I can't prove it, and of course there's documented evidence of Britney doing the job herself, but I think she was just cleaning up what Simon started. And in good spirits, too, she didn't press charges or nuthin.
No, she thought Kelly Clarkson would think it looked sexy.
No, she EFFIN' FELT LIKE IT.
No, it WAS Simon, but more indirect. See, Britney read this thing that he wrote on his blog:
At the height of the pro-pop delirium a couple of years back one proponent declared that “popism is about eliminating barriers to pleasure” while another poptimist argued “importance and relevance is a scam and a trap. Don't bother with it…. Once you stop thinking about things in those terms, all of music and art becomes far more enjoyable.” The trouble with this quasi-virtuous elevation of pleasure/enjoyment to supreme value and sole criteria is that, for critics and the critically-minded (the bloggerati, “serious” fans) enjoyment in itself is not that interesting. It doesn't take you anywhere. Actually it's bloody hard to write about pleasure alone. Go on, try reviewing a record entirely in terms of its pleasurability. I guarantee by the middle of the second paragraph you’ll be reaching for some kind of measure of significance or relevance. So it makes sense that critics, whose job it is to generate thought-provoking words, are being drawn to the harder stuff.
And got real angry and said THAT IS IT I AM MAKING A BIG STATEMENT RIGHT NOW!
And then she shaved her head.
Except the timeline's off for that explanation.
What other celebrity could shave his/her head (ha, "his") and get plastered all over the place with BREAKDOWN etc. etc. DRUGS etc. ROCK BOTTOM? I don't mean to suggest that Britney isn't struggling with addiction or depression or anxiety or whatever the hell else, I'm just posing the question. Because it seems to me that this is being crammed into a sort of "cautionary" narrative by the press that basically makes explicit what's been implicit throughout Britney's career -- "faking" the virgin persona, becoming the slut "we" all suspected her of being, finally falling through the bottom of the barrel.
Y'all are nuts as Britney.
Anyway, to bring this back to what Simon's writing about, my own interest in pop is so far removed from what (I think) Simon's suggesting is a form of rockcrit hedonism (or, less drastically, an essentially anti-critical stance) that those words just burn the back of my eyeballs. (N.B. I also hate fun.)
Has he read anything that any poptimist has really written about the music they're listening to?
In this instance, he's referring to this Dissensus thread (thanx google), where he's (allegedly) quoting Matthew Perpetua, and he later quotes Eppy saying:
Hey, anyone else think that Dizzee's "I Luv U" just sounds like pop now? Which is good, you know, but I remember it being presented as this revelatory and revolutionary thing at the time. Wasn't, really, was it?
And responds:
what struck me about this (apart from the tit for tat aspect!), is that pop-ist impulse to strip away all that the stuff that actually matters and is exciting about the record in question, reducing it to some putative pure pop essence. I mean the record is incredibly catchy and punchy, but A/ that's not everything that's going on even in the song/record, let alone around it. (And when did “pop” have a monopoly on memorability or aesthetic focus?). But the real point is the reductive impulse, with its undercurrent of ressentiment. i see pop-ism working as by reducing the scope of things that you care about. The positive spin on that is a sort of minimalism of affect (perpetua's idea, at a charitable reading), stop thinking about these other factors and then this main thing--the pleasure of the moment/the thing-itself--dramatically expands. The negative spin on it is: i don't give a fuck about anything else but my pleasure.
I mean, this doesn't seem to me to be in the same universe as Eppy's comment (which was inconsequentially tossed-off in its original context and had no surrounding ideas whatsoever to suggest the kind of sweeping claims SR is making). Since when has Mike, on his blog or elsewhere, EVER argued for a "putative pure pop essence" that can be reduced to "the pleasure of the moment"? And since when is it all about "pleasure," anyway? And what does he, or the people he's quoting, even mean by pleasure? I get pleasure of sorts from caring about/worrying about/being moved by Aly and AJ, and pleasure of sorts from knowing that they might believe things that I can never believe, things that terrify me, because they've offered me a connection to them anyway. This is the sort of pleasure that leads to ulcers. Of course, all I'm doing by calling it all pleasure is making "pleasure" a pointless catch-all when I could more articulately convey what I'm feeling by...oh, I dunno...devoting a lot of my time and energy to writing about it at length. Which is what poptimists qua Poptimists are doing.
Obviously this isn't just about SR, who's too smug about all this crap to take too too seriously, although it's kinda shitty to blogroll Frank Kogan and then thoughtlessly sneer at what FK's been writing about (possibly without SR's knowledge, although I don't see how he could be simultaneously THAT out of the loop and also intent on saying this kind of bullshit again and again...I mean, who does he think he's referring to when he talks about Paris Hilton's supporters in a critic's poll whose only Paris supporters have also written extensively -- and intelligently and provocatively -- about her for about eight months?).
Anyway. This is about a lot of things...my own restlessness and my own feelings that I'm not doing enough to carry a conversation forward that I think is absolutely crucial right now -- I want Britney's bald head to say something to other people that they aren't hearing, or don't care to hear; I want it to reveal something about us, not just her, which is what's missing from tabloid covers, from conversations. (Britney's actual head being an image I have at the front of my brain at the moment and, uh, isn't really working for me; I know fairly little about the actual circumstances surrounding it that doesn't seem too speculative to be particularly useful -- so what people are saying about it is more important to me than what might have caused it. In fact, let's move away from Britney altogether for a sec and go to something else.)
I'm hitting a wall here.
I guess I'm saying, in part, that I resent SR for dismissing a fairly incredible group of writers and thinkers by reinforcing an idiotic binary that's pervasive enough to go unquestioned by some of the most incredible of these writers. He's part of a critical community and he's actively cutting himself off from these people without even beginning to engage with what they're actually thinking about, what's actually driving them to say what they say. And his own "examples" validating his stance don't even hold up to a quick google (I still can't even find the Fluxblog quote, but whatever), let alone everything I've come to understand about people who classify themselves as poptimists.
So this is me flailing against the wall, I guess, hoping this doesn't come off as too much of a tantrum...but why not, full-on confessional blog mode: I'm feeling anxious and a little guilty lately writing some of things I've been writing while knowing full well that I'm not putting the time and effort in that I know that I'm capable of, not listening to music very often and generally getting very sour about the conversation itself, not necessarily through any fault of the conversation and without much effort to make it better myself. Which is to say I'm in a funk, comes and goes in waves, and I'm hoping to come out of it soon. But part of the funk comes from thinking...I dunno, that the ideas that really grab me, make me think, make me challenge myself to try to work harder at this...it's like the Rolling-Crit (so that's where the "roll" went) keeps rolling along more like a snowball in hell than a snowball in snow. So it's like Day for Night, we have to make our own snow, which can be a lot of fun. But the environment is fundamentally a problem, when it could be and should be what is nourishing us -- which means, obviously, that Simon Reynolds is ALSO responsible for global warming.
(PS - yesterday I had to fast all day per doc's instructions and when, irritable and weak, I finally reached for my smooshed little sandwich, I realized that our mouse had TAKEN A LARGE BITE OUT OF THE CORNER OF IT. We're about to get Wile E. Coyote on this motherfucker.)
(PPS - I'm leaving for a week w/o internet, so apologies for no further responses on this post.)
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