The consensus roared down the mountain of pop culture like an avalanche: Britney Spears’ attempt at a comeback at the VMAs was a catastrophe, a car crash with accompanying light show and music, a wasted last chance for a disgraced pop starlet in dire need of redemption.
What no one is admitting, be they media elite or once-prepubescent fan, is she’s always been that terrible. Her lyrical acumen has always been easy surpassed by a chihuahua is the throes of a seizure. Her music has always been insubstantial dance-pop, the aural equivalent to Andy Warhol without the self awareness. Her prime selling point was always the delicate balance she struck between the virgin/whore ideal too many Americans view all women through the prism of, and two disastrous marriages and the same number of miraculously-still-alive children later, she is the pop world’s dumb whore, its brain-dead hick of a punching bag.
Britney’s biggest crime during her performance was not the music itself, it was her inability to properly sell her ramshackle wares the way she was once so effortlessly able to. It was forgetting the words while lip-synching, dancing too awkwardly, being “too fat” (though most women who have had two kids wouldn’t mind looking like a quote “house” if that is what a house looks like these days). This was the culmination of a three-year-long “the empress has no clothes” moment, which, ironically, is what millions of vapid, middle-aged men wanted from her before she began to remind them of their own wives.
