Got Your Money Shot: sloppy, slippery, disappointing Village Voice piece on Britney (maybe there’s just not much to say about it, and her, any more?) – the increasingly common and cheap e-mail exchange format doesn’t help.
Almost every time co-writer Amy Phillips* says something nice about Britney, she seems to feel she has to back it up with some indie/rock comparison point – PJ Harvey, The Strokes, Nation of Ulysses. She’s not doing it to bait, but to sell her opinions – which is odd in the Voice, the most pro-pop weekly on Earth. By the time you get to a paragraph devoted to the fact that she knows who did “I Love Rock’n’Roll” before Joan Jett did (the Arrows, if you care), you wonder if she’s really doing it for us – to prove to the big cynical boycrit readership that she knows her stuff, that she – just like Britney – can do her chosen profession ‘properly’.
She’s Britney’s age, too (the VV tells us so – presumably it wants to prove its pop reporters are demographically 4 Real). And, like Britney’s new material, her piece ends up a drag because she can do what she wants to do too damn properly.
*There’s another writer who’s only Mandy Moore’s age! But that one I lost when she started fretting about how she could wear a Britney shirt and still “demonstrate the irony”.