by Alice Bolin
“Something bad happened to me today,” K said one night when I came home. She had put a bottle of white wine in the freezer and forgotten about it, and it exploded. She carefully hoarded the hunks of frozen wine in my Tupperware.
“Aren’t you afraid of drinking glass?” I said.
“I made an Indiegogo page to fund a new bottle of wine,” she said.
Three weeks in, she told me that her best friend wanted to move in after all, and I would have to move out after one month instead of two. My clothes and books were still in the milk crates I had moved them in.
My third roommate in Los Angeles was an actor in his forties, V. His apartment was in a strange old row house in the heart of Koreatown. “Okay, I’m just going to be honest with you,” he said the first time I met him. He told me the landlords were elderly and apparently insane. He had convinced them that his friend who had lived in the apartment for fifteen years had never moved out, so that he could maintain rent control. “If you lived here, you would have to pretend to be my girlfriend,” he said. “And the hot water doesn’t work in the kitchen.” I moved in five days later.
A few weeks after I moved in, I passed V in the kitchen.
“I forgot to tell you. There’s a homeless man named Gary who lives in our carport. I give him five dollars a week,” he told me. “The landlords know about him,” he added to ease my mind.
I continued boiling spaghetti in my hot pot.
“Gary might call you ‘you guys,’ even though there’s only one of you,” he said. “He hasn’t been looking good. I don’t think he’ll live much longer.”
Halfway through Lana Del Rey’s Paradise EP, she breaks out a lugubrious cover of the standard “Blue Velvet,” and no one is surprised. She has always shared filmmaker David Lynch’s fetish for fifties and sixties culture, singing about looking for her James Dean and the “fifties baby doll dress” she would wear to her wedding. With Lynch’s twisted fifties aesthetic as a guiding standard, Del Rey’s music is an innovative mix of trip hop and cabaret, featuring both echoey drum beats and cinematic strings, sometimes stripped down, fuzzy, washed out, other times lush and retro. She has developed a fully imagined persona that goes way beyond the concept album, something like a freaky Connie Francis with a death wish.
In the United States, the 1950s are idealized as the most wholesomely American decade, riding the pride of winning World War II into the paranoid patriotism of the Cold War. Precisely because of this wholesomeness, fifties America is a trope that is easily, and enjoyably, perverted. This era is where white America places a lot of its nostalgia when it longs to be great again—Leave It to Beaver helps efface the Montgomery Bus Boycott, just as it was designed to. Del Rey’s music is overtly about America, with song titles like “American” and “National Anthem.” She is obsessed with her cultural origins —who begot her, who formed her vision of herself. Maybe this is why she displays a self-consciously Freudian interest in fucking her dad. Most of the relationships she describes have a creepy daddy-daughter dynamic. Most stunning are two lines from her song “Cola”: “I fall asleep with an American flag . . . / I pledge allegiance to my dad.”
“Light of my life, fire in my loins, / Be a good baby, do what I want,” Del Rey sings on “Off to the Races.” Lolita is a twisted vision of fifties America, too, a charming road novel about a pedophile and his kidnapped stepdaughter. Lolita’s power is in how it demonstrates the lure of evil and the banality of innocence, with its slick, seductive narrator, Humbert Humbert, and his repulsively ordinary victim, Dolores. Humbert’s attractiveness cannot be separated from his European identity, and Dolores’s crassness can’t be separated from her American one. If the American spirit is a bored, sexually mature suburban teenager, then Del Rey does everything she can to embody her.
“Is ‘mask’ the keyword?” Humbert Humbert asks in Lolita. Alfred Appel Jr., tireless annotator of Lolita, directs us to a moment where Humbert’s narrative mask slips. In the novel’s shortest chapter, we get a vision of Humbert in jail, despairing, “Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet.” Nabokov famously inserted himself in Lolita by using anagrams of his own name, most notably Vivian Darkbloom. Del Rey hides in plain sight, too, but sometimes it’s not clear whether her Lolita burlesque is actually the disguise. “Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer,” she sings, “life imitates art.” Is mask the keyword? It’s a feat to make yourself disappear while actually being straightforward, honest, even autobiographical.
In a 1967 interview with The Paris Review, Vladimir Nabokov said:
Another project I have been nursing for some time is the publication of the complete screenplay of Lolita that I made for Kubrick [ . . . ] The film is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlost is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass.
This strikes me as a very Los Angeles story. Los Angeles is a land of iterations, versions of versions, a swimming pool’s endless refractions, a city that sprawls forever. “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!” Humbert says. Is it obvious I don’t know what I’m doing here? I have no sense of Los Angeles. With this diary I build a collection of things I have authority to speak on. Light of my Lana, fire of my Lana. My song, my sort of.
Things with V were good, except for the several months that we had to pet-sit a hairless cat for his ex-girlfriend—in fact, the woman who had sublet me her room. The cat was always plotting ways to get into my room, thinking it was his, and I was unable to get him out if he ever tricked his way in, since I didn’t want to touch his furless skin. Gary died in the spring.
One day when I was home, someone shoved a piece of paper between the front door and its frame saying the landlords would be at the apartment later that week. Our neighbor’s apartment was sinking, V told me flatly, and our place was at risk of being condemned by the city, forcing the landlords to visit their neglected property. Having never put our relationship ruse into practice, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to act and was terrified of accidentally revealing our fraud. As I left for work on Friday, I came face-to-face with an ancient man with charcoal hair oiled back like Jimmy Stewart’s. He looked at me with obscure suspicion, but he didn’t say anything.
Lonely Heart
A few years ago my friend Paul posted on Twitter: “when you finally ‘get’ the britney spears song HIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME like 15 years after hearing it for the first time.” This had been on my mind, too: how “. . . Baby One More Time” had started to strike me as very deep and very sad. Spears’s first single is comfortably one of the most important pop songs of all time. The song and its iconic music video, featuring sixteen-year-old Spears in a Catholic school uniform dancing provocatively through a high school’s hallways, rang in the teen pop craze of the late nineties and early aughts, when a generation of Spears’s fellow former Disney Channel stars busted out of Orlando and went (a little) wild.
I think most people grant that “. . . Baby One More Time” is a good song. Its production is visceral: the opening piano chords that summon pop spirits, the wah-wah guitars, the cymbal crashes, and the use of background vocals are all distinctive. And this was the first showcase for Spears’s singing voice, which is sexy, abrasive, and strange. “. . . Baby One More Time” has all the features of an incredible late-era pop single: simple hooks over tightly layered production, designed to move your mood, not your mind.
Why is it anything more than that? Spears has had two dozen major hits since “. . . Baby One More Time” was released in 1998, and her singles “Stronger,” “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” and “(You Drive Me) Crazy” are all remarkably similar to “. . . Baby One More Time” in their composition. Still, her first song remains her greatest hit. “. . . Baby One More
Time” doesn’t just tower over her other singles because it was the first, or because she tied up her school uniform shirt in the music video. Paul tweeted:
my loneliness
is killing me.
—britney spears
She sings this over and over: So why had I never heard it?
“. . . Baby One More Time” is a product of the music industry’s bubblegum factory if there ever was one. Shortly after Spears signed with Jive Records, she flew to Stockholm to work with Swedish producers. Joyful, creative, insidiously catchy pop music has long been one of Sweden’s top exports, and its stars like ABBA, Ace of Base, and Robyn along with its super producers like Dr. Luke and Stargate all bow to Swedish pop god Max Martin.
Producer and songwriter Martin wrote or cowrote seventeen number one hits in fifteen years, including the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” NSYNC’s “It’s Gonna Be Me,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.” Martin first met Spears in 1998 when he played her the demo for “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” TLC passed on the song, but Spears and her team instantly saw that the track was, as a Jive A&R executive put it, “a fucking smash.”
“. . . Baby One More Time” is so entwined with Spears’s persona that it seems bizarre that it wasn’t written for her. How could any other artist have sung it? But then again, of course they could have. Pop songwriters are necessarily mercenary, offering their services to the artist who will take them. And the song’s connection to TLC is an interesting one. Spears’s emergence signaled a sea change in popular music, away from the funky R&B of the mid-1990s, exemplified by TLC and Janet Jackson, toward a sound that was younger, whiter, and on the surface, more sexually innocent. Spears’s record label tried to tone down “. . . Baby One More Time” by removing the “hit me” from the title, but the song is still knowing in a way that’s closer to CrazySexyCool than “As Long As You Love Me.” Like any good opportunist, Martin found a way to turn the old thing into the next big thing.
I was an actual Catholic schoolgirl at the age of sixteen, and it was so dismally far from the music video fantasy. The Catholic high school I went to for a semester in Nebraska was underfunded and strange. At the end of the school year we had to hot-glue our textbooks back together. From what I could tell, the school’s prime objective was to instruct students not to have abortions or vote for John Kerry.
I jumped ship the first week of my senior year. I decided to get my GED, which if you’ve been to a majority of high school is, as my GED counselor told me, “a mute point.” But because I was under eighteen, regulations put forth by the state of Nebraska to dissuade people from dropping out of high school dictated that I had to take ten hours of GED training at the local community college. I finished all of the preparatory materials before my ten hours were up, so the teacher running the training sessions let me put my head down on my desk.
In the same obstructive spirit as the required training hours, I was told I could not actually receive my GED certificate until I was eighteen. However, they did give me a letter that served as notice that I had passed the exam. At sixteen, I sent the University of Nebraska my GED letter and an essay I wrote about a book I hadn’t read, and they let me into the honors program.
The most prominent part of Spears’s personal brand has always been that she is like a virgin, vacillating absolutely inconsistently between performing as an adolescent girl and as a sexually mature woman. Part of her “little girl” act is pretending not to understand the sexual attention she elicits. “All I did was tie up my shirt!” she told Rolling Stone in 1999 about the “. . . Baby One More Time” video. “I’m wearing a sports bra under it. Sure, I’m wearing thigh-highs, but kids wear those—it’s the style. Have you seen MTV—all those in thongs?”
And yet Spears has been remarkably self-aware—even calculating—about the conflicts in her persona. Her hit “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” from her coming-of-age movie Crossroads, is the most blatant expression of this trope, or maybe it’s the “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” video, where eighteen-year-old Spears dances in a skintight red vinyl bodysuit and sings, “I’m not that innocent.”
There is no doubt that her personal contradictions are heightened by the brilliant, dissonant images in her music videos. People have credited the “. . . Baby One More Time” video with all of the song’s success, a sixteen-year-old brashly seizing on a naughty schoolgirl porno fantasy and immediately positioning herself at the center of the national imagination. “Is Spears bubblegum jailbait, jaded crossover diva or malleable Stepford teen?” Rolling Stone asked in 1999. “Who knows? Whether by design or not, the queen of America’s new Teen Age is a distinctly modern anomaly: the anonymous superstar.”
In “Overprotected,” released ten days after Spears’s twentieth birthday, she makes several startling complaints. “I tell them what I like, what I want, what I don’t,” she sings. “But every time I do, I stand corrected.” She’s singing not as a post-adolescent coming into her own, but as a woman who has been guarded and controlled by handlers since she was fifteen. She is self-aware in performing not only the naughty schoolgirl but also the anonymous superstar, her body a projection screen that all of the world’s desires can flicker across.
Her early hit “Lucky” is an unsubtle allegory about a starlet named Lucky who dreams of escaping fame. How perverse that Martin would write this song for Spears, and her managers would agree that she should record it, then release it as a single and profit off it. “She’s so lucky,” Spears sings, “she’s a star / But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart.” When we confront it, this sadness is so much more dissonant than the sex in her videos. My loneliness. Is killing me. My loneliness. Is killing me.
A little while later, Paul texted me, “do you ever feel that your level of intelligence dooms you to be alone.” My reply began, “My answer is I think sort of obviously yes.” My intelligence setting me apart is a lie that has driven my life in ways I’m only beginning to interrogate. When I tell people I went to college at sixteen, they get a vision of a super-special whiz kid that I’m happy to indulge. When I think about my college experience, what I see is not overachiever syndrome but an almost sociopathic delight in being ahead, in tricking the system. This shows a kind of intelligence, but not necessarily that of the wunderkind I’ve pretended to be.
I did not really pay attention or learn anything in college. Many weeks I skipped more classes than I went to. I spent four years alone in the dark of my parents’ house eating canned ravioli and watching MTV. I manipulated and bullshitted my way to a bachelor’s degree at the age of nineteen, and I knew exactly what I was doing. But when I think about my classmates who went to class and read the books, whom I felt so much distance from, it’s obvious the joke was on me.
That’s why sixteen-year-old Britney Spears has started to fill me with such pathos—she knew exactly what she was doing, too, though I’m not saying it was the same thing I did. I was very lonely in college. I knew I was different from the people surrounding me, but it wasn’t because I was smarter than they were. It goes back to the reason I wanted to go to college at sixteen at all, a decision that from the beginning guaranteed only that I would never have a dorm-rooms-and-keg-parties college experience. I got too good at isolating myself, which was not intelligence but more likely the clichéd coexistence of self-hatred and self-obsession.
Is pop music smart?
It is easy to attribute the brilliance of “. . . Baby One More Time” to the familiar accident where a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We can draw up a diagram of the contributing factors for its success: Max Martin, Jive Records, trends in Top 40 radio, Debbie Gibson, Monica Lewinsky, the Disney Channel, and, very last, Spears herself. It goes back to capitalism’s odd vision of “the market,” which knows everything but is not intelligent by the same standard we would judge life on other planets.
But to my min
d, “. . . Baby One More Time” speaks as keenly about the loneliness of love as any other artifact of our culture: it’s not about losing someone but the impossibility of ever really having them. “When I’m not with you, I lose my mind,” Spears sings. Romantic love doesn’t lessen the opacity of other people’s thoughts and motivations. It heightens it, because the desire to know and inhabit the beloved’s mind is so great. That’s what makes us sick in love, crazy in love. Short experiences of union reinforce that each of us is, once and for all, a single person, alone in a body, known only to the self.
I’m not reading too much into the song. Pop music can speak deep truths because it is simple, because the truest truths are simple. What isn’t simple is a sixteen-year-old in her expected setting—a high school—singing about grown-up desperation. Or an artist whose greatest creative preoccupation seems to be a smiling sadomasochism—“hit me baby” and vinyl bodysuits, the giant snake on her shoulders as she sang “I’m a Slave 4 U”—being labeled as “America’s Sweetheart.” Or a woman hunted by paparazzi who photographed her working out, going to Starbucks, driving recklessly with her son on her lap, shaving her head; who photographed her genitals as she got out of her limo for an audience that loved her almost to death.