Fake, but Britney Spears is still fascinating

It's hardly news that the pop star can't sing when everything else she does is fraudulent, says Neil McCormick.

So Britney Spears can't sing? Quelle surprise, as the French say. The leak of a dull, flat, wobbly vocal exposed as utterly inept without the aid of autotune is just the latest opportunity to mock her minimal musical ability - as if that was even a consideration in a contemporary pop career. But if you have been paying any attention to the career of Spears at all, you would know by now that she can't really sing, can't dance, and often can't be bothered even making an effort to pretend otherwise.

Personally, I think Britney is the very worst kind of modern pop star, which is, of course, part of what makes her so fascinating. She is not famous for any particular charisma or talent, she is famous for being sexual jailbait who made a very public transition from cherubic Mickey Mouse Club starlet to provocative schoolgirl fantasy figure with the video for her 1999 hit single Baby One More Time. She was the Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus of her time, a teen crush who also fed dark adult desires, promoting a US dream of apple pie chastity while performing risque songs with revealing costumes and dance moves, the latest incarnation of a bizarre cultural fascination with the virgin whore. She achieved such an incredible degree of fame in the early 21st Century (she has sold more than 100 million records worldwide) that her career since has been one long public burnout, a fairly standard pop soap opera narrative of extreme fame exposing family dysfunction, romantic disasters, drug addiction, weight problems, depression, breakdown, recovery and comeback.

She has, along the way, made some absolutely fantastic pop records, punchy, plastic, shiny assertions of identity packed with ear-catching hooks, each essentially the creation of top backroom writer-production teams cynically playing with the public image of the star and delivered by Spears with a kind of robotic blankness then spruced up with slick, big-budget soft-porn videos. You can't argue with tracks such as Toxic (by Swedish duo Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg), Womanizer (by Atlanta production team Outsyders) and most recently her collaborations with will.i.am (Work Bitch and Scream & Shout).

And if the star at the center of the promotional campaign often seems dazed, damaged and disinterested, well, that only adds to her allure.

The vulnerability of Spears is the most human part of her. Airbrushed, choreographed, produced and manipulated to within an inch of her sanity, Spears is a vacuum into which fans, producers and brand managers alike disgorge sexual and idolatrous fantasies. She is an emblem of everything superficial and fake in celebrity culture.

Of course she uses autotune - it would almost be disappointing if she didn't fake her vocals as well.

(China Daily 08/02/2014 page24)