to understand what the world wanted of her: that she was created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement and titillation. She is not ashamed of her new persona — she wants us to know what we did to her.”

But did we really do anything to Britney? How much arrogance is involved in the idea that you can have fame, and the fortune that comes with it, without paying a price?

For the rest of us in the real world, the world that doesn’t involve black AmEx cards and checking into the Four Seasons when you have a perfectly good house not 10 miles away, there’s this thing called work. And it’s not called work because it’s a laugh a minute. No, it’s called work because it’s often tedious, sometimes onerous, and always sucks up about 20% of your life. We work to get money so we can afford things like the house and the water and the food and the occasional vacation to forget about work.

True, if “we” didn’t buy the tabloids then the photography scrum wouldn’t have any reason to block traffic, shoot off all those flashes (which I think are the reason why most celebs are so weird; they’re all constantly having the epileptic fit from all the camera flashes), and do all the other insane, stupid stuff they do to get the pictures they sell.

On the other hand, since I know for a fact that the key to messaging is repetition, don’t those same celebs benefit from all this exposure?

So isn’t part of the work of being a celebrity having your every move analyzed and pondered? Having people talk about your crazy religion, or your any other damn thing (see TMZ.com but I refuse to link to it)?

I guess if you don’t like your job and you’re a celebrity maybe you should do what the rest of us do: find another one.

Somewhere in the third act of Oliver Stone’s The Doors Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) asks the question “what is wrong with being a large mammal?” By this point in the narrative it’s March 1969 and Morrison is well into the drug abuse/alcoholism/rampant self-indulgence phase of his career. One of his handlers makes the trenchant observation that “rock is cock.” And now that I’ve joined the ranks of those who pay for radio, in my case XM, and I have access to hard rock playlists again I’m increasingly wondering why that has to be true.

I’ve been a headbanger most of my life, including that crucial period in the late-1980s when MTV’s unflinching, objectifying eye provided me with enough half-dressed, oversexualized portrayals of women to get me comfortable with the male perspective. While MTV and the largely white and, Lita Ford and Heart aside, male dominated world of metal/hard rock, gave me as a young lesbian in a culturally conservative environment a safe outlet through which I could look at and desire women, I find that two decades later no matter how much the music has changed, and it has changed enough to notice, the atmosphere in which that music is served has gotten even more misogynist and objectifying to the point where I’d call it degrading.

Nearly two years of slowly exploring the current hard rock environment has revealed a soundscape that is markedly different from the spandex and eyeliner fueled world of Headbanger’s Ball. True, there are the requisite number of songs about sex and drugs, but there’s another strain that runs through hard rock these days. Songs that deal with frustration, with existential angst, with the noise that modern life can create inside your head are a far cry from the party, party, party world of Motley Crue, Winger, and Def Leppard. While all of these songs feature the heavy bass, aggressive percussion, throaty vocals, and fuzzy guitars common to all hard rock, what they don’t have is that female presence that is prerequisite to misogyny. Yet, the DJs that play this music insist on injecting that snarky frat-boy mentality into their broadcasts. What else can you call it when a band gets introduced as “soon to be signing your sister’s tits?”

What I question is not why this music is delivered in this environment; indeed, the answer to any why question about a cultural trend is “because someone thinks there is money to be made from doing it that way.” More, what I question is why women put up with this shit?

In discussions with my uncle, rest his shocking, smart soul, about culture we would inevitably come around to the women are 51% of the population shoal, the sticking point for me about why women don’t wield more cultural power. Depending upon how much wine we’d both had he’d point out, quite rightly, that while women may hold a small edge in total population we control 100% of the p*ssy. So why is it that women tolerate this treatment? Yeah, it’s nice to be appreciated it but culturally we’ve reached a point where the appreciation isn’t even vaguely real; hell, it the veneer on it isn’t even dry enough to pass the smear test.

It just astonishes me in an era of ever-dwindling music dollar, you’d think that the music industry, that includes broadcasters, would be doing everything they can to court every possible dollar. Instead, hard rock seems committed to a broadcast model, something that greatly influences sales because after all if I can’t hear it, like it, and decide I want it I can’t frakking buy it (after all, it’s not like seeing a cute “top” from the aisle in the mall and stepping into the store), that alienates a potentially huge shopper base.

I guess I’ll just have to keep sending the boys at Squizz rude e-mails when their insecure, frat-boy crap intrudes on the listening experience.