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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Compassion As guilty as anyone else, prowling around youtube. Prompted by an email reminder that Britney Spears' new cd is out, I typed in her name. I find the new video of Ms. Spears uninteresting, and frankly, was a generation too late to find her all that interesting to begin with. Most of her videos are deeply distressing from a feminist perspective if you think about it. Deep in the culture-vulture pockets of my brain I knew she had great abs [another reason some foks have turned on her: she had kids and admitted to eating Taco Bell] and possibly, a rabid stage-mom-run kinda life. A talented Toronto comic spoofed her up ages before it became cool to run Britney into the ground, and she did it with insight: Shoshanna nailed BS long ago. She actually did it kindly, too, comprehending the exhaustion-riddled life that musta been Miss Britney age 12-24.
Now Britney is painted as a diva, a spoiled brat, a nutter and so on: she is possibly an addict and most likely someone who'd move to a remote island in the South Pacific if her ego hadn't been groomed to a painful and fragile state by hmm, someone close to her who wanted to make lots of money...
I knew she was some cute Southern belle, likely pushed past her limits most days and deprived of "normal" life.
But if you *really* want to get depressed and feel some compassion at the same time, watch Spears' video, "Lucky" right after you read Kafka or download Prison Break or something. "Lucky" shows a very young, very emaciated and bleached Spears singing to her future self and the lyrics are harbingers. [Can we pluralize that out here???] She has since been lambasted for being fat, drunk, otherwise addicted, a lousy mother, a bad dancer, a party-animal [well, one who got caught or seemed to want to get caught], and yet, if you watch "Lucky" you're going to see a very young girl trapped like a rat in a cage in a lab hell-bent on harming the self-esteem of other young girls. In the lyrics, she basically sings that she has no one to turn to in her state of seeming great luck and fortune.
I have no doubt that she may need some coaching in the mama department, since her own mother must have had dollar signs for eyes when she allowed her kid to be a sex symbol. The apple, the tree, all that, and well, if you want to explore compassion: watch Lucky. The most depressing video ever made, and possibly, the most prescient.
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