Crossroads?

J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle

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The public unraveling of Britney Spears has been one of the most singularly unpleasant and joyless tabloid spectacles since the death of Princess Diana in the summer of '97. It's not so much the excoriation that's troubling as the accompanying sense of glee.

Ever since she transformed from benign Mouseketeer to threatening sex object, Spears has been fodder for furyhounds, blandly lambasted as "everything that's wrong with music" by people whose fervor for cultural correction should probably be applied to their own record collections. What's troubling about the recent spate of rubbernecking is the absolute lack of empathy. Spears' alarming irresponsibility is clearly the result of a severe psychological short-circuiting, but there's a kind of implied reasoning that her hard spiral into oblivion is just comeuppance for having the gall to sell millions of records without possessing any discernible talents. It's a troubling mind-set, one that affects moral indignance while conveniently overlooking the fact that enormous success is impossible without a willing populace. It's tempting to suggest that Spears is being vilified not for her behavior, but because, once upon a time, we were naïve enough to like her.

In what manages to be a demonstration of both sly self-parody and depressing obliviousness, Spears' fifth record is called Blackout. It's her darkest yet, a record full of warped electronics, clattering rhythms and slinky, sinuous melodies. But its most fascinating quality is how uninvolved Spears is in its proceedings. Her voice is obliterated — mangled, pitch-shifted, larded with effects and stripped of any defining human characteristics. It jitters unnaturally, at times sounding no more alive than the cobweb of synths that contains it. It's the aural equivalent of using CGI to insert Humphrey Bogart into a George Clooney film. It's all of the appearance with none of the presence.

It's hard not to read this as a kind of emergency therapy. Spears has discovered that the last terrifying refuge from celebrity and cruelty and actual adult responsibility is complete evaporation. So this is what's left: just a mechanized voice, incapable of shaving her head or driving drunk or abandoning her children. A few neon-blue notes crackling in the ether, existing only as long as the song they inhabit. She's not here. This isn't happening.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)