Sam Noble: Rock n’ Roll Suicide
Pop music should come with a health warning: in extreme cases, leads to complete bald-headed, cocaine guzzling and pill-popping insanity. Britney Spears for example. There’s nothing new about this Valhalla-style decadence in which each generation’s pop royalty indulges with increasing ingenuity and innovation. Bizarre sexual practises, narcotic over-indulgence and hotel trashing - it’s all been done before.
So who would have thought that the blonde-headed schoolgirl, gyrating in her uniform, would shave her head on a cocktail of drugs and booze and ink her nubile skin? Did she think the tattoos and lack of hair would reinvigorate her career the way JT’s gangster tats and short-back-and-sides has? Stranger things have happened. Luckily, in Popland the right PR agent can usually coax a comeback camel through the smallest proverbial needle of credibility - cue the Greatest Hits. Fortunately for the divas (but maybe not us), the troughs in their lives lead to peaks in notoriety and record sales.
But when the girl-next-door indulges in such extreme bald-headed exuberance, we must examine the pop world they inhabit that can provoke such insanity. Pressures of childhood fame, money, regular hounding from the paparazzi and being adored are all obvious justifications for pearly-headed mentalism. In the sugar-coated child-marketed world of pop, self-expression and personality are on the backburner.
But this is the price of fame: celebrity is more important than credibility. Britney is one of those rare cultural icons whose first name has become a household brand, synonymous with blonde hair (well, it was) and Barbie-like features. More often than an album release, we instead see the pop princess as a highly paid mouthpiece for Pepsi or Coca-Cola, or even supporting the Iraq war and that lame-duck incumbent Bush. It affirms for me that all the waffle that pop stars espouse as nice, girl-next-door types is nonsense.
The levels of notoriety scramble your brains something rotten - there are too many fame casualties to argue otherwise: Michael Jackson, Keith Moon, Judy Garland, Ozzy Osbourne, to name but a few. And I name these few because they all had, and for little Michael and Britney, may still have, oodles of talent. It affirms what Beyoncé said (again, too famous to warrant a surname): “it’s hard to be taken seriously as a talented performer and be beautiful.”
So is Britney clawing back some credibility, if she ever had it, via a lack of blonde, instantly identifiable Britney follicles? Or is she, like so many others, hooked and od’ing on the fame drug? Despite your explosive phoenix-in-flames self-destruction, we still love you Britney - perhaps even a tad more. We can’t blame you and the other skinny blondes for taking to drugs, booze and breezy new haircuts as a refuge from the insanity of the pop world that you make your substantial living from. I can’t confess to having an extensive knowledge of your music. But I’m sure they are glistening pop nuggets polished to such a sacchrine sheen that, even you, princess-on-a-pedestal Britney, could eventually get sick. Get well soon.
