Britney Antoinette

I have a personal relationship with Britney. I think anyone who memorized all the words to Baby One More Time ten years ago does. Britney was new. She was fresh. She was this wonderful piggy-tailed school girl fantasy and we all wanted to be her. The novelty wore off after a while. We grew up, realized that no, we weren’t going to turn into Britney, and no, we didn’t really want to either. We would mock her new hits and belt out her old ones with nostalgia. Her movie Crossroads was terrible. Britney won the Razzie award for Worst Actress, and the film was poorly received critically and by everyone who saw it - but the point is- everyone saw it. Britney once said, “I can… hopefully be a legend or something, like Madonna.” And she has become that. Everyone knows the name, everyone knows that she has two children, and shaved her hair that one time, and used to date Justin Timberlake, and claimed she’d be a virgin until marriage, and pashed Madonna on national television and failed her hyped up come-back performance at the MTV music awards, and everyone knows the words to Baby One More Time. It’s not her music. It’s not her performances, her acting career or her talents. Britney is simply famous for being famous. We watched as her image was prostituted by the media, we watched her try to grow from a soft-porn princess into a sexually strong woman- and sort of fail. We watched her two marriages, her failure at motherhood and marriage. We watched her breakdown and we watched it with a sick hunger in our eyes. Britney was the sad little trailer-trash girl, carefully chosen as a virgin sacrifice to the gods of publicity. Her state was so pitiful, abused and tragic that all we could do was shake our heads and laugh sadly.

The Marie Antoinette of our generation, she epitomizes the excess of the past century and has become an abstract idea of the self destruction induced when too much fame is put in the wrong hands. When we were starved of good music, Britney said, ‘Let them hear pop’ and in a paparazzi revolution, we beheaded her with our bloodlust. And then she released “Blackout”. With a surprising self-consciousness, she sang, ‘Gimme More,’ a belated f-you to the media. Yes, she said, you can abuse me and put my ass on the cover of your magazines, but it’s my ass that’s selling the magazine. I’m still here, I am surviving, I am Britney, and you all know my name. While it’s not much of a comeback, it’s nice to see that she’s still kicking. We’re clustering around the computer watching the video clip and rooting for her, just like in the old days. As ridiculous as she is, she’s still a part of us, an icon of the last ten years, an icon of pop. She’s refused to burn out and fade away, and her persistence has made her a Madonna. Britney got her wish. She became a legend.

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