In a series called Mondo Bullshittio, let’s talk about some of the most glaring hypocrisies and faux pas in pop culture…and all that it affects.
In yet another one of many (seemingly infinite) examples in this world of how everything is rigged, the winner of MTV’s so-called “Most Iconic Performance” award—freshly added into the mix this year—was bequeathed to the least deserving nominee: Katy Perry’s “Roar” performance back in 2013. One that, by the way, absolutely no one remembers (and if they say they do, they’re definitely lying). However, considering that Perry was the 2024 recipient of MTV’s “coveted” Video Vanguard Award (decreasingly referred to by its full name: the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award), it seems more than a little bit “political” that she should be the one to claim the award for “Most Iconic Performance” when, in fact, what she offered back in 2013 was one of the least iconic performances in VMA history (which also extends to someone like Bryan Adams singing “Do I Have To Say The Words?” in 1992).
Indeed, of the seven nominees, the performances that people are likely to most immediately recall (even if solely by an image alone) include Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” at the 1984 VMAs, Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady/The Way I Am” at the 2000 VMAs, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna and Missy Elliott’s “Like A Virgin/Hollywood” at the 2003 VMAs and Beyoncé’s “Love On Top” at the 2011 VMAs. The three other options—Perry doing “Roar,” Lady Gaga doing “Paparazzi” at the 2009 VMAs and Taylor Swift doing “You Belong With Me” at the 2009 VMAs—are hardly memorable at all.
But one supposes that, of the three least memorable out of those seven, Lady Gaga’s 2009 performance of “Paparazzi” was more “iconic” for how horrible her vocals were (not to mention how retroactively offensive her “disabled” shtick was) and the fact that “the fame” killed her at the end—with the fake blood pouring down her body to prove it as she was suspended in midair for the big finish. With regard to Swift, the only thing that people will ever remember about her appearance at the ’09 VMAs is her illustrious encounter with Kanye West, who incited their now lifelong bad blood by bum-rushing the stage when Swift won the award for Best Female Video, declaring that it was, instead, Beyoncé who had “one of the best videos of all time” (which is definitely not true of “Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It]”).
And, if one is really going to try to make the claim that the “Roar” performance is “iconic,” let it be noted that Perry’s boxer costume and the boxing ring backdrop that was set up in front of the Brooklyn Bridge look like a bad knockoff of Madonna’s boxer persona from the Hard Candy era, which she also took on the road for the 2008-2009 Sticky & Sweet Tour. It was on that tour that Madonna incorporated her boxing aesthetic in a major way for the “Die Another Day” video interlude. And yes, it was in a manner far more, let us say, “hardcore” than what Perry offered “live from Empire-Fulton Ferry Park.”
In any event, the fact that Madonna had two nominations in the Most Iconic Performance category also might have led one to believe the odds were easily stacked in her favor, with both the 1984 and 2003 performances being the pinnacle of iconic. But no, clearly not. Because apparently people think that Perry bopping around in a shitty boxing costume and singing a Black Mirror-level type of “inspirational” song is much worthier for icon status than Madonna changing the fucking game on sexual and ironic performances with “Like A Virgin” or being the first theoretically hetero woman in the mainstream to make lesbianism chic in the twenty-first century (just as she also did in the twentieth with her Sandra Bernhard friendship/Erotica era [among other things]).
The question of who ought to have won this award should have been utterly undeniable. Thus, to give the “honor” to Perry just proves that not only is everything political, but also that the masses (or maybe just the MTV VMAs in this instance) prefer to reward inferior trash. Because, objectively, there is absolutely no argument in favor of Perry dominating in this category. We’re talking about Madonna in one of the most signature fucking looks not just of her career, but in modern pop culture as we know it. A moment so iconic that it was riffed on again in 2003 for yet another performance that would turn out to be equally iconic in its own way (even in terms of cutting away from the Christina Aguilera beso for the sake of getting Justin Timberlake’s peeved reaction). And this time with Madonna making the then-latest generation of pop princesses into her brides, while she played the big dick energy groom.
Incidentally, it was less than a year later that Madonna and Perry would pose together for a V Magazine photoshoot (taken by none other than Madonna’s favorite, Steven Klein). Although it was technically meant to “star” both of them, Madonna also stood out as the dominant force among the Bettie Page-inspired images. But at least being styled and photographed by the same people put them on a more level playing field—for when it comes to VMAs performances, there’s no fucking contest. Regardless of the grave error made at the 2024 VMAs.
In a series called Mondo Bullshittio, let’s talk about some of the most glaring hypocrisies and faux pas in pop culture…and all that it affects.
In yet another one of many (seemingly infinite) examples in this world of how everything is rigged, the winner of MTV’s so-called “Most Iconic Performance” award—freshly added into the mix this year—was bequeathed to the least deserving nominee: Katy Perry’s “Roar” performance back in 2013. One that, by the way, absolutely no one remembers (and if they say they do, they’re definitely lying). However, considering that Perry was the 2024 recipient of MTV’s “coveted” Video Vanguard Award (decreasingly referred to by its full name: the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award), it seems more than a little bit “political” that she should be the one to claim the award for “Most Iconic Performance” when, in fact, what she offered back in 2013 was one of the least iconic performances in VMA history (which also extends to someone like Bryan Adams singing “Do I Have To Say The Words?” in 1992).
Indeed, of the seven nominees, the performances that people are likely to most immediately recall (even if solely by an image alone) include Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” at the 1984 VMAs, Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady/The Way I Am” at the 2000 VMAs, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna and Missy Elliott’s “Like A Virgin/Hollywood” at the 2003 VMAs and Beyoncé’s “Love On Top” at the 2011 VMAs. The three other options—Perry doing “Roar,” Lady Gaga doing “Paparazzi” at the 2009 VMAs and Taylor Swift doing “You Belong With Me” at the 2009 VMAs—are hardly memorable at all.
But one supposes that, of the three least memorable out of those seven, Lady Gaga’s 2009 performance of “Paparazzi” was more “iconic” than “You Belong With Me” or “Roar” for how horrible her vocals were (not to mention how retroactively offensive her “disabled” shtick was) and the fact that “the fame” killed her at the end—with the fake blood pouring down her body to prove it as she was suspended in midair for the big finish. With regard to Swift, the only thing that people will ever remember about her appearance at the ’09 VMAs is her illustrious encounter with Kanye West, who incited their now lifelong bad blood by bum-rushing the stage when Swift won the award for Best Female Video, declaring that it was, instead, Beyoncé who had “one of the best videos of all time” (which is definitely not true of “Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It]”).
And, if one is really going to try to make the claim that the “Roar” performance is “iconic,” let it be noted that Perry’s boxer costume and the boxing ring backdrop that was set up in front of the Brooklyn Bridge look like a bad knockoff of Madonna’s boxer persona from the Hard Candy era, which she also took on the road for the 2008-2009 Sticky & Sweet Tour. It was on that tour that Madonna incorporated her boxing aesthetic in a major way for the “Die Another Day” video interlude. And yes, it was in a manner far more, let us say, “hardcore” than what Perry offered “live from Empire-Fulton Ferry Park.”
In any event, the fact that Madonna had two nominations in the Most Iconic Performance category also might have led one to believe the odds were easily stacked in her favor, with both the 1984 and 2003 performances being the pinnacle of iconic. But no, clearly not. Because apparently people think that Perry bopping around in a shitty boxing costume and singing a Black Mirror-level type of “inspirational” song is much worthier of icon status than Madonna changing the fucking game on sexual and ironic performances with “Like A Virgin” or being the first (theoretically) hetero woman in the mainstream to make lesbianism chic (thus, normalized) in the twenty-first century (just as she also did in the twentieth with her Sandra Bernhard friendship/Erotica era [among other things]).
The question of who ought to have won this award should have been utterly undeniable. A proverbial no-brainer. Thus, to give the “honor” to Perry just proves that not only is everything political, but also that the masses (or maybe just the MTV VMAs in this instance) prefer to reward inferior trash. Because, objectively, there is absolutely no argument in favor of Perry dominating in this category. We’re talking about Madonna in one of the most signature fucking looks not just of her career, but in modern pop culture as we know it. A moment so iconic that it was riffed on again in 2003 for yet another performance that would turn out to be equally iconic in its own way (even in terms of cutting away from the Christina Aguilera beso for the sake of getting Justin Timberlake’s peeved reaction). And this time with Madonna making the then-latest generation of pop princesses into her brides, while she played the big dick energy groom.
Incidentally, it was less than a year later that Madonna and Perry would pose together for a V Magazine photoshoot (taken by none other than Madonna’s favorite photographer, Steven Klein). Although it was technically meant to “star” both of them, Madonna also stood out as the supreme force among the Bettie Page-inspired images of the duo in various S&M-y poses. But at least being styled and photographed by the same people put them on a more level playing field—because when it comes to VMAs performances, there’s no fucking contest. Regardless of the grave error made at the 2024 VMAs deeming Perry the “winner.”
Of all the films Britney Spears could have “gone all Method” for, a “frothy” (but actually fundamentally deep) teen road movie called Crossroads probably wouldn’t have seemed worth it to most “serious” actors. Or even “serious” moviegoers. And Spears would likely tell you that her sudden “morphing” into Lucy Wagner on and off the set had nothing to do with acting, so much as “what acting did to [her] mind.” As Spears retells it in The Woman in Me, “I think I started Method acting—only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all.”
Spears’ unwitting (and unwilling) commitment to the “character” (not so far off from herself if the dancing to Madonna in her underwear scene is an indication), however, was not very appreciated by critics. Most of whom panned the project as shallow, insipid teen girl bullshit that served as a thinly-veiled puff piece for Spears. They even went so far as to deride her positive messaging about a girl finding her voice amid a world of oppressive patriarchal figures, with one female critic insisting, “…the film’s mealy-mouthed messages about feminine empowerment will almost certainly fall on deaf ears, since even eleven-year-olds know Spears’ power resides largely in her taut torso.” Indeed, Crossroads was lumped together with the badness of another film starring a pop star around the same time: Glitter. But at least Brit’s movie had the benefit of being released several months after 9/11, instead of just ten days later (with its soundtrack also being released on 9/11). And yes, both movies are, to this day, often shown as a campy double bill. But that’s not really fair to Crossroads. Because Spears’ performance does offer an emotional intelligence that Carey’s simply does not (despite her having “lived the tale” of a sob story childhood and subsequent breaking into the music business with the help of a possessive producer…in this case, Timothy Walker [Terrence Howard], before the plot becomes more A Star Is Born when another producer, Julian “Dice” Black [Max Beesley], enters the picture). And while, like Carey’s film project, there are similarities between Spears and the lead character (including an oppressive father steering the course of her life and keeping her from doing normal “teen girl things” or how Lucy spells “dryer” as “drier”), the difference is that one can see Spears isn’t relying on their similarities as her sole crutch for playing this part.
In fact, what she relied on for the role appears to be something far closer to the divine. Laugh as movie critics might at such an assessment. But when Spears writes, “This is embarrassing to say, but it’s like a cloud or something came over me and I just became this girl named Lucy,” there’s no arguing that something more mystical was involved. Even if that “mysticism” related to her mind’s power. Spears continued, “When the camera came on, I was her, and then I couldn’t tell the difference between when the camera was on and when it wasn’t. I know that seems stupid, but it’s the truth. I took it that seriously. I took it seriously to the point where Justin [Timberlake] said, ‘Why are you walking like that? Who are you?’” Yet another small anecdote that makes Justin come across like kind of an asshole for basically making fun of her uncontrollable commitment to the part in a movie that found room for her to show support for Justin’s goddamn boy band. All simply by placing “Bye Bye Bye” at the center of a light-heartedly contentious scene over what music her and her friends want to listen to while their driver/Lucy’s budding love interest, Ben Kimble (Anson Mount), keeps trying to change the station back to his “angsty rock” music (this, by the way, was the crux of warring musical identities in the late 90s and early 00s).
And though detractors would also argue that Spears does little to stretch her acting abilities in a role that finds her character auditioning for a record contract, the character biography Spears herself took pains to write in Britney Spears’ Crossroads Diary wouldn’t have been so thorough in spelling out the differences if she didn’t feel intrinsically separate from this person. Specifically, she states, “I play Lucy, an only child who lives with her dad, Pete, in a small town in Georgia. Lucy’s parents got divorced when she was much younger, and her mom lives out in Arizona. They don’t communicate. Lucy is the kind of girl who doesn’t make waves. She’s spent her whole life following the path her dad has laid out for her. She’s smart and gets good grades: she’s planning to be a doctor. But she really loves to sing and to write. She’s a poet and is kind of obsessive about her journal.” While it can be pointed out that, in many regards, Spears, too, was a girl who didn’t make waves, always listening to “the adults” and doing what she was told despite being the true agent of her success (Spears herself admits in The Woman in Me, “I was committed to not rocking the boat, and to not complaining even when something upset me”), Lucy is more overtly obedient and, yes, virginal. In fact, that’s the word one of her ex-friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana), hurls at her as an insult in the hallway of the school. In contrast to Spears, who played with that persona of being virginal via more sexually-tinged irony, Lucy is someone who wants her first time to be special, even though her high school lab partner, Henry (Justin Long), desperately wants her to keep her word that they’ll lose their virginity to one another so as not to go off to college all “naive.”
Lucy’s naïveté is also something that sets her apart from Spears, who, by age twenty in 2001 (the year the movie was being made and the Britney album was released), was already plenty worldly—and about to get even more so in the wake of Justin’s imminent portrayal of her as a “harlot” to his “golden boy” in the 2002 song (and video), “Cry Me A River.” The Diane Sawyer interview of 2003 would turn that worldliness into all-out jadedness. That all of this happened after Crossroads seemed cruelly poetic in that the film is about a teenage girl coming to terms with the terrifying responsibilities and potential landmines of womanhood. But what Spears endured was above and beyond the conventional horrors of becoming a woman. Lucy was lucky that, as a civilian (at least in the story we get to see before she potentially lands a record deal), she would never have to know what it was to be scrutinized not just over her body, but over every minute detail of her personal life. Besides, Lucy’s sartorial style isn’t exactly in keeping with Spears’, who also commented on that in Britney Spears’ Crossroads Diary by saying, “[My assistant,] Fe calls [Lucy’s clothes] ‘casual frumpy’—jeans, sneakers, cotton button-down shirt under a sweatshirt. Accessorized with a yellow canvas pocketbook and a bucket cap. They’re the opposite of what I usually wear.” To be sure, even when Spears’ was “off-duty,” she was always fond of low-rise, midriff-baring ensembles.
And then there was Lucy’s inherent knowledge of all things automotive thanks to her dad (Dan Aykroyd) being a mechanic. As Spears is sure to call out in her diary, “Me? Let’s just say that on a recent road escapade with Felicia, it took the two of us twenty minutes to figure out how to put gas in the car!” So yes, there are many nuanced differences between the two women, ones that ultimately overtook Spears’ own spirit for quite some time.
It was, apparently, CVS that cured her. Or rather, buying some makeup there with a friend. As Spears recalls, “After the movie wrapped, one of my girlfriends from a club in LA came to visit me. We went to CVS. I swear to God, I walked into the store, and as I talked to her while we shopped, I finally came back to myself. When I came outside again I was cured of the spell that movie had cast. It was so strange. My little spirit showed back up in my body. That trip to buy makeup with my friend was like waving some magic wand.” Undeniably, this is what would be called a symptom of psychosis. Schizophrenia even. And yes, Spears’ tendency to bisect her personality as a defense mechanism came into play early on here. With her portrayal of Lucy, Spears tapped into that precarious split between thinking, memory, personality and perception. As such, Spears put it best when she said, “All I can say is it’s a good thing Lucy was a sweet girl writing poems about how she was ‘not a girl, not yet a woman,’ and not a serial killer. I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently. I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads.”
This was something she seemed to notice and give voice to even at the time of filming, with one entry in her diary noting, “I’m doing another one of those really hard scenes. I’m crying and talking to Anson (Ben). It’s very emotional. I couldn’t pick my spirits up afterward.” The scene in question happens after Lucy’s mother (played by Kim Cattrall, though, at the time, there were rumors Madonna would do it—as if!) tells her that she never wanted her in the first place—that her father “made her” have a baby. Meanwhile she appears perfectly happy with her new set of children in Tucson. Spears describes getting into character for the emotionalism of that scene, explaining, “How did I do it? I remembered things that made me sad, but mostly I just put myself in Lucy’s place. I thought about how I’d feel if my mom didn’t love me, and I just hurt for her. Feeling the way Lucy would feel brought on the tears.” Tragically enough, it can presently be argued that maybe Lynne Spears really didn’t love Britney all that much to allow what happened to her with the conservatorship. Not just allow it, but help conspire to make it happen.
While Lynne made plenty of appearances on the set, it was, as usual, Spears’ assistant, Felicia, who was the most ever-present. It was she who prompted Spears to write, “She told me that she can see me getting more confident about acting. It’s true, I’m less worried about all this movie stuff—sometimes I even feel like an old pro!” That seemed to be true enough when, soon after Crossroads, she auditioned for the role of Allie in The Notebook. It came down to her and Rachel McAdams, with the latter obviously winning out. A result Spears was pleased with, commenting, “…I’m glad I didn’t do it. If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress night and day. “Although Spears was briefly hoping to make a “proper go” of becoming a singer/actress, in The Woman in Me, she concludes of that profession, “I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”
Funnily enough, Spears could just as easily be describing the bifurcation between her stage persona and her real self or, during her early Instagram days when the conservatorship was still not being questioned, her social media self and her real self. Thus, the great search for “the real Britney” has been a decades-long one.
As for Crossroads and what she sacrificed emotionally for it, it obviously still means something to Spears. Not only because she goes into such detail about it in her memoir, but because it was the only attempt at promoting the book Spears offered up: rereleasing Crossroads in theaters (in addition to a special edition of the soundtrack…with NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” still noticeably missing). Once again, however, it went unappreciated. Audiences just can’t seem to appropriately embrace or honor Spears’ uncontrollable Method acting abilities.
For those who were worried that the 2000s might never come back authentically (instead having to settle for ersatz imitations like the makeup aesthetic on Euphoria), Britney Spears, the decade’s foremost representative, has decided to return with non-remake music (no shade at “Hold Me Closer”). Though, depending on who you ask, it’s some “fake version” of her still being controlled by members of her family and/or her new husband, Sam Asghari (or maybe even her gay bestie du moment, Cade Hudson). In short, that she hasn’t “returned” at all. Worse still, that the vocals on “Mind Your Business” are recycled from what Myah Marie, a singer who recorded many of the demos on 2013’s Britney Jean (which will.i.am executive produced), already did.
And yes, 2013 was the last time Spears and will.i.am collaborated via “It Should Be Easy,” another EDM-centric ditty for Britney Jean that was released as the final single. However, “Big Fat Bass,” from 2011’s Femme Fatale, was not. Perhaps because both Brit and Will knew they would have something better to offer in their 2012 collaboration, “Scream & Shout” (from which “Mind Your Business” takes many sonic cues). A song wherein Britney repurposes (most of) her immortal 2007 line, “It’s Britney, bitch.” This hailing from “Gimme More,” the lead single on her fifth album, Blackout. The one her then-paparazzo boyfriend, Adnan Ghalib, says she wrote portions of on a Starbucks napkin (“iconic,” as Paris Hilton would remark). And it was “Piece of Me” that came after “Gimme More,” both songs exuding a tongue-in-cheek irreverence that showcased just how little Spears could bother to give a shit about her public image anymore. One that had been tarnished and tainted into oblivion by that point already anyway. After all, the head-shaving incident had occurred in February ‘07, along with her lip-syncing flop of a VMA performance in September, making “Piece of Me” an ideal track to unleash later that year in November.
It is the spirit and sound of “Mind Your Business” that echoes, once more, Spears’ “fuck you” defiance on “Piece of Me.” And yet, at the same time, it has to be said that the frozen in time quality of Spears’ sound on “Mind Your Business” makes one wonder if she is truly still “relevant” or simply catering to what longtime fans continue to want from her. We won’t use the term “cashing in,” for that’s a bit too crass in this case. Britney, after all, has been given the tacit sanction to cash in all she wants after being exploited for so many years. But, in all those years of being “handled,” forced to do things without being allowed to put in much creative input of her own, did she become trapped in the age she was effectively enslaved at (twenty-six) and in (2008)? Is that, in the end, what “Mind Your Business” embodies about Spears returning to the music business as a free agent?
It was Taylor Swift who once said, “There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they’re frozen at the age they got famous.” In Spears’ scenario, not only does that hold true (based on her perpetually childlike nature), but it also applies to the age she got frozen at before losing her agency. The age she last recognized herself as, well herself. Not to mention one of the last instances where she had more control over the music she released (even if it wasn’t enough control to get Original Doll out there). So it’s only natural to want to return to that state (as natural as Britney wanting to revert to being twelve years old on her forty-first birthday). “Mind Your Business,” for precisely that reason, sounds like it could be straight outta 2007 far more than it sounds like “fresh content.” The same goes for the puzzling cover art, which makes some of the half-assed PicsArt offerings Lana Del Rey has been known to “create” look positively effort-laden. Where “Mind Your Business” is concerned, the image for the single is confirmed to feature a photo of Spears (or at least her face) from 2003 taken by Mark Liddell (from the same photoshoot Spears favors using an image from for her Instagram profile). Which, again, speaks to all the ways that everything about this single seems to want to freeze Spears in that decade. A freezing that appears to be of her own making.
And, as alluded to before, it might not technically even be “fresh content,” with the possibility that it was first “generated” in the Britney Jean era and “laid down” by Myah Marie. A woman, incidentally, who once uploaded a parody of “Piece of Me” called “Don’t Take the Kids From Me.” Removed at some point after it was initially posted in 2011, the purported lyrics doing a sendup of Spears’ original song include, “I was miss preteen wet dream when I was seventeen/I lip-sang and pretended to sing/Got breast implants and a wedding ring/Then I flashed all my privates, they put pictures in the magazines/Don’t take the kids from me, don’t take the kids from me.” Then there was also the verse, “I started hittin’ the bottle/Lost all the titles of role model/Hitched in Vegas, forgot it/Did all the things that I wanted/And with a kid in the car/Don’t need a seat belt for protection/Don’t take the kids from me.” For a parody that came out in 2011, it has all the crisp mean-spiritedness that was plaguing Spears in ‘07-‘08. A time that would have also prompted Spears to repeat, “Mind your B, mind your B, mind your B” (the “B” obviously playing on the first initial of her infamous name—so infamous, in fact, that she often gets the “icon treatment” of being referred to by the mononym of “Britney”).
To that point, as Spears enters a new decade as a liberated woman, “Mind Your Business” feels decidedly “old hat” (though she did have some fire flat caps and fedoras in the 00s). By the same token, everything about it is “giving the people what they want”: 2000s hauntology. Although no one really wants something truly “new” from Spears, her uncanny ability to deliver the same themes and sounds from the 00s doesn’t quite work as well within the context of now, an era when, sure, she’s still occasionally “stalked” by paparazzi, but nowhere near the swarming level that was happening to her in 2007. To boot, those magazines that could once make so much coin off tracking her movements are no longer selling the way they used to. And websites like TMZ and Perez Hilton certainly have nothing close to their 00s-level influence. So, who then, is “Mind Your Business” really speaking to? Other than a need to dust off the time period in which Spears can last recall herself at her “best.” Or maybe she’s redirecting some of her ire toward the comments section (which she’s turned off at this point), where trolls abound in innovatively hateful ways.
And so it is that “Piece of Me” lyrics like, “Don’t matter if I step on the scene/Or sneak away to the Philippines/They still gon’ put pictures of my derrière in the magazine/You want a piece of me?/You want a piece of me” transmogrify into “Mind Your Business” lyrics like, “Uptown, downtown, everywhere I turn around/Hollywood, London, snap-snap is the sound/Paparazzi shot me, I am the economy [the “Britney economy” being the name of the entire career that cropped up out of documenting her in the aughts]/Follow me, follow me, follow me/Follow, follow me.” That last line having new meaning in the social media epoch.
Of course, a song like “Mind Your Business” exemplifies the great dichotomy of fame. Of how, on the one hand, a celebrity craves the kind of attention that secures them millions (or even billions of dollars), yet on the other, they just want to be treated like a “regular person.” A.k.a. have the financial/influence-related benefits of fame, along with anonymity and privacy in their “off” hours. Alas, being famous is a 24/7 occupation (but at least the pay grade somewhat matches that grueling schedule more accordingly than it does for others).
Britney once likened her life to a “Circus” and having all eyes on her in the center of the ring. To some extent, that’s made her world-weary. To another, it’s part of the “I’m paid attention to, therefore I am” mentality that many celebrities can’t ever shake once they find their fame. And, talking of circuses, the intro to “Mind Your Business” has a very circus-y, zany type of sound—with a sinister undertone that the Joker could probably get on board with. For that’s what belies the “glitz” and “glamor” of fame: a seedy, nightmarish underbelly. It then concludes with a choir-y repetition of “mind your B.” This after the final verse delivered by Spears that somewhat unfortunately echoes another 00s song, Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?” Namely, when Spears, likely referring to her current coterie of canines, warns, “If they don’t get up out my face, then send the dogs out (woof)/Five seconds and then the dogs come out (woof)/You know what happens when the dogs come out/None of your business-ness.” The playful nonsensicality of it harkens back to Spears’ tone on “Work Bitch” (among the few standout tracks from Britney Jean) when she says, “I bring the treble, don’t mean to trouble ya/I make it bubble up, call me the bubbler/I am the bad bitch, the bitch that you’re lovin’ up.”
Elsewhere, it’s not as though will.i.am’s lyrics do much to update the sound of the song either, with Big Brother-y nods like, “They watchin’ me, they watchin’ ya/They got eyes up in the sky/So pose for that camera” channeling Snoop Dogg and Justin Timberlake’s 2005 single, “Signs,” on which the former raps, “Now you stepping wit a G, from Los Angeles/Where the helicopters got cameras/Just to get a glimpse of our Chucks/And our khakis and our bouncer cars.” Much as they tried to get a glimpse of Britney doing just about anything banal (usually leaving Starbucks)…circa the 00s.
In the present, Spears still refers to unflattering paparazzi photos she sees of herself (though it’s hard to say where), as though despising, more than anything, not being able to sustain the image she has of herself as that twenty-two-year-old from 2003 (hence, the picture chosen for the “Mind Your Business” cover art). Madonna, too, has a similar problem, but in contrast to Britney’s idol, there seems, here, to be a lack of any attempt at reinvention (both image-wise and in terms of experimenting with a different sound), so much as a leaning further into the decade that made her an icon in the first place. Because maybe, in the end, the early and mid-aughts are the last time she can remember, like so many of us, feeling any sense of “normalcy.” For, as skewed as her (and humanity’s) “normal” was back then, it’s undoubtedly even more oblique now.
