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Oh, Britney. We're glad we haven't had to take as much crap over the past six months as you have. The ostensible blossoming of our bosoms hasn't caused the international press to speculate about whether or not we, at the tender age of eighteen, had gotten breast implants. We haven't been tarred by unfavourable comparisons to Tiffany, the teen star of yore. We weren't photographed for Rolling Stone in a variety of poses juxtaposing our youth and our sex appeal, inspiring hard-hitting Entertainment Tonight Cover Stories with titles like "Is Fametracker Too Sexy?" Don't worry, Britney; Fametracker isn't here to debate whether you're too sexy. All we want to know is whether you're too famous. We have a feeling that you are.
After all, what have you really done to impress yourself on the public's consciousness? You've only released one album to date. You haven't even padded out your CV with a CD of Christmas carols the way Hanson did. And even though your album has only spun off two singles so far, and even though I never listen to the radio and seldom watch MuchMusic, I know both your hits. I even know that you're terrible at lip synching. How can you justify your ubiquity, given the paucity of your actual artistic production?
We think that you were lucky enough to piggyback onto a trend that first sprouted in 1996 (when you were only fifteen! Were you ever so young?) with the release of Scream, flourished in 1997 with the launch of Teen People magazine, came into full flower in 1998 with the premiere of Dawson's Creek, and is now on the point of being mulched with approximately forty-seven new hour-long TV dramas this fall: the rise of teen consumerism. And while you're the teen queen now, you weren't exactly in the vanguard; rather, you've been riding the coattails of the pioneers who came before you. In fact, many's the time that, in the past few months, The Backstreet Boys have hung up their coats only to discover you clinging to their tails with such tenacity that they had to call for a bellman with a broom to knock you free.
Live by the Boy, die by the Boy. You'll be consigned to flames of woe when the inevitable reckoning of a Backstreet Backlash comes to pass.
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