Thoughts about Britney

By the time you read this, everyone who writes about celebs and entertainment will have had a field day with Britney Spears’s spectacularly terrible performance on MTV’s VMA 2007 show.  To the level that anyone cares about the Britney litany, people will talk about this performance for years.  It has surely marked the end of her career as a musical entertainer.  Which begs the questions — Who let this happen? And, why?

Certainly someone in-charge of creative or production at the show must have noticed that Britney was going to seriously embarrass herself.  Everything about her act was wrong and inappropriate.  More importantly, Britney was non-functional on stage.  She seemed incapable of lip-syncing or even remembering the words to her song.  She was too out of shape to dance and her costume (if that’s what it was) took her pitiful public image to an imaginable low-point.

Who let this happen?  The stakeholders at MTV. Why? Because ratings are everything and Britney’s handlers are too stupid or too greedy to understand or care.

The bigger issue is Britney herself.  I had the pleasure of working with her during her “Elvis” years.  Back then, she wasn’t managed well, but she was brilliantly produced and loved (and only slightly abused) by the people around her.  Brit’s not an angel and she certainly should take some responsibility for what has happened here.  However, I can’t help thinking that somehow she is more victim than villain.  She has been sacrificed for ratings by an industry that lives on attention — good or bad.

I am cynical by nature and almost always overly sardonic with respect to the bad fortune of the truly talentless — and Britney certainly qualifies.  That being said, I was scared for Brit tonight.  Something is horribly wrong. While every reviewer and gossip columnist is going to torture her with scathing remarks, she is going to have to deal with whatever the actual problem is.  But I’m not sure where she will turn.  Tonight, I was profoundly sad for a star that is about to implode while others profit from her misfortune. Hang in there Brit!  As they say, “once you’ve hit rock bottom, up is the only direction you can go.”