Board up the windows, hide the silver and tie down the cat. The new Britney Spears album comes out in three weeks.
Gentlemen... start your engines!
Aging hipsters spitting out their coffee with muffled laughs and passe jokes; fratboys with mute vindictive hormones; 13 year-olds in Limp Bizkit T-shirts coughing words like \sellout""; punk rockers who hate image-based music; Eminem: no one brings out hate in people like a 21-year-old pop icon.
You hate her because Belle and Sebastian are smarter and Bis is catchier and Beth Orton just needs a guitar to make music. You hate her because celebrity fell into her lap. Men hate a tease; women hate a tease who pulls it off. More than that, you hate the image. You hate that the caricature obscures the product, that implants and virginity clash.
We've talked before, me and someone like you; about how teen pop star's hold on the teen attention span keeps teens from grasping smart bands. And as such, we would never expect someone who listened to teen pop to review smart rock. So why do you take it upon yourself to loathe Britney Spears with such thorough hate? Why take a moral stance against an artist of a genre you're opposed to?
And so it has come to this. People who listen to intelligent rock are too stupid to understand Britney Spears. Sometimes entertainment isn't about the music.
So Britney Spears is an entertainer, not a musician. Ain't nothing wrong with that! Add Elvis Presley to that list of teen icons who relied on sex appeal and other people's songs. The girls swooned for Frank Sinatra. He came out unscathed; everyone likes Frankie nowadays.
People never used to care when music wasn't written by its singers. A&R reps bought songs from a songwriter and matched them to marketable singers, found studio bands that suited them and producers to be the studio generals. Artists didn't play any role in recording until the Beatles. All of Motown was assembly-line music. Didn't that work out OK? When the Beatles changed music, did it make all prior music worse?
People keep saying the reason bland songs overtook radio is that radio only gives people a chance to hear bland songs. Hipsters would choose Rites of Spring, but focus groups indicate watered-down hip-hop is what the kids want, plain and simple. There is a reason that Bob Dylan's existence gave way to The Byrds. The people who can keep up with Dylan chose the former. The people who could only handle the essence of Dylan placed in front of pop-music circular melodies picked up the Byrds album. Pop-styling grew out of our desires-the payoff note at the end of every measure.
When Britney tries to appeal to smarter fans, they reject her. The Neptunes wrote ""I'm a Slave 4 U,"" for Britney with complex beats and layered sounds. But our predispositions nixed all Britney as Britney.
Like Wagner's foray into Nazi-hood, your hatred of Britney is not the fault of her music. You will hate her for being that unobtainable social ideal; the girl at the front of the class in charge of the popular clique. But keep it off the arts page. Keep it off the message boards. Last year the ""Britney Underground"" was flamed out of existence. Album reviews on www.amazon.com are overloaded with text from people who haven't actually heard the album.
No matter what I say, a flood of unabashed hatred is coming. So, lock the doors, bolt down the furniture and stock up on food. Britney's new album comes out Nov. 18.
staticoracle@hotmail.com.
