by Ann Powers
So the virtual world wasn’t the only place where people played at sexual perfection; the privileged and their children could do so in the material world, too. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a dramatic increase in plastic surgery within mainstream America, with minimally invasive techniques such as laser surgery and Botox becoming commonplace. In 1999, the Washington Post reported that twenty-five thousand teens had cosmetic procedures, up 100 percent since 1992. Many pop stars of the 2000s also reportedly got plastic surgery, even as adolescents. Journalists fretted that celebrities were inspiring young girls to reject their natural bodies too young, yet also were obliged to report that 50 percent of such girls had mothers who underwent the surgery, too.1
These developments in the mainstream collided with a long-building wave of intellectual interest in “the post-human.” In 1985, the philosopher of science Donna Haraway published her influential “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a feminist analysis of technology’s ability to make “thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.”2 Haraway argued that women could engage this new reality to free themselves from the confines of essentialism: being more than human might be liberating, sexually and otherwise. Haraway’s ideas found a complement in the cyberpunk science fiction of the 1980s, which often featured street-smart heroines who negotiated multiple realms of reality. Writers like William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, and the explicitly feminist Pat Cadigan and Octavia Butler imagined worlds that were postapocalyptic but also pretty sexy. Theorists produced enough books on cyberspace, cyberculture, and cybersex to fill a warp-speed spaceship. These futuristic thinkers captured the mood of people moving beyond bodily limits on a worldwide scale. The philosopher Sadie Plant enthused in her essay “Coming Across the Future,” “You make the connections, access the zone. Whatever avatar you select for your scene, you cannot resist becoming cyborg as well. Some human locks on, but a replicant stirs. Depending on the state of your time-tract’s art, the cyborg you become will be more or less sophisticated and extensive; more or less hooked up to its own abstraction and the phase space in which you are both drawn out. But it will be post-human, whatever it is.”3
LOLITA ON AEROBICS
In the summer of 1998, music journalists and radio programmers received a back-to-school package from the cyber frontier: an inflatable bubble backpack holding a pot of sparkly silver-and-blue lip gloss, a compact, stickers, and a cassette previewing a hot new fall release. The featured artist was seventeen-year-old Kentwood, Louisiana, native Britney Spears. The photograph accompanying the press release (“From a small town to the big time!”) showed this latest teen-pop contender in down-home denim shorts and a tank top, with a subtle red tint in her hair, wearing just a bit of lip gloss—pink, not blue. Gazing into the camera, she looked natural, not highly processed like the backpack.
Few who received this lagniappe sensed the impact Spears would make within the year. She had come up the traditional way, doing theater (she was an understudy in a play called Ruthless, about a murderously motivated would-be child star) before securing a spot as a tween on Disney’s New Mickey Mouse Club, a revival of the show that launched rock and roll beach babe Annette Funicello back in the 1950s. But Britney was something new: the first American sweetheart of the Internet. Those who popped in that cassette and listened to Spears’s first single, an aggressively catchy electro-pop come-on called “. . . Baby One More Time,” produced by an emerging studio superpower named Max Martin in a hit factory in Sweden, heard a voice equally redolent of girlish vulnerability and super-heroic aggressiveness, perfectly calibrated for a moment when robot dreams were becoming increasingly immediate.
Spears, raised on Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the cosmetically obsessed beauty pageant culture of her native South, heralded a new era in which music’s body-bound pleasures would be framed by ethereal tones and mechanized beats produced in fully digitized recording studios. With her gorgeous flesh and tiny voice—its metallic tone perfectly suited for manipulation—Spears presented from the beginning as a hybrid: half shopping mall American, half creature from another planet. Her body, voice, and projected emotions were youthful but washed clean of any adolescent awkwardness. In performance, Spears tapped a sexual maturity that seemed almost perverse in its effective power. Observers weren’t sure what to call her—an “adult teen,” a “baby babe.” In an early profile, the celebrity-oriented People magazine sought the opinion of the popular sex theorist Camille Paglia, who commented, “She is a glorified 1950s high school cheerleader with an undertone of perverse 1990s sexuality . . . Britney is simultaneously wholesome and ripely sensual. She’s Lolita on aerobics.”4
That last phrase nicely sums up Spears’s erotic but cold evocation of bodily perfection, achieved through endless exercise routines. Though she dutifully performed vulnerable ballads—an early one was called “E-mail My Heart”—Spears became famous for her more aggressive synthesizer-driven dance hits, which addressed romance as a sometimes violent game. “. . . Baby One More Time” disturbed many feminists because of its possible endorsement of domestic violence: Spears was asking her potential lover to “give me a sign, hit me, baby, one more time.” But as Neil Strauss of the New York Times pointed out, the reference could just as easily be connected to DJ E-Z Rock’s call to “hit it,” pushing the button on the mechanized beat that drives the hip-hop classic “It Takes Two.” Spears was the beat, her voice as instrumental as a synth-drum.5 In her breakthrough video she was a dance machine in pigtails, more human than human, to quote the description of android replicants in the prototypical cyberpunk movie Bladerunner.
The business plan made Spears a virtual-reality sensation before she became a physical one: Spears’s label created a World Wide Web page displaying images, videotaped chats, and more musical nuggets. “The response was tremendous, without even having a single in the market,” Jive Records executive Kim Kaiman told Billboard. “Kids were intrigued by Britney.”6 Spears’s emergence as a solo star built upon a new style of prefab pop, led by groups like England’s Spice Girls and the harmonizing “boy bands” *NSync and the Backstreet Boys. The Spice Girls, a mid-1990s phenomenon, even had doll names: Sporty, Baby, Ginger, Posh, and Scary. Spears was one shade more accessible: a girl actually born with a name that sounded like it came from a comic book, or a porn movie.
She was the product of two factories, one for her sound and the other concocting her image. O Town, located just miles from Disney World, specialized in pop prepackaging aimed at where the youngest listening generation lived: the mall and the Internet. She and *NSync, whose de facto leader Justin Timberlake (also a former Mickey Mouser) became her tabloid-endorsed sweetheart, toured shopping centers together, singing to prerecorded backing tracks, and engaged in newfangled fan interactions like Web chats.
The other factory where Spears’s stardom was assembled was in Stockholm, where she recorded much of her first album under the guidance of producer Max Martin, a former heavy metal musician who’d become obsessed with crafting hits. On singles for both the Backstreet Boys and *NSync as well as for international stars Celine Dion and Ace of Base, Martin had exhibited a knack for irresistibly repetitive melodies and hard-driving hooks. In Britney, he found his foil: a self-styled successor to Madonna and Michael Jackson, who sang in a style similar to her idols’, with a dancer’s precise attention to rhythm and a child star’s deeply ensconced sense of life as a show. Martin and Spears also shared an intense work ethic. Their approach was the opposite of the punk-inspired spontaneity and slack embraced by 1990s rock stars like Kurt Cobain. A 2001 Time magazine profile of Martin described his recording studio technique as an exhausting process designed to produce something “direct, effective, we don’t show off”—like a Volvo rolling off an assembly line. Spears appreciated Martin’s taskmaster side: “‘He’s hard on you with the vocals,’ Spears reports. ‘Then when you hear it, y
ou’re like, Oh, damn! I’m so glad.’”7
A notion of the new teen stars as almost genetically predesigned cogs in a hit-making machine ran throughout the media’s coverage of Spears and her contemporaries. Consumed by teens alongside video game heroines like the princess in The Legend of Zelda or Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft (herself to become a movie star in 2001, embodied by actress Angelina Jolie, whose unusually voluptuous lips and eyes made her look like an animated character), these idols learned early to transcend limitation. In 1999, Rolling Stone complained: “Today’s little troopers are showbiz lifers, pros since the minute they made it down to the hospital lobby, sporting cell phones and production deals while rattling on glibly in interviews about merch and market saturation.” The image of a cell phone as both dehumanizing and empowering reflected prevalent anxieties: “Teens don’t have an attention span anymore,” said Carson Daly, host of MTV’s update on American Bandstand, Total Request Live. “They just want to feel good for those four minutes, then go hit the Internet . . . Britney is a poster child for them.”8
What teens did on the relatively new Internet mystified adults, and as before those fears often focused on sexuality. “Call up Britney Spears on the Web and you’ll get something like 120 porn sites before you hit even one that’s clean enough to be viewed by an eleven-year-old girl,” wrote one critic. Teens were skilled participants in this new realm; the Internet was their automobile and sometimes they hopped into the backseat. Looking at Spears-themed websites (including pornographic ones), one Internet executive noted: “Some of the Britney sites are really high-quality, professional stuff, yet they have been created by computer-literate children.”9
The new millennium’s sensations both resisted and played into the idea that they represented something dangerous. The Backstreet Boys, nominally the elders on the scene, greeted the year 2000 with the futuristically packaged album Millennium and a song called “Larger Than Life,” which slyly came on sexually to young fans. Its video featured the Boys as mildly lecherous cyborgs in a phallic spaceship. *NSync went for a different more-human-than-human image, outselling its big brother band that year with an album, No Strings Attached, whose cover portrayed the band as puppets freed from their strings, suddenly animate, and which included a song, “Digital Get Down,” about the relatively new phenomenon of cybersex. Performing it live, the group appeared in cyborg guise, humping the floor after apparently being generated within a display of frisky computer code.
These robot dreamboats had nothing on Spears. She worked her magic mostly without resorting to science-fiction metaphors, although she did appear as a comely space alien in the video for the title track of her second album, “Oops! . . . I Did It Again.” Spears’s android soul was grounded in her music itself, and in the self-regulation behind the image she projected—a steely extreme of youthful femininity that was commanding and invulnerable, her doe eyes locked in a thousand-yard stare. She claimed to be a virgin when she first gained fame. “I have no feelings at all,” she said to one reporter, quizzed about possible boyfriends. “All those feelings,” she said to another. “It’s too much stress.”10
Making this resistance to emotion musical, Spears, Martin, and her other producers structured her singles around the idea of control. She pushed out the chorus of “. . . Baby One More Time” with the steely spit of a sparring partner, not the vulnerability of a victim. “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” also framed romance within metaphors of manipulation and resistance; the “oops” signified Spears losing herself in love, but then walking away with a self-possessed sneer. “I’m not that innocent,” she growled as Martin’s synthesizers created a huge, door-slamming whomp! behind her. Other explorations of control and its absence followed: “(You Drive Me) Crazy”; “Stronger”; “Toxic,” with its metaphor of being poisoned; her duet with Madonna, “Me Against the Music,” in which the elder pop siren nearly begs Spears to “lose control.” Perhaps the most blatant song in this vein was “I’m a Slave 4 U,” written and produced by the hip-hop team the Neptunes: over layers of breathy release and enraptured murmuring, Spears utters the title line like a self-deflating sigh, followed by the words “I cannot hold it / I cannot control it.” The song is supposedly about loving music, but there’s no mistaking the erotic mood of submissiveness. The video showed a dance floor dissolving into an orgy.
The artists who most influenced Spears also connected a focus on the dynamics of dominance and submission with the plastic new world of cyborgs and cyberspace. Janet Jackson’s 1986 breakthrough album was called Control, and, like Spears, she possessed a vocal instrument that was more synth than saxophone. Working with Prince associates Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam, Jackson pioneered the connection between the erotic and the electronic, rejecting usual diva displays in favor of a delicate, conversational style that was also highly percussive—a robotic siren call. Her brother, of course, was the master of the funky melody. Spears’s love of staccato utterances clearly came from Michael. Spears also found vocal inspiration in the 1990s R&B queen Aaliyah, whose career was cut short by a 2001 plane crash, when she was just twenty-two. In an appreciation after her death, New York Times critic Kelefa Sanneh extolled Aaliyah as “a digital diva who wove a spell with ones and zeroes,” insinuating her gentle voice into the deep digital soundscapes of her producer Timbaland. Comparing Aaliyah’s singing in her last single—the tellingly titled “More Than a Woman”—to the spirit of the android boy David in 2001’s popular science-fiction film AI, Sanneh called her “a real person chasing an ideal of electronic perfection.”11
As her career progressed, Spears became immersed more deeply within the sphere of the electronic. Music writers whose ears were accustomed to music made by fleshy, ego-assertive rockers and rappers found this troubling. “It’s hard to visualize real live musicians picking up real live instruments and actually making these songs,” complained critic David Segal. By 2003, when she released the frankly erotic album In the Zone, critics were bemoaning the veritable absence of Spears within her own songs. “Her voice is so processed, her physicality almost disappears,” wrote critic Jon Pareles. Sanneh himself argued that the album was “almost perversely devoid of personality.” Whatever he’d heard in Aaliyah’s music—a deeper soul resonance reflective of African American legacies, perhaps—he didn’t hear in Spears’s.
Spears’s voice represented a prime example of the rise of what the Scottish philosopher Andy Clark called “the soft self”: a melding of human and post-human “processes—some neural, some bodily, some technological—and an ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which ‘I’ am the central player.”12 Small-voiced women vocalists like Jennifer Lopez, Ciara, and Ashanti topped the charts in the early 2000s, upholding the legacy of Janet Jackson and Madonna more than the one forged by lung-power-driven vocalists like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. These manipulable voices blended well with the electronic elements of dance music and hip-hop; Ciara and Lopez often worked with rappers on their hits. Meanwhile, Spears continued to pursue a sound that was ever more synthetic, attached to lyrics that were increasingly sexual.
It was no accident that Spears’s sexy new material conjured thoughts of work. “Spears is slapping on a headlamp and heading into the mines,” wrote Caryn Ganz in a Spin review of In the Zone. Nearly every early profile described her life as a glittery indentured servitude, with twelve-hour rehearsals, painful dance injuries, and isolation on tour buses and in hotel rooms punctuated only by management-sanctioned shopping sprees. Her self-sexualization, Spears maintained, was simply an element of this work ethic, put on to please her audience. In interviews, she consistently described herself as “playing a part” when behaving provocatively: “That’s not me” was her standard line. Detractors called Spears a “cynical cyborg” and “blank screen” for her ability to both project intense sexuality and stand apart from it. Most public discussions of Spears began by expressing familiar divisions employed to question female sexuality: girl versus woman, virgin versus
whore. But increasingly, “product” versus “person” became the dichotomy that most troubled Spears’s detractors. Was she real, or was she a replicant?13
During Spears’s heyday, cyber fantasies were settling in as a staple within popular culture. Television showed a preference for the supernatural, with shows like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer providing narratives about shape-shifting that harkened back to classic science fiction and fairy tales. Video games like Halo and Final Fantasy told cyber stories and offered a cyber experience, allowing players to assume idealized (usually muscular, perfectly fit, hypersexual) forms and even switch gender at will. The Matrix trilogy, which launched in 1999, became the era’s definitive cinematic science-fiction adventure by reimagining the world as a game. The films featured the sleek couple Neo and Trinity, played by mirror-image androgynes Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, kicking ass and coupling within alternate realities that rendered them superhuman and superhot. Nerds in the flesh, Neo and Trinity found their ideal forms by jacking into the Matrix, a computer platform which, though they were forced to be there, made them into the dreamboats audiences loved to watch. Blending Eastern ruminations on the world as illusion with Japanese anime style and an epic through line that both questioned technology’s dominance and made it irresistible, The Matrix marked the moment when the post-human became an ideal state for the average multiplex popcorn chomper.
Writer Chuck Klosterman made the connection between Spears and The Matrix explicit: “Britney is almost like the little kid who freaks out Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. You say you want to bend a spoon? Well, the first thing you need to realize is there is no spoon.”14 Spears’s ability to inhabit multiple identities—teenybopper queen and hard-core vixen, or, to put it in classic sexist terms, virgin and whore—lifted her beyond those categories, or even negated them. Within her music and persona, sexuality was Britney’s spoon, something she generated and could manipulate, but which was not natural to her and therefore not confining. In this, she resembled the cyborg ideal Donna Haraway had imagined, simply without the feminist framework. Her stardom was a warped fulfillment of the cyber-feminist ideal of erasing the limits culture placed upon the flesh.