RAMBLE ON: "Circus" by Britney Spears

I confess a certain indifference towards Britney Spears, which is probably a character flaw for my line of work – how can you be a pop critic and not be deeply invested in the life and works of Britney Spears? I’m not sure. I was a teenage boy when “Baby One More Time” dropped and I understand what makes her great; I don’t remember loving that song, because it was for girls, but I do remember staring at the video every time it came on. It wasn’t even because I was a teenage boy; she just pulls focus like no one else ever has. Like everyone else I was constantly aware of her troubled existence and tabloid hounding over the next twenty years, and I agreed that hashtag Britney should be hashtag Free. And yet, Britney as a person and as an artist, I find hard to really connect to. All her biggest and best songs, “Baby One More Time,” “Toxic,” etc., I enjoy them, I can sing along with them, I respect their greatness, but there’s no Britney song that I really love or that’s part of my soul or anything. In an attempt to feel something about her, I watched a little of the “Framing Britney Spears” documentary; I couldn’t stand it, and I didn’t make it very far. Despite its New York Times branding, it felt horribly tabloidy and gossipy, and the angelic victim depicted in it felt as fake as the TMZ version of her. She emerges as something pitiful; it didn’t surprise me at all that Britney herself wasn’t a fan.

Before I turned it off, the doc did try and make the case for Britney as a real auteur, the driving creative force behind the Britney phenomenon – she’s not just some puppet to be pulled around on strings, says one tour performer.  That feels like a necessary corrective, because guilelessness and lack of control wasn’t just a tag by unfair critics, it was practically her whole aesthetic – the sense that somehow she’s doing all this by accident. In his 2003 profile of her for Esquire, Chuck Klosterman describes her as either “the least self-aware person I've ever met, or she's way, way savvier than any of us realize. Or maybe both.” She takes several topless and bottomless pics for the magazine (and Klosterman’s article is extremely weird about this) but she doesn’t really think it’s anything provocative – she refuses to think about it at all. And then after that there were the public breakdowns, and the fact that she literally lost her rights as a human being. But that lack of autonomy was also a theme in the music itself – “Oops I Did It Again,” she led you on completely by accident. “Lucky,” she’s trapped in fame and miserable (astonishing that she was already singing about this so early). “I’m a Slave 4 U” – I mean, come on. I think it’s that, more than anything, which keeps me from being invested in her fully – she never seemed to have much authorial control, not like her peers, not like the Main Pop Girls of the 2010s and especially not like Christina, who was defying her pop-princess constraints almost immediately. But maybe that isn’t a fair impression; lots of teen stars come off as naifs initially and then eventually come of age, and Britney was in that process too. The “Toxic” video, a pointed cover of “My Prerogative,” I remember her trying her hand at directing her own videos; now that I think about it, she was showing herself more and more as someone in control of her own destiny – until, publicly and legally, she wasn’t.

I started being an actual pop fan in 2007 so that’s my favorite period of Britney, which makes me feel bad because that was a really bad time for her personally – the divorce, the head-shaving, and then the conservatorship. Those albums sounds like someone who has lost control, especially her 2007 album Blackout; the producers fill the tracks with noise, glitchy synths, stuttering beats, vocal distortion – she sounds like a ghost in the machine, trapped in the Matrix. “It’s Britney, bitch.” Was it, actually?

Blackout was the album where her music became all about the Britney phenomenon. She hadn’t been “Britney, bitch” before then. The signature track was “Piece of Me,” a song where she lashes out at her critics. I remember liking it, but it didn’t sound to me at the time like the real Britney; it sounded like a PR statement written for her. I guess it worked in that it was a hit single and kept people interested, but I’m not sure I enjoy it much in hindsight. A touch overwritten, way too defensive. She doesn’t sound like she’s punching back at the press so much as flailing at air.

This is what made “Circus,” one of her last great singles, so compelling, such a brilliant act of PR, and somewhat queasy to listen to now. The title track to Blackout’s follow-up album, “Circus” immediately contrasted with the album’s (awful) lead single “Womanizer”; compared to “Womanizer” and to Blackout, “Circus” was the less messy, more respectable version of The Britney Spears Experience. “When I crack that whip, everybody gonna trip just like a circus,” Britney sings. She’s the ringleader. She calls the shots. She runs a tight ship. She makes it hot, when she puts on a show. Blackout cleared out some space for Britney to rework her image, and “Circus” put her back on top (of the narrative, at least, if not quite the top of the charts). No more Britney against the music, or Britney against the press. The dark period of two years earlier -- the 2006 VMA disaster, the umbrella attack, the head-shaving, K-Fed – all part of the act, folks. “All eyes on me in the center of the ring just like a circus.” You eat it up, don’t you? A brilliant reframing of the Britney phenomenon, as both superstar and mastermind – she gets all this attention because she commands it. And it’s true – she does, she does it like no one ever has, and she knows you can’t resist.

And at the same time, it wasn’t true at all. A circus is one thing that gets attention, and it does so by design. It’s a much more flattering comparison than another thing that commands attention, the one Britney typically heard from the press: a trainwreck. “All eyes on me in the center of the news just like a trainwreck” would scan but it wouldn’t reflect well on Britney or anyone in her orbit. No, a circus is the more convenient metaphor. But there are lots of performers in a circus. Circuses have ringleaders. They also have animals, in cages. Who was the ringleader here? I’m looking at the credits and whaddya know, it appears that the mastermind of this song was one “Dr. Luke,” an early hit for him on his way to building a reputation as an abusive controlling Svengali with a trail of aggrieved female artists who’ll never work with him again. Dr. Luke has admittedly made a lot of good songs, and this is one of them, a high point for both him and Britney; this beat cooks, and Britney kills on it. And yet. Britney was infantilized by so many and I don’t want to be one of them, but I cannot shake the suspicion that this song, about how in control she is, is one of the biggest lies foisted on her by her terrible father and handlers. “I’m the ringleader, I call the shots.” What a thing to make a woman with no legal rights say. Fucking dark, man.

Honestly, “Piece of Me” is probably closer to the real Britney than I gave it credit for. Judging by her Instagram, she does in fact have tons of grievances at the way she was treated and she’s letting them all out now, now that she’s free to. She’s said she’ll never make music again. “Circus” begins “There’s only two types of people in the world, the ones that entertain and the ones that observe… well baby, I’m a put-on-a-show kind of girl.” But there are other shows besides circuses that entertain people. New York Magazine’s “House of Spears” article pointed out that her father was an athlete in high school and she could have been too; it takes no stretch of the imagination to see her as a gymnast, it notes, with her toned physique and perfect moves, and it helps me to think of her as such. An athlete performs until they can’t and then they retire in their thirties and write memoirs and live off the fortunes they made with their past glories. An athlete, not a ringleader. A ringleader has to keep entertaining the masses. A ringleader says the show must go on. Britney decided that the show didn’t “must go on” at all. What stronger case could there be against the song than that?