Britney Spears: "Circus"

I forget if my CD player broke or what, but I was listening to the radio the other day and this fucking blew my mind. Britney Spears finally realized that the only way to exploit her public shamelessness is to become shameless on every fucking level: it’s there in the smash-and-grab way she updates her production, the hilariously confrontational lyrics, even just the fact that she still is making music at all. At least Madonna has some semblance of a consistent persona and style through all the surface changes; if she’s the Bill Clinton of pop tarts, Britney’s the Richard Nixon, going past the dirty tricks to actually break into the opponents’ headquarters for no good reason other than the sheer scuzziness of it. If the schoolgirl video was the Checkers speech, signs of future aggressiveness bursting through feigned innocence, Circus is Watergate.

But what the hell: if you’re going to go Courtney Love on everyone, why not assault us about how it makes you a better person, all of this after the single where she writhed naked while accusing some poor nameless schmuck of being a womanizer in such a realistically zombified voice that it made Daft Punk sound like Marvin Gaye. It’s not like you’re going to get impeached for mining new depths of inexplicable desperation that no one knew existed. For chrissakes, it’s pop music. If someone wasn’t actively trolling these frontiers, you’d really know something was wrong.

This all seems to be working for her in the short run, but I’ll be fascinated to see if she can keep us (yes, we are all complicit in her continued existence) interested even after she’s bilked her own ridiculousness into further strata of ridiculousness. If she can’t, she’ll have at least refused to go quietly into that good night of irrelevance. If she can, she’ll become the Jacques fucking Derrida of terrible pop music.