‘framing britney spears’ reminds us who’s complicit in the fall of a star.
Super Bowl Sunday thoughts on the deep misogyny of early aughts pop culture.
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The Big Game is here and I, like many homosexuals on TikTok, couldn’t even tell you which teams are playing today.
But one element of the Super Bowl that I look forward to every year is the celebration of what should (in my mind) be a national holiday in and of itself: Janet Jackson Appreciation Day.
Launched several years ago on Twitter by film director (of Hair Love fame) Matthew A. Cherry, the day is intended to draw attention to the pop icon’s incredible legacy. To commemorate the day, myself and other Janet stans flood your Twitter feeds with remembrances and tributes to the woman responsible for a nearly endless stream of hits like the five singles off her 1986 album “Control” (which turned 35 years old this week) that cracked the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The day was, you may have guessed, originally spawned in response to the return of Justin Timberlake to the Super Bowl halftime show in 2018. The last time Timberlake took to that stage, of course, was 2004, when Timberlake briefly exposed Jackson’s breast during the performance.
The incident had little to no impact on Timberlake’s career — he went on to release several award-winning hit records including FutureSex/LoveSounds, which came out just two years after the so-called “nipplegate.” He also starred in films like The Social Network and has even earned an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music. Aside from a whole lot of memes around his Man of the Woods album cover, he’s thrived and emerged practically unscathed from the entire fiasco.
Jackson, don’t let it be forgotten, had a very different experience. She was publicly shamed and humiliated. At Les Moonves’ insistence, Viacom ordered that Jackson’s music be blacklisted from all of its properties, including MTV and most major radio stations. She was pulled from a Grammy appearance and a planned Lena Horne biopic. Her next several albums suffered from reduced promotion and also clouded their critical reception, and the incident has likely forever tainted her otherwise illustrious career in the eyes of many.
I was thinking a lot about Jackson while watching Framing Britney Spears, a just-released Hulu/FX/The New York Times documentary.
The film explores the events leading up to Spears’ now-infamous conservatorship that leaves much of the control of her life and career in the hands of her father, Jamie Spears. It also adds important context to the sentiments that have fueled the #FreeBritney movement and a whole lot of speculation surrounding her recent Instagram output (which I’ve previously explored at length, in this blog’s most popular entry to date).
The documentary also, importantly, lays bare the blatant misogyny that led up to Spears’ infamous shaved-head breakdown in 2007 — an incident that culminated with her agreeing to a conservatorship in 2008, seemingly as a means of regaining parental visitation rights in the heat of a fraught custody battle with Kevin Federline. Let’s lay out some of the culprits here:
First, there are the media interviews and late-night shows where Spears was repeatedly grilled over her clothing, her lyrics, her parenting and her relationships, and made a laughing stock. Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Jay Leno, the Family Feud writers. Super mainstream, respected journalists all gleefully took part in the takedown.
Then there are the celebrity photographers and bloggers (like Perez Hilton) who to this day appear to have no remorse over their treatment of the star. The lack of perspective one of them who agreed to be interviewed for the film seems to have gained is mind-blowing.
And then there’s her father, Jamie, who was clearly mostly absent from his daughter’s life altogether until he intervened and pursued the conservatorship in 2008. The documentary is not at all a good look for him.
A few more key takeaways from the documentary, for me:
Felicia Culotta, Spears’ former assistant, is so pure — and is one of the few people formerly from Spears’ inner circle who agreed to be interviewed for the documentary. I really felt for her demotion to being in charge of Spears’ backstage tours at her Vegas residency.
Spears broke out in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when the nation was in the midst of throwing another young woman to the tabloid wolves. “… Baby One More Time” was released in October 1998 and hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 the same month of Clinton’s impeachment trial. Basically, a lot of people had opinions about women’s sexuality at the time.
Kendel Ehrlich, the wife of Maryland’s Republican governor at the time, “joked” that “if I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears, I think I would” because she believed Spears was a poor role model for young women. Where is she now? Last year, she was tapped by Trump for a post with the U.S. Department of Justice. See, it’s all connected.
One member of Spears’ team says she almost never dealt with Jamie Spears during Britney’s come-up, except for one time when Jamie commented “My daughter’s gonna be so rich, she’s gonna buy me a boat.” Hoo boy.
Spears’ brother, Bryan, ain’t much better than Jamie.
Jackson and Spears share a common thread in Mr. Timberlake. I had forgotten — or at least not drawn the connection from then until now — how Timberlake appeared to blame Spears for their very public breakup in 2002. His “Cry Me a River” video featuring a Spears lookalike was practically a revenge plot, and he has continually dissed her through the years (as detailed in this Reddit post), including in the middle of Spears’ custody battle and struggles in 2007 into 2008.
In both cases, we see how incredibly talented, hard-working women are held to an impossible standard of perfection — sexy, but not too sexy; smart, but not too smart; assertive, but not too assertive — when compared to male peers like Timberlake. There are simply no room for a single misstep for these women, while the men consistently get a pass.
I would argue that this was a particularly heightened phenomenon in pop culture post-9/11, as the U.S. embraced all things serious, somber, conservative and male. The celebration of white male mediocrity hit its peak in the early aughts, with successful acts like Nickelback, Creed, Staind, Train and Lifehouse taking over radio play from women artists like Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Eve, Blu Cantrell and Alicia Keys who’d been dominating the charts prior to the attack on our nation.
It’s impossible to imagine a male celebrity in similar situations as Jackson and Spears experiencing a similar backlash. Post-#MeToo, even in this particular moment where we are seeing Armie Hammer and Marilyn Manson facing some repercussions for their abusive behavior toward women, the consequences still are not likely to have anywhere near the lasting impact that women in a similar situation would see. Just look at how white male country star Morgan Wallen (don’t worry, I had to Google him, too) is experiencing a surge in digital downloads after he was pulled off Cumulus’ radio stations due to his casual use of the “n-word” in a newly surfaced video.
I’d like to imagine a world and an entertainment industry that doesn’t eat women alive for sport and give men passes for their bad behavior, but we’re so far away from that reality still. To make progress, we must reject misogyny and racism in all its forms. Until then, we will only continue to feed this beast.
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Watch: It’s truly perplexing and vile that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association completely ignored so many brilliant performances from actors of color in their just-announced Golden Globe nominations. If you want to support the snubbed films and also catch up on what are expected to be some top contenders for the Academy Award nominations (due to be announced on March 15), the BBC has compiled this comprehensive list of favored films, and how and when you can see them. I just watched a screener of Judas and the Black Messiah, which is hitting HBO Max next week, and this film is incredible. If you’re not already familiar with the story of Fred Hampton and William O’Neal, buckle up.
Listen: Arlo Parks just released her first full-length album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, and I can’t stop listening to it. Parks’ music reminds me a lot of one of my all-time favorite bands, The Cardigans, and songs like “Black Dog” deeply resonate with the experience of trying to be a functional human in these times. Give it a listen.
Read: February is Black History Month and if you are looking for a resource to learn how Black art, literature and artifacts illustrate this nation’s Black history, the social platform Anti-Racism Daily is curating a month-long virtual exhibition called 28 Days of Black History. One of my favorite exhibits from the first week was a piece highlighting Dance on the Volcano, a fictional narrative of the Haitian revolution written by Marie Vieux-Chauvet.