MagneticMediaFed

USA Today recently named Britney Spears as “Celebrity of the Year.” If you were unsure up to this point just how awful 2007 was, this should be the last piece of evidence needed. How this decision was reached seems dubious at best and probably should be avoided at all costs. Whatever the methodology, the result is sadly spot-on, and goes to great lengths to not only summarize 2007 but the entire decade.

To really understand why 2007 was the way that it was, and why it is the year that best represents the aughts, we need to revisit the previous decade, some would say the better decade: the nineties. More specifically, we should take the Way-Back Machine to see where our “Celebrity of the Year” was so that we can better understand where she is now and by extension where we are now. If we focus primarily on mass culture, Britney Spear completely embodies what we often think of as being “the nineties” (or at least late-nineties) despite the fact that she didn’t really explode in the music industry until 1999. Because of this we have to acknowledge that cultural eras aren’t particularly concerned with the Gregorian calendar. Need proof, look at that photo of you from 1991. Those tight-rolled jeans and neon bracelets scream 80s far more than grungy 90s. More after the jump…

Culturally, the late nineties represent this perfect storm of mass appeal. Post-internet, pre-Napster America was an America unified in its love of shitty, bubble-gum, pop music and what is likely the last time in our collective history that numerous records were simultaneously going multi-platinum. We no longer live in a society that consumes large quantities of physical media, and even if we did we collectively wouldn’t be able to agree on what that piece of media should be. We have become a fickle bunch. This makes the late 90s all the more fascinating, especially when we think about our now-stretch-marked pop-star. At the time not only was she the biggest female star in the country, she was dating the most popular guy in the nation’s most popular boy-band, (not so fast Joey Fatone!) Justin Timberlake. Between the two of them they owned the airwaves as well as daily top-seating on MTV’s once-important Total Request Live. The ubiquitous duo was American mass culture. They were the power couple and remained so until the spring of 2002 when they too-perfect romance ended, and here is where things start to get complicated.

Most people would argue that 9/11 is the one event that fundamentally ended the 90s and hurdled us viciously us into aughts. This is not the case. If anything 9/11 is the one event that epitomizes nineties culture because it was something that affected everybody. This is drastically different than this decade in American cultural history where the only things affecting everybody are the wires and waves needed for us to better illustrate our own uniqueness and originality. The events of September 11th, 2001, were big and horrifying and all-encompassing. Dare I say 9/11 was the N’Sync of terrorist acts? I dare.

If the last five years have shown us anything, it is that niche culture has usurped mass culture. This is a good thing for people who enjoy interesting music, films and television (especially television), though not such a good thing if one enjoyed the fruits of media deregulation during the 90s — especially if you happen to run a major record label because you know longer understand how to sell your product. In the spring of 2002 the internet was finally figuring out what it wanted to be, thanks in large part to the proliferation of high-speed connections and dirt-cheap bandwidth. Things seemed to head in two distinct directions. On one hand the internet has broken down almost all the walls that have kept the average American from contributing to the creative culture. YouTube, FunnyOrDie, MySpace Music, Café Press, plus myriad others (with more sites popping up almost as fast as the trends they are meant to service) have allowed people to produce something and get it out there with the same reach as the old media institutions (scurrying like the rats they are in attempts at catching up). The brilliance of the web also means that the good tends to float to the surface (so long as they know how to market themselves) while the dregs remain a mystery to most. It is not a perfect system, but the tools are in place (and for the most part free) for anyone with some talent to be discovered by media consumers looking for precisely what they’re offering.

Justin Timberlake has embraced this path. No one would have suspected in 1999 that the white-boy with the cornrows dressed as a puppet in that shockingly cookie-cutter (with equally shocking popularity) boy-band would now be considered one of the more significant artistic forces in R&B and dance, and yet the hugely enjoyable Justified and last year’s Futuresex/Lovesounds have not only been a hit with audiences but with critics alike. Timberlake isn’t blogging his daily routine or maintaining a horrible designed MySpace page (to my knowledge), but his success is certainly representative of the segmentation of mass culture. Timberlake isn’t the first name we think of when it comes to the Internet (personally, I think of Chris Cocker, but we’ll get to that in a moment), though his career path could be (and probably should be) characterized as being especially “Web 2.0” in the specificity of the audience he’s aiming for and the projects he chosen to undertake (with the exception of Shrek the Third, his film roles have been largely indie-centric – one of my favorite performances of the year was his role in Black Snake Moan, a very hard film to love). One could argue his biggest commercial success has not been either of his solo records, but a three minute short film he made while hosting Saturday Night Live shortly over a year ago. “Dick in a Box” was arguably as big a hit as “Rock Your Body” though most of its popularity came from a source other than the medium in which it was originally designed. Far more people checked out the clip on the Internet (unedited) than those who actually watched it on SNL – knowing that, is it any wonder the WGA is still on strike? And really, his greatest public snafu was being the guy who coined the term “wardrobe malfunction” after he exposed Janet Jackson’s freaky, shield-clad boob on national television triggering perhaps the first real viral video (YouTube was still two years away at this point). It’s a testament to how well that guy has protected his image (and mocked it when necessary) in that most of us need to be reminded that the was actually one of the principal figures in that whole controversy.

Then, of course, there is the other side of the coin — the oxidized, rusty side with jagged edges and no remaining monetary value. While new media has put more power in the micro-targeted niche demographic, it has also provided an increased and unrelenting ability to bring out humanities most voyeuristic and vicious tendencies. Cue: Britney. If J-T represents the creative possibilities of our World 2.0, then Britney is certainly the face that best embodies the other side of our new culture. This year the endless celebrity juggernaut of gossip, drugs, and exposed vaginas came to a shaved head as Ms. Spears’ rapid fall from grace brought us all down with it as we sat glued to TMZ, The Superficial and the Access-Extra-Hollywood-Entertaiment-Report-Tonight TV-sleasefest as the new media allowed us to wring every drop of faux (and not-so-faux) drama from the life of a stranger. Still, we can hardly be held accountable for the ritualistic destruction and subsequent entertainment derived from a recognizable face’s downward spiral. After all, the medium just makes it all So. Damn. Easy. No one wants to wallow in filth, but when the filth looks like bubble-gum and rewards you with pennies, why not? Perhaps as fascinating as the web’s ability to be 24/7/365 in its ruthlessness is its frequent penchant for getting bored with characters almost as quickly as it becomes obsessed with them. Really, Chris Cocker? Who gives a fuck? This fall “Don’t Tase Me Bro” seemed to live the entire life of a cultural trend in an afternoon. Perhaps it is a testament to Britney that her life just keeps getting more and more… um… blogable? You have to be up to some serious antics to hold our attention spans for this long and she’s done a masterful job at keeping herself on the marquee (even if the marquee is now in kind of a lousy part of town and is missing all of the Es). What makes internet culture so great is how the high-brow and low-brow play against each other and how because of this the unifying trends of our era have gone from being rallies around specific pieces of media to instead specific (and fleeting) popular culture events. As a society we will never buy millions and millions of copies of a one artist’s record (at least not all at once), but we will turn out en mass to watch said artist drive his or her car into a light pole on YouTube.

This is the difference between the nineties and the aughts, two vastly different generations separated by the breakup of Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 7:23 am and is filed under Commentary, Internet Television, Personalities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.