Since the age of 11 when Britney Spears first appeared on the Mickey Mouse club, there has not been a time when the pop icon has not been the subject of intense scrutiny. First by her fans, then by the paparazzi, then by her father for 14 long years.
He had control of her money, he vetted her friends, logged what she bought and decided where and when she would perform under a strict conservatorship which finally ended this year.
The Britney Spears saga reveals a dark fascination with fame and celebrity and says as much about us as it does about her, says rock n roll historian Jennifer Otter
Photo: AFP / FILE
She’s looked at Spears’ impact on feminism, celebrity and mental health in her book, Being Britney: Pieces of a Modern Icon and joined Jesse Mulligan to discuss the singer.
Bickerdike comes from a music background herself, having put on shows for bands such as No Doubt and Sublime in her youth in California. While at university, she worked at the college radio station and was picked to work at Sony Music at 18 years old to be a college music representative.
“I was driving Nirvana and Pearl Jam around in my 1976 Volvo sedan, which was intense. By the age of 25, I was the marketing director for Interscope, Geffen and A&M. I left that to help Gwen Stefani start her handbag line, and left that to go work at Facebook.”
Things changed for her when one of her friends was murdered in California.
“I had a complete meltdown and did what I think anyone would do, sold all my worldly possessions and moved to England to get a PhD. That’s the path, that’s how it happened.”
She’s authored books on Nico from the Velvet Underground and Will Sergeant from Echo and the Bunnymen. Britney Spears might not seem like such a ‘hip’ person to write about which raised a few eyebrows.
“Echo and the Bunnymen, Nico and Velvet Underground, they’re very much cult bands, they’re very serious, very artsy, very cool. Britney is, unfortunately, not cool at all. People could not see the trajectory of where I was going.
“But the thing that Britney and Nico, especially, have in common is really the way the media and the mythology treated both of them. God bless my husband, I have to tell you, for putting up with me this year because I’ve been an angry woman. There’s been a lot of similarities between them and that’s been mentally quite difficult.”
Bickerdike says the main things she hears about Nico from those that have heard of her were that she was promiscuous, a groupie, and a junkie. She says its bizarre that Nico is criminalised for drug use and promiscuity when her male counterparts such as Lou Reed and David Bowie were doing exactly the same thing.
“She’s criminalised for being a sexual creature, she’s put down for being an addict and I would say that, working with her story and Britney’s, made me look at myself and the way that I have been towards Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, men I’ve worked with that had addiction problems. Our society holds them up in a different way than they do women, I definitely think that.”
Photo: Allen and Unwin
Britney landed at the height of the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the United States and Bickerdale says the official advice from government to school children was to avoid sexual contact, essentially be abstinent until marriage.
“This is the late 90s were talking about, this is not 1950, this is recent history. It’s absolutely boggling and when I look at it now, I have a lot of friends in their 20s and 30s, and it’s funny, I talk to people my age and we were scared to have sex because we were scared we were going to die, literally scared we were going to die.
“We throw Britney into the mix, where there’s this incredible fear still lingering about AIDS being incurable, AIDS killing you, and Britney comes along – here she is, this perfect marketing tool because as a teenager you want to feel cute, you want to feel sexy, Britney has all that but she’s also a good Christian girl from the South, so parents feel safe giving that to the kids.”
Bickerdale says Britney’s perfection as a marketing tool and icon is also part of what made her downfall so catastrophic.
“The fact that she dares to have sex is so huge because her whole thing was based around this moment of incredible fear that you were indoctrinated into as a young person living in that moment in time in the United States.”
Her first smash hit music video, 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', has quite a generational divide on how people see it, Bickerdale says.
“I’ve talked to younger women and they saw that as very empowering. Here you have Britney slamming the locker, you have Britney trumping down the hallway, she’s looking at the man with desire, the boy is objectified in that video. For girls looking at that, it was definitely something they aspired to.”
An interesting point about the video was that all the clothing worn by dancers, models, and Britney Spears was from Kmart and easily attainable to young kids.
“What’s so important to look at here is the adults looking at it and saying, it’s Lolita, it’s the adults looking at it and thinking she’s trying to be a teenage seductress whereas, as a kid, you don’t even know what that is, you’re not aware of that character or those archetypes. That is parents and adults putting that on to that video, not children.”
Bickerdale says that the sad thing about Britney Spears is that the media sensation has eclipsed the musician, despite her songs and performances being very good.
“I have a Google alert that I get for Britney everyday and it’s not ‘Britney’s song is doing so wonderful’, or ‘Britney’s perfume is doing so great’. It’s always ‘Britney is wearing a tiny red bikini’, ‘Paparazzi follow Britney into the gas station bathroom’. This just happened the other day, this is not from 20 years ago.
“Britney is a media phenomena and it’s completely taken over, that’s what has become the thing about her, not anything else, which I think is really sad. And I think that’s what she’ll be remembered for.”
The documentary Framing Britney came out in February this year and Bickerdale says it seemed to be trying to find who was at fault for her treatment.
“You don’t want to look at that link and say, I clicked on that link, I picked up that newspaper, I was laughing along. The answer is that media reported on what people wanted to know. You’re doing this interview because people want to know about Britney, if people didn’t want to know about Britney, you wouldn’t be doing it, that’s the bottom line.
“The media covers what people want to hear, it’s a revolving cycle, one feeds the other. In terms of who’s at fault, we are all at fault.”
However, she says that the way journalists talked to her when she was still just a teenager was beyond the pale.
“In the early 2000s, you have this teenage girl facing a room full of mostly male journalists and the questions are, are you still a virgin? Are those your real breasts? It’s just completely insane. I can’t even imagine, at my age, if someone was asking me those kinds of questions let alone as a child or young woman someone asking me that. It was absolutely incredible to watch that that happened and that nobody blinked an eye or stepped in.
“To watch the way that she handled it with such aplomb and would laugh about it and just treat it like a normal question, not weird or bad or offensive, it says something about her character. What’s she going to say? You’re a complete jerk, don’t ask me that. Who’s going to look bad? She’s going to look bad, not the person asking the question.”
