I love Britney Spears. Really, I do. Because even with her shaved head and refusal to wear shoes at gas stations, she will always be the person who brought the world “Baby One More Time,” “Toxic”, and the entire Blackout album (which more people need to recognize as a work of staggering genius considering the fact that BRITNEY SPEARS recorded an album in 2007). Which is why I feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite because I am one of the millions who have pushed her into near-insanity by constantly reading and commenting on news about her. Even worse, I’m one of the thousands who owns one of the very blogs that thrive on the downward spiral of the biggest pop star of my generation.
I helped create Britney Spears and am subsequently destroying her because it is within the audience’s power to do so to any star. A person remains a star so long as he or she is relevant to the public because we are, after all, the ones who are watching. And Britney Spears has certainly done a great job of staying relevant since she first came out in 1998 but that relevancy has moved from revolving around her artistic accomplishments to any and all of her decisions in her private (or really, public) life. We created Britney Spears because we continued to listen to her music and we are ruining her because we continue to go to Perez to get an update of her in a hospital or to write a post about how much change she put in the parking meter.
Britney is making all of her own decisions—there is no question there. But to assume no responsibility for why she might be acting the way she does is questionable. Obviously, in general, people are accountable only for themselves. But this isn’t general—this is the world of celebrity where the actions of millions of people who thrive on the overexposure of one person can have an effect. There is a general lack of accountability even on the part of the stars (which is perhaps best summed up in Lindsay Lohan’s statement that the “pants weren’t mine” when she was caught drunk driving with a bag of coke in her pocket). But we, the audience, also need to be held accountable because without an audience, there is no celebrity.
I know that this comes off as hypocritical because I’m a blogger but I also know that if Britney were to die tomorrow, as many are claiming and/or hoping, I would feel responsible. It’s one thing to become famous and suddenly be in the unique position of being in the spotlight. It’s another thing to become famous and suddenly have the entire world examining your every action and judging nearly every aspect of your existence.
I think that what is happening to Britney Spears parallels Michael Jackson. You’d be hard-pressed to find many people who can deal with being the most famous, powerful and watched person in the world, let alone many 17-year-old girls without a strong family or education who could handle that kind of fame in a “good” way. And while most people recognized what happened with Michael Jackson as a sad, even tragic example of the pitfalls of fame, we still continue to latch onto Britney, discussing all that’s wrong with her while never once considering what we might be doing wrong.
1 comment:
What's interesting about Britney Spears is that, at this point, she NEEDS the attention. We've all heard the rumors about her setting up photo ops with paparazzi, inviting them into her home, etc. And we (her fans) and certainly responsible for her love of (need for?) attention that has morphed into this.
I own every album she has released and was definitely a crazy fan as a kid, but what no one seemed to give any thought to was the fact that she was a kid herself. She became a huge star when she was only 16! I look and her now and wonder if I wouldn't be in the exact same position that she is if I had been constantly on the go with ridiculous amounts of responsibility all while trying to just figure out who I was. I don't think that that's a luxury that Britney had. She had people telling her how to present herself in public, how to sing, how to dance, how to wear her hair--everything. Obviously, this was a life she chose and, I'm sure, enjoyed, but I just don't think that it's a healthy environment for figuring out who you are and what you want in life.
This author/journalist named Chuck Klosterman wrote an article for Rolling Stone on Britney Spears while she was at the height of her fame and made some really interesting observations that no one else seemed to pick up on. He said that her appeal was in the fact that her personality was kind of ambiguous; she was whatever you wanted her to be. If you were a young girl, she was a cool person to look up to. If you were a male, she was the hot chick. And she was practically manufactured to be this way. It was thought out. Klosterman said that once she defined herself as one thing, the myth of Britney would be all over, which turned out to be true. When Britney decided that she was going to do what she wanted to do regardless of what anyone thought, she deviated (i.e. getting married in Vegas, getting together with someone who was already in a relationship) from the carefully constructed, polysemous personality that we were all familiar with.
I really hope that Britney can get the help that she needs, and it seems like things are on the right track. I think that she needs some time to herself out of the limelight to finally figure out who she is.
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