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.::. City University London: 'The Public Demise of a Fallen Pop Star'
Published April 25 2008

It started so sweetly in Kentwood, Louisiana in USA some twenty years ago. A beautiful, arguably talented girl grew up as an accomplished gymnast, performing in local revues, going on to appearing in a number of off-Broadway productions in NYC before landing a part in the popular Mickey Mouse Show at the age of eleven. It was still partly sweet, partly sexually charged innuendo, but mostly a huge success, when the provocatively dressed 16-year-old sang “hit me baby one more time” in her first music video dressed in a midriff-baring school uniform. A star was set for worldwide success, and in the following years she was unstoppable. Her name? Britney Jean Spears.

The Build-up

No one had foreseen what would happen come eight years later. A public meltdown of some sorts, starting with Spears announcing her divorce from dancer Kevin Federline in 2006, whom she married in 2004. Yes, the innocent image of the self-professed virgin who dated fellow pop star and actor Justin Timberlake for years had vanished – Spears had given birth to two sons with her now ex-husband, and she had by this point shown so much skin and provocative sexy dancing in her music videos and performances that everyone knew –this was no virgin the world was looking at any longer. Marrying Kevin Federline in 2004 was her second marriage, after her first of a number of public embarrassments had taken place only months before when she married childhood friend Jason Allen Alexander in Las Vegas, only to end it 55 hours later with an annulment. Two years on, Britney Jean Spears was no longer such an innocent young girl. Her and her husband had reached the point of public bad-mouthing to an extreme, with the media, and especially gossip mags in Britain, referring to the couple as “white trailer trash”. Fans of the singer might have been cheering happily after Spears announced her divorce. Spears, who very coincidentally appeared by surprise on The Late Show with David Lettermen days before, looked remarkably different from the wreck that had been interviewed a few months before on national TV in the US, crying that her and Federline “are people too” in reference to how they were treated by the paparazzi and the media in general. Little did Spears’ fans know, and little did the rest of the world know, that it was the start of a series of head-shake inducing incidents that would eventually lead to media outlets such as The Sun referring to the once so successful singer as a “psycho”.

The Divorce

Maybe it all started with the divorce, or rather what one could call the inevitable end of a marriage doomed to fail right from the start. After the divorce, Federline seemingly tried to smear Spears’ public reputation as badly as possible. He claimed that she was bisexual, and wrote a book on her smoking marijuana, taking cocaine and secret cosmetic surgery. Partying excessively with and snogging “young men”, gulping alcohol with Paris “why am I famous” Hilton, “questioning her sexuality” and going in and out of rehab had its fatal consequences for the falling star. And all along, the media was following her every move, watching her like hounds, and plastering up any given shocking picture they could find – the more provoking the better, the worse Spears got out of control the more copies sold, and the less signs of improving or getting her life back on track the more stories would follow.

The Meltdown

It all completely fell out of hand when Spears one night in February last year decided to shave all her hair off in a tattoo saloon, with the paparazzi filming and taking photos of her whilst the “job” was done. It was on front pages all over the world, with British tabloids embracing the news value of the story to the fullest – people were asking “God what has Britney been up to now?” and the media would gladly answer the question, usually in extreme detail. A bald Spears perhaps tried to fight back – attacking the paparazzi with an umbrella, but it only worsened the situation. And while the legal battle of the custody of her two children had been in the running ever since the singer’s divorce from Federline, it reached its peak when Spears lost physical custody to her children after several incidents of “bad public behaviour”. It could not have come at a worse time, with only a month before Spears was set to release her highly anticipated comeback album. Although “Blackout”, her fifth studio album, was praised by critics and selling fairly well despite no promotion from Spears herself, the focus was taken away from the music with an opening performance at the MTV VMA’s labelled as “catastrophic, she looked like she was on drugs” and the music video for first single “Gimme More” given the verdict of being “highly unsexy”. The star seemingly got herself together for a music video for follow-up paparazzi-bashing single “Piece of Me”, but little did it help that the singer was to undergo her worst public meltdown yet only a month later.

The Hounding

Paparazzo Nick Stern, who moved to LA from London, spoke of his horror in regards of the “hounding of Britney Spears” in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year, explaining why he quit the job. Despite him claiming the Spears “means absolutely nothing” to him, an incident on 3 January this year was what led Stern to leave his job for good. Spears was taken to hospital for a mental evaluation this particular evening, all to the gaze of about 200 photographers and TV camera crews. A distressed-looking singer was strapped down and taken away in an ambulance, as part of a police-led evacuation plan that was estimated to have cost $25,000, after Spears refused to relinquish custody of her children to her ex-husband’s representatives. Stern said in the interview: “"I'm used to following celebs, sitting outside their houses, and sometimes it gets pretty heated. But it's when there's complete disregard for everybody's safety, that's when it's difficult to see any positive way out of this.”

The Recovery

Although the troubled singer is now seemingly on her way back to her former good self, as recurrent articles in both gossip mags and tabloids keep telling us, it’s interesting looking at what happened to her in retrospect. No one can put a finger on exactly what caused the meltdown, be it lousy paparazzi boyfriends (as Spears developed a strange relationship with those hounding her on the daily) or a manager who seemingly took advantage of her, but anyone would argue that it’s impossible to overlook how she’s been portrayed in the media, and particularly in Britain. There was a time where you’d see her daily on at least one front page, be it in thelondonpaper or The Sun, or even in The Guardian or The Independent. The media took full advantage on a celebrity in a clearly troubled and intensively difficult time, and the public, despite yearnings for “leaving Britney alone”, bought into it all. Being obsessed with celebrities and pop culture is one thing, but when you have the media emphasizing it to a point where someone ends up in a mental ward, someone clearly forgot to push on a stop button somewhere. It’s not a question about dignity or respect; it’s about knowing when the line has been crossed. With the case of Britney Spears, it happened multiple times.


Sources
• Bernstein, J. (11 February 2008) “The Snapper Who Snapped” (accessed 21.05.2008)
• Wikipedia


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