Back in the day when I still hung around with men, my boyfriend used to complain that Britney’s worst fault was her lack of ego - yet it was one of the things he loved most about her. It reminds me of TV detective Adrian Monk’s wonderful comment on the bizarre personality traits that made him so effective: “It’s a blessing..... and a curse!”
My BF’s issue was with Britney’s lack of certitude, and he felt that it hampered her career. Where most megastars build a shell of egotistical self-worship around themselves, Britney was more prone to bouts of self-loathing - or, at the very least, a total loss of self-confidence. She has revolted against herself on more than one occasion. Once, she decided to take a break from her career because she simply wasn’t a big fan of herself. Another time, she found that she couldn’t bear the sight of her face on so many magazine covers.
Where some stars may proclaim that their next album will not only save the world, but be the greatest single cultural event of the century, or discuss its lengthy gestation and eventual painful birth with any journalist who has a big enough readership, Britney doesn’t take herself or her work that seriously. She isn’t so self-obsessed that she thinks her music is of earth-shattering importance. For her, it’s supposed to be fun - but she still wants to do it the best that she can.
But seeing it as intended for fun isn’t the same as taking a throwaway or careless attitude to her music. Far from it. A fan once wrote “One thing about Britney is that she never lets you down. She always delivers.” She works damned hard. She spends more time in recording studios than almost anybody. She produces so many outtakes you could make several more albums out of them, and they’d all be good.
She doesn’t lapse into the habit of always working with the same producers. You can be sure that Dr Luke won’t figure prominently next time. Britney lives at the cutting edge of pop and has good ears for trends that matter and for everything else that’s going on out there. The content of her albums is adjusted and changed right up to the last minute, so it won’t already be old by the time it comes out.
We know all of this, don’t we? So why do I keep finding fans muttering darkly on their forums that she “isn’t involved” and “doesn’t seem interested”? It drives me mad. She may not boost herself with a lot of dubious writing or co-producing credits, but if she was as detached from her music as some people say she is, she’d make a formulaic album every 4 years and try to promo herself from nowhere back into the game instead of what she does, which is to stay on the field.
If she hated making albums, or basically couldn’t be bothered spending countless hours in recording studios, she could avoid it. She doesn’t need the money, and everyone knows there isn’t much money in recording nowadays anyway. But some people are clearly not behaviorists and don’t draw their conclusions from th things a person actually does. They have their own sets of signifiers and validators that mean something to them, but don’t really make a lot of sense.
As one fan on a well-known forum put it: “Some say they support her but they want her to be a promo machine with no other goal in life than one Billboard 1 after the other. Some fans are more obsessed with the perfect Britney than Britney herself will ever be. Some fans are so concerned about Britney being the indisputable number one, the most talented, the most recognized, the best video queen ever, that they don`t enjoy all the fun. Some fans tend to get too worried or too carried away by negative emotions to let themselves enjoy things a bit more.”
Another fan says: “We're all so caught up in the writing credits and vocal production, but these things are givens when talking about Britney. She has always had co-writers/writers and as of ITZ, used heavy vocal production. Why, all of the sudden, is it such a surprise?”
And he’s right in more ways than one. Back around the time of ITZ, one of the magazines that interviewed her was already commenting that she seemed curiously dispassionate about her music. Yet here we are, several albums later and she's still doing what her ACTIONS appear to show that she is very passionate about.
And this is where we come back to what I was saying at the start. Britney is a modest, unassuming person. As Poor Britney says, she has a simple way of talking. She doesn’t have grand, portentous delusions about pop music or about her personal ability and mission to alter lives. She doesn’t see herself as a modern day Pied Piper leading the nation’s children into a magic mountain. But, just because she isn't big on "blowing her own horn" we shouldn't deduce that she’s semi-detached from her music or isn’t “involved”.
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