Spears hides behind smoke, mirrors at show
By Tiffany Lee-Youngren
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
June 7, 2002
If there was any doubt before Britney Spears has tied it up and muzzled it: She is a Slave 4 U.
It boggles the mind to imagine the hours of rehearsal and preparation it took to put together her circus of a show at San Diego State's Cox Arena Wednesday night – Spears' 14 costume changes alone would have employed a small European fashion house, and that's not even counting the crew of engineers to hoist, drag and lift her onto the stage following each pause for dress up.
It was clear from the beginning that this was a production more about looking good and dancing fly than it was about music. A parking lot crammed with semis could attest to that – at the ready were trucks for hauling her massive stage and its forest of lights; trucks for transporting equipment for the five-piece band (including 10 keyboards and a grand piano); trucks for moving fire and water jets, video screens, fireworks equipment, a second mobile stage, and nearly 15 sets and accompanying props.
That's not to mention the fleet of tour buses hired for Spears' dancers, backing vocalists, musicians, costumers, road crew and heaven knows who or what else.
Despite her plastic smile, one thing is indisputably true about Spears: When this 20-year-old tart from Louisiana puts on a show, she puts on a show.
And she'll be a slave 4 U to do it.
But Spears wasn't the only slave at Cox Arena Wednesday night. With a shameless guerrilla marketing campaign behind her 2002 "Dream Within a Dream" Tour, it became more and more obvious that by buying tickets to see Spears, her fans had sold themselves to the worst kind of corporate manipulation – advertising designed as "just a part of the show."
Boxes of Nabisco cookies were thrown to the crowd as "prizes," and Nabisco TV commercials were projected onto two huge screens above the audience before Spears had even made an appearance. Spears' drummer, Slam, implored the crowd of mostly pre-teen girls to buy Samson cell phones because "that's the phone Britney uses." Slam then read a "poem" he said he had written about his love for Pepsi and convinced the audience to "interact" by shouting "Pepsi!" each time he pointed to a bottle of the stuff.
The most disturbing marketing tactic: What looked like patriotic spotlights of red, white and blue streaming through the arena turned out to be none other than the Pepsi logo on parade. (It was only small vindication that Pepsi was sold nowhere at the venue – for Cox Arena, Coke is it.)
Fortunately for Spears, her fans are too young to realize when they've been sold out. Or it might be they're just fine with slave status – after all, the vast majority were slaves to the painted-on, low-riding, belly-bearing fashion Britney has adopted. Ever seen an 8-year-old who looks like a Fifth Avenue hooker? You haven't been to a Britney Spears show.
For the most part, her fans are an impressionable population of girls raised on fast food and MTV, a demographic that doesn't seem to think twice about the kind of visual flagellation Spears employed to keep them entertained.
Nearly 45 minutes of TV commercials and music videos served as the "intro" (though a capable opener by Janis Joplin-esque Nikka Costa should be mentioned), and everything from a waterfall to flame jets to fireworks so loud they should be outlawed were used to distract from the fact that Spears lip-synced at least 13 of 16 songs.
If there was any doubt that the music was only a sideshow, consider that Spears introduced her dancers by name midway through the show, allowing each a short solo spot, but barely mentioned her band in passing as she made her way offstage before the encore.
No matter how much debauchery Spears displays (or how insidious her corporate sponsorship), it seems her fans will continue to place her on a pedestal so high, she may never fall.
Spears unwittingly parodied such blind devotion, four songs into her show, with her performance of (what else?) "Born to Make You Happy." Dressed like a ballerina and trapped in a giant music box, she personified the metaphor that has made her a pop icon – as long as she keeps spinning and looking pretty, there will always be someone out there winding the mechanism. |
