By Special Guest Writer Jordan Whelan
Britney is back in gum-smacking action y’all but “don’t call it a comeback”, no really please don’t.
If you count the “comebacks” there have been three, which seem to bleed together in an unsorted mix of auto tune, bargain bucket hair extensions, and imbecilic promotional interviews.
Each however, is as largely anticlimactic as the next. I can’t pick a favourite but like clockwork we are brought back to the same dog and pony shtick that Spears Inc. can churn out.
This era seems to stay customary except for an increasingly inordinate amount of unyielding spandex. See: Toe of Camel.
It is ironic that Spears would title her latest album “femme fatale”. That phrase is most often reserved to one who carries with them a sense of allure and mystery. Mystery, a word not usually accredited to an individual we have seen bald, british, battoned to a gurney, and giving her best Mary Poppins impression to an SUV. Oh and there was that one, or ten times when we became privy to her beaver. At the club, at the mall, Britney likes it breezy y’all. Now never talk about it again.
Part 1
Brit's back in the place she once called "Elvis's birthplace”, Mississipi for those who finished high school, but we’ll give her Las Vegas.
Crew are a flurry erecting an elaborate assortment of lights, smoke machines, and psychedelic props which are merely tools, in a 10 minute presentation on Houdini’s lessons in audience distraction.
The 20 somethings file in and the arena has the odor of an ornate money making ploy. Eau de Bernie Madoff if you will.
Camp Spears really should bottle their luck and carry it to the slot tables. They have concocted an entertainment machine that gushes millions and those forking over the coin seem to carry on blissfully unaware that the product barely functions.
The recipe is 10 parts familiarly, 2 parts Alvin and Chipmunks vocal range, and 5 Parts Hollywood Hair & Makeup power wash team. That Disney is devil’s work!
Throughout the mockumentary, we cut to Spears fielding questions from MTV reporter Sway (not his baptismal name) who is ineptly trying to disguise the fact that the questions are undoubtedly pre-screened to support this protracted pr campaign.
Sway starts the interview kissing ass, and by the time he finishes his index cards is halfway up Spears’ sigmoid colon.
Here is a gleaming snippet:
Spears on the studio v. performing:
“When you’re in the studio you’re just like really focused on and you know you’re really in your head and in your ears and like you know on like the notes and stuff and when you’re you know performing you’re more of like you know a tiger like you know its just its just more youre more in your body”
We also convoy Spears with her pimp manager, Adam Leber, (who isn’t a club bouncer but should tell his face) to the hardest working audio engineers this side of the Milky Way.
We witness Britney putting in hard studio time listening to playback, seal clapping, roaring “yay” and then hitting the road faster than you can say “John Lennon grave roll.”
Part 2- The big number
Physically propped up by a metal pole (not for show!), Britney enters centre stage seemingly petrified of those in the front row. Like a Duracell on low juice, Britney dances sways like a wheat branch in the southern Louisiana sun. She looks engrossed by a chemical lobotomy.
This wind up toy has only had a half crank and suddenly edge of our seat excitement to hedge bets on if she will make it to the chorus.
The rest goes like this.
1. Leather, SM Theme blah blah- Check
2. Quasi makeout session with male dancer: Check
3. More smoke than Snoop’s tour bus: Check
4. Wind machine to create a semblence of kinetics:Check
5. Epileptic gyrating: Triple Check
I look at the lifeless Spears and ponder to myself….
Am I watching “Weekend at Bernie's” or “Weekend at Britneys”
Meh…same show….just different handlers.
