The Britney BlenderMagazine interview is a hoot!

I thought this was a funny article from the globe

Spears nor Alexander have commented on the event for what it is, however: a desperate bid for publicity, rivalling Jayne Mansfield's fake-kidnapping or the latest reason Oprah is not ready to settle down with Stedman.

Spears's latest album, In the Zone, after making its debut at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, is dropping quickly despite a number of gaudy, prerelease moves, including innumerable semi-nude magazine-cover shoots and, to borrow a term from critic Daniel Boorstin, the "pseudo-event" of having tongued Madonna during the MTV awards.

The slow yet certain plunge of Britney Spears is difficult to assess. More prudent observers would track this decline through sales figures, yet numbers convey only the starkest of narratives.

I believe it was the exact moment she kissed the Madonna-viper (who had courted Spears for a long time, wearing her T-shirts and remarking on her, obsessively) that her descent began.

Madonna is infamous for a kind of cruelty that always seems to originate in seduction (Sandra Bernhardt is painfully articulate on this subject), and her affection usually culminates in vicious, public cuts. After the kiss, Madonna told the press that Spears's bad breath had repulsed her -- a typical Madonna comment, utterly lacking in compassion or self-reflexivity (I should imagine kissing Madge is like having your head swallowed by an anaconda).

Madonna kissed her the way Michael Corleone kissed his brother Fredo: It was an explicit display of Sicilian vengeance, and Spears's body, at the time, appeared to crumple in both submission and dismay.

Tired of hot blondes stealing her now-quiet thunder, Madonna, dressed like a Black Widow, may as well have screamed, in the manner of the hag in The Evil Dead: "Swallow your soul!" as she made a fool of her hapless protégé. Biographer Albert Goldman once remarked of the postwar Elvis performing with Frank Sinatra (who despised Elvis), that Presley's body language was so unsettling because it was devoid of rebellion, and fairly quivering with submission.

Spears, whose 1999 debut album, Baby One More Time, seemed determined to knock out every blonde in her way, is a pop masterpiece, an exemplar of rough innocence that conjures the image of the wise nymphet Lolita with a hundred bodyguards.

Her lies about her virginity were as quaint as Jessica Simpson's or Brooke Shields's, very likely the delirious inventions of PR agents who continue, in the manner of common pornography, to find greater sexual appeal in the very absence of legitimate sexual activity.

Her subsequent fame never seemed compulsive: She was a campy yet legitimate talent, trailed only by the mildest of gossip; given only to lightweight contretemps. Rumours of her non-virginity abounded well before she outed herself as a player, and she was once rumoured to have indulged in cocaine (in a tabloid squib that had her asking her club friends to "check me, check me," before leaving a washroom). Spears denied this in an exclusive Star interview, and why not? I am fairly certain that most young stars do more coke than Tony Montana; I fail to see why they would want to share this practice with a public hell-bent on constructing public reputations in the manner of chubby-fingered children sorting shapes into pegboards.

Her romance with Justin Timberlake was equally benign, despite their back and forth diss-lite festivals. Justin implied that Brit was cheating! Brit implied that she knew, like, stuff! About him! This sort of back-and-forth punking, to cite the beau monde of Ashton Kutcher and his callow associates, is pure high school, designed to provoke flurries of sobbing pyjama parties, and nothing more. Even Eminem backed off of Britney in his famously coarse riff about sitting with her and Christina Aguilera at the Grammys: Spears is like a large, trembling hamster, and to revile her is beneath the kind of tough guys and bad girls who have, or should have, larger prey in mind.

As Spears's career falls like sparklets from the mane of a My Pretty Pony, I feel sorry for her. Her chic juvenile friends remind me of the kind of adolescents who would turn on you for wearing floods to a party and, increasingly, she seems more sinned against than sinning -- increasingly, she is like a baby beauty queen who, having lost a great degree of her adorableness over time, is still brandishing her sceptre, confused and teary in the face of the withdrawal of an affection that seemed certain and true.

Because she seems like such a soft and pliable victim, she is capable of arousing contempt, but this sort of reaction is better felt and demonstrated by the Madonnas of the world, who shift shapes because they have no genuine centre; who, with animal cunning, are able to thin their ranks with a single, callous gesture.

I recently saw the interior of Spears's mansion in a tabloid: It is a girl's dream house, filled with the kind of femme-kitsch that Laura Ashley once defined. I like to imagine Brit taking to her bubble bath and crying a river, while the sounds of N'Sync fill the room: "And now you're runnin', you're runnin' out of time. You played yourself."

Cry it out, Britney. And then punk Madonna, by pretending Hanky Panky is a wicked song; punk Justin by actually telling us what you know; punk Ashton by making mere reference to That '70s Show. Then dry off and remember that you "made us believe." Not that you were a virgin, but that you were Like a Virgin and capable of playing us all.


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[This message was edited Tue Jan 13 1:52:31 PST 2004 by twink69]

What ARE they talking about in that article?

Britney Spears is going nowhere. Just the fact that people talk about her so much shows how she manipulates the media and the public just like Madonna did. She has little talent, but she's good at grabbing headlines which equals record sales and $.

VoicesCarry said:

Madonna being the kiss of death to Britney.