The contents of the Britney Spears documentary, Britney: Buy My Record, were perhaps the worst-kept secret in history.
To be fair, everyone knew what to expect anyway – 90 minutes of Britney Spears going “Cuh! What happened THERE? Lorks a-lummy, I went proper bananas for a while, didn’t I? Oh well, I’m better now. Buy my record” – but that didn’t stop all the interesting parts of the documentary creeping out weeks ago.
But now that Britney: Have I Told You About My Record has been aired in America, we now know everything that happened in it from start to finish. So what did happen in Britney: You Know What’d Make A Lovely Christmas Present For All Your Loved Ones? My Record? Nothing. It turns out that people weren’t leaking the interesting parts of the documentary, just the bits where Britney Spears used actual identifiable words.
Britney Spears fans on either side of the Atlantic have equal reason to be jealous of each other today. In Britain, Britney’s new album Circus has been released but her warts and all documentary Britney: For The Record isn’t aired until tonight. Meanwhile, in America, Britney: For The Record was shown last night but Circus isn’t out yet.
So who has it better? The country that has already seen Britney Spears tearfully picking through the remains of her broken life, or the country that has already got full access to the sound of Britney Spears going ?Oompapa oompapa oompapi oompapi ooh papi ooh papi ooh lammy ooh lappy ooh papi uh ow? during a song where she appears to be begging her own father for sexual intercourse?
Well, the truth is that nobody wins. The British don’t win because the Britney Spears album can be heard for free anyway – and also because a victory that involves hearing Britney Spears going “UHH Pappi LOVE you! UHH Pappi LOVE you!” again and again isn’t really a victory at all – and the Americans don’t win because Britney: For The Record has been leaked so extensively that it’s barely worth watching anyway.
Before Britney: For The Record was shown anywhere, everybody knew that at some point during it Britney Spears would say that her life was worse than prison, and that she’d also confess that it was loneliness that sent her barmy. But was that just the tip of the iceberg?
No. No, that was pretty much the entire iceberg. Unless it was a special kind of iceberg that you can see 99% of on the surface, with the remaining one percent being made up of some sort of garbled nonsense about driving a car that doesn’t really make any sense. MTV reports:
Explaining her breakdown, Spears said that she had let the wrong people into her life. “[It was] a really bad time in my life. … I’m not gonna sugarcoat it and say I was OK,” she admitted. “Maybe I had traumatic stress. I just remember I did not want to be at home. When I was in my car, I was driving and I was going somewhere.”
Now we’re not sure if that’s a metaphor for Britney’s life, or if she was literally driving a car somewhere at some point, but that’s not important. Nor is the fact that most of Britney: For The Record was leaked out so long ago that not a single person who watched it could have been even slightly surprised by anything that happened in it. No, what’s important is the overriding message of Britney: For The Record, the universal message that everyone can learn a little from.
And, if you even needed to be told, that message is ?Oompapa oompapa oompapi oompapi ooh papi ooh papi ooh lammy ooh lappy ooh papi uh ow.?
Profound, we’re sure.
joe mm says
Way too much was leaked before the show.
Very little was new.
Still beautiful Britney deserves our prayers.
She needs our love and sympathy.
Sarah says
She need to keep taking her lithium.
The Dread Pirate Sausage! says
She needs a good broadsiding. But she’s proof that booty isn’t everything.
…
No, …wait.
You know what I mean, dammit.
Julian Mentat says
Being the center of a promotional circus; being told how to dress, how to move; concealing the fact that you can’t sing and dance at the same time so that your stage act is essentially fakery; having dozens of people write meaningless illiterate lyrics that you are obliged to sing; all of this is what drove Britney crazy.
So I’m glad to see she’s walked away from it all, dumped the managers and handlers, stopped hiding inside costumes, and written a minimalist album of guitar ballads that move you to tears because they come directly from her scarred heart.
Wait, hang on…