All hail Britney Spears: it's not about art, it's about inspiration
Has it really been a decade? “If Britney Spears can make it through 2007,” the internet meme goes, “you can make it through today”.
It was 10 years ago that the pop star endured an astonishingly difficult period in her personal life, including repeated visits to rehab, publicly shaving her head, some well-publicised mental health issues, giving an unusually substandard performance at the MTV awards and having an altercation with a photographer, among several other traumatic events.
Much of the fallout was extremely sad: Spears lost custody of her sons and control of her business affairs for the duration of her recovery.
What had become of such a talented young star, the magazine headlines gasped, with audible mass hand-wringing –as if obsessive press attention hadn’t contributed in any way to Spears’s mental health problems.
They were asking the wrong question. Worldwide love of Britney has never been about her talent. She has never claimed to be a great songwriter, and although she is a capable singer and dancer, her success has always been found in the cultivation of her image rather than the artistic quality of her output.
Whether she was playing the doe-eyed schoolgirl in …Baby One More Time, or the femme fatale in I’m a Slave 4 U, every outfit and dance move has been calculated to turn the Britney brand into a shiny front behind which an army of producers, image consultants, writers, merchandisers and autotuners could work their magic.
We were shocked by Britney’s behaviour all those years ago because she was slipping from the pedestal we’d created for her. Kylie Minogue and Madonna, with their image-heavy performances that, like Britney’s, never depended too strongly on vocal ability, laid the groundwork for Britney to arise at the tail end of the 20th century to become the purest commercial music object the world had ever seen.
“I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17,” as she sang in her 2007 single Piece of Me, composed in the depths of her troubles. Those words perfectly describe her career, but she didn’t write them. It’s a track which lists four writers, none of them Spears, and her vocals are bolstered by contributions from three extra singers, including Swedish pop star Robyn.
But Britney’s face was on the CD. And the song summed up her public image, and the media’s hunger for details of her life, precisely.
There’s often a sense of fake horror when it’s revealed that pop stars don’t write their own material, as if they have somehow tricked us. But nobody has ever seriously believed that Britney has spent the 20 years since she signed her first record deal sitting down alone in the studio every morning with a pen and paper, crafting her own rhymes and harmonies.
Her 1999 debut single was written and produced by the Swedish pop svengali Max Martin, and since then she has worked with a host of other writers and producers to release 42 singles from nine studio albums.
More often than not in her “live” stage performances, she obviously lip syncs, and nobody seems to begrudge her for it. There’s a whole lot of talent behind the story of Britney’s pop domination, but most of it doesn’t belong to Spears. And we don’t care.
Because, in the end, being a star has nothing to do with personal talent. True stars are personalities that captivate us, and Britney Spears’s difficulties are what make her inspiring. Thankfully, Britney in 2017 is almost unrecognisable compared to that troubled figure of the past.
She seems healthy, not only comfortable with the spotlight but in control of it, performing in her successful Las Vegas residency as well as maintaining a close relationship with her children.
We should cherish the fact that Britney’s breakdown and subsequent climb back towards Glory (the title of her triumphant 2016 comeback album) tell us a very human story about resilience. Who cares who writes the songs?
If Britney can survive such intense personal crisis and emerge, like a glittery pink phoenix, to become even glossier and more fabulous than before, there’s hope for us all. True stars aren’t talented, but unstoppable, and that’s why we love them.
