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Some of you might recall that a few weeks ago I claimed that Britney Spears hasn’t yet hit rock bottom because she’s financially secure – unlike TLC or Vanilla Ice or MC Hammer, she seemed to be far from having to trade in her sports car for a bicycle or having to move back in with her mom. As much as people say that money doesn’t have anything to do with happiness, I’m going to say that you can’t really be in the depths of despair, the lowest of the low, when you have millions in the bank.This, of course, was before I read this article on CNN about where Britney keeps her money. The answer is: she simply doesn’t. The official court papers show that while Brit spends, per month, $50,000 on her two mortgages, $16,000 on clothes, $15,000 on her baby daddy, and $100,000 on entertainment and gifts, she is putting exactly $0 into investments and savings accounts. She gives exactly $500 dollars in charity.
This does not bode well for her. I don’t care how catchy her new song “oh oh Baby” is (the answer: extremely catchy), Britney has a limited shelf life whether or not she has a successful comeback in the next few years. I mean, if I were that well off, I would at least pay someone to care about my money situation and future security so I didn’t have to – you know, like an accountant or someone? More than the drinking, the unprotected sex, and the hitting people with her car without a license, her financial situation seems to paint the picture of how destructive (or just stupid?) she has been behaving.
And now for the comparison: how am I doing in this aspect of life? Well, even though I make as much in a year as Brit spends of cute shoes and half shirts in a two month period, I’m putting away 6.5 percent of my income (which is generously matched by my employer). And I save 100 percent of the money I make freelancing, which, in a year, comes to as much as Britney pays Fed-Ex a month for cornrow upkeep, releasing failed rap albums, and weirdo hat purchases. I spend exactly as much a month as Britney does on charity aggressively paying off my student loans, which is a charity in its own way, helping the poor student Sarah of the past.
The way things are going now, even though Britney grossed almost exactly 10,000 times as much money as I did last year, I might end up in the same nursing home as she does. Now I just have to make sure my old lady abs are flatter and less wrinkly than hers.
Here’s an image for you: me, sitting in a little messy cubicle, answering hundreds of responses from unsolicited emails about history textbooks, listening to Britney Spears’ new album, Blackout way, way too loud on my headphones and bobbing my head. Every once and a while, like when Britney rhymes position, mission, and permission, or when Britney obviously misses several nasally notes in a row, I will stop bobbing my head and frown.
So yes, I decided not to Be Proactive to Help and go ahead and buy the album. And the bonus track.
I have a lot of mixed feelings. Before purchasing the album last night, I read a bunch of positive reviews of it online. “It’s totally not a horrible, overweight disaster!” record reviews wrote. “I really thought that this album would be a bad mother struggling with a substance abuse problem and a fresh divorce, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a collection of 13 pop songs!”
It seems that people like the album because it’s not another train wreck of a misstep like Brit’s performance at the MTV VMAs or her two children – their expectations were low, so it was a pleasant surprise. They can’t separate Brit’s life from her music. And the music isn’t bad. The beats are good and catchy and the production is great. I would say I even like three or four of the songs more than anyone should.
Of course, is it Brit’s music? I’m going to say no, and it’s not just because I’m a poor jealous talentless brunette. She can buy the best producers in the business, and this album features Bloodshy & Avant, the Clutch and the Neptunes – people who can make catchy songs out of anything. Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if Britney didn’t even sing in the studio for this album — she was just recorded having a whiny, breathy conversation out in the parking lot and they sampled bits and pieces of it. Like she said, “Gimme more fried chicken, baby!” and they cut out “fried chicken” and made two hit songs out of it.
Because, after all of these years, it’s still pretty apparent that Brit isn’t the best singer out there. She’s often shrill, nasally, and off pitch. The best songs are the ones where she’s mostly just talking in the background or making those weird sexy noises she makes. When it comes to guilty-pleasure pop divas, I’ll stick with Pink and Shakira – who are not only better singers, but who also manage to write their own songs from time to time (Britney is credited on two songs on Blackout, although one of them is the less-than-brilliant “oh oh Baby,” which contains the lyrics “oh oh baby baby baby baby baby” and is about the physical act of sex).
The lyrics on the album that are not the words “hot” or “baby” seem like a study in irony or perhaps just a lot of hilarious misunderstandings – songs like “Piece of Me” are about what a mess she’s been over the last year or so, and how she’s really sassy about it, but it becomes quickly apparent that she didn’t write the lyrics. I mean, you can’t really complain about people taking pictures of you while you get out of your car when you often show your genitals during the process. Can you?
In the end, I’m not sure if I learned any secrets about my enemy Brit by listening to this. She’s just not there very much – you can’t feel her presence like in some of her earlier albums. It’s unarguably a good album, though, perhaps for that reason. Either way, she’s probably widened the lead, just a little bit, in our race to have the more successful life.
Where does that leave me, and where does that leave Britney? I’m not sure. I think I learn more about her by keeping up on the gossip, the latest of which claims that Britney was breastfeeding JJ while she was drunk on vodka. And while I find it horrifying that she’s treating her kids to Baby’s First White Russians, I’m also going to keep listening to her new album while I reply to the rest of these textbook emails. I will not, however, bob my head during the sequence where she deems to rhyme man, hand, and understand.
It’s been another big week for Britney Spears – not only was she involved in another paparazzi hit and run incident, but the Fed-Ex vs. Brit-Brit custody battle has become so confusing that I’m not even sure the judge knows where the kids are any more. But this is only the present. And, as always, the present is mere seconds – seconds! – from being the past.
I should be worried about the future. More specifically, I need to be worried about next Tuesday, October 30th, when Britney Spears’ new album, Blackout, hits the stands. It’s her first original music release since 2003 and I have no idea what to expect. On one hand, I should probably buy the album and listen to it on repeat until I have it committed to memory – both so that I may know my enemy better and because I need to learn from her for when I finally get around to recording my five world-wide hit pop albums.
On the other hand, should I buy the album at all? Should I support Brit’s downward spiral of a drug-dazed life by purchasing her CD? Wouldn’t that be sending the wrong message to Jive Records and the music industry at large?
Well, some of Brit’s closest acquaintances and former hangers-on say no. In fact, they’ve started a MySpace page, Be Proactive To Help, which urges anyone who truly cares about Brit to boycott her music and merchandise (and here I was, about to buy her new fragrance, In Control, so that I could see what Britney thinks being in control smells like). More than an utterly confusing mashing of an absolute train wreck of un-diagramable words, Be Proactive To Help really wants to see Britney get better and return to her former rock-hard-abs glory. The thought behind the boycott is that if Jive was financially affected by Brit’s mental state that they will force her to seek help and get healthy.
Upon first viewing the page, I was a bit moved. Here are people – fans – being proactive to help. Together. Would so many people be proactive to help me if I were in trouble? Would they even make a weird MySpace page for me? I decided then and there: as much as I wanted to hear it, I wouldn’t buy Blackout next week. I would save the pop star and save the world.
About an hour later, I was still on the site. The sun had set without my noticing, my blog was sitting cold and unupdated at updating time, my cat was hungry and confused. I couldn’t stop reading – the comments, the profiles of the commenters, the profiles of the significant others of the commenters. Oh, the body glitter and the sadness! Oh, the creepy middle-aged men who say they haven’t bought an album since …Baby One More Time! Oh, the pink backgrounds with slightly darker pink fonts! Oh, the John Mayer soundtracks!
And, around that time, when I was getting pink MySpace wallpaper eyestrain, that I realized that I had been tricked. Be Proactive to Help might be being proactive to help Britney, but they were being proactive to hinder me – my goals and my dreams. Instead of doing any of the many tasks I need to complete in order to surpass Britney’s success, I was sucked into wasting hours of my time. On purpose.
Yes, I will buy Blackout next week. And I will study it and I will learn. I will not be tricked by Brit’s posse again. I will stay focused and see nothing but my goal of being better at life than Britney Spears. In the end, hopefully, I will reek of being in control. To help.
I spent much of the afternoon reading about how to attract more readers to my website. I opened accounts on de.licio.us, Technorati, and thisisby.us. I left comments on blogs that had similar audiences as mine and I tagged my previous entries with vague promises of subject matter that is enticing to the general population- Entertainment! Health! Food! Britney Spears!
I won’t lie – it felt a little weird. Like writing about how great you are for the About Me section of an online singles profile or talking about the awesome diversity of your hobbies and volunteer work at a job interview.
And then, when it was all over, I wrote a long introspective post about blogging, audience, marketing, the internet, and what it means to be successful. About how I have to resist letting my traffic stats effect my subject matter and how content should create audience and not the other way around. About life, death, sex, and my stupid blog.
In the end I came to the conclusion that no artist wants to self-promote or market. Or, they don’t want to have to. We talk about getting discovered, and getting discovered is a very passive thing. Diamonds get discovered — there they are just sitting there, waiting! And that would be nice – very Field of Dreams, very if-you-build-it-they-will-come. But that’s not exactly the way things are. People have to find me before they can read my stuff, and to help people find me, I have to put myself out there. Fin.
The whole thing was all very meta and pensive and super self-indulgent (and long). It was blogging about blogging, and you totally owe me one for erasing it. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that this new post could be described as blogging about blogging about blogging, which is much, much worse. What buzz words can I even tag this entry with? Sadly, the word “brooding” comes to mind.
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