Chuck Klosterman IV

A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

Chuck Klosterman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780743293785
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

Coming off the breakthrough success of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Killing Yourself to Live, bestselling pop culture guru Chuck Klosterman assembles his best work previously unavailable in book form—including the groundbreaking 1996 piece about his chicken McNuggets experiment, his uncensored profile of Britney Spears, and a previously unpublished short story—all recontextualized in Chuck's unique voice with new intros, outros, segues, and masterful footnotes. Chuck Klosterman IV consists of three parts: Things That Are True—Profiles and trend stories: Britney Spears, Radiohead, Billy Joel, Metallica, Val Kilmer, Bono, Wilco, the White Stripes, Steve Nash, Morrissey, Robert Plant—all with new introductions and footnotes.Things That Might Be True—Opinions and theories on everything from monogamy to pirates to robots to super people to guilt, and (of course) Advancement—all with new hypothetical questions and footnotes.Something That Isn't True At All—This is old fiction. There's a new introduction, but no footnotes. Well, there's a footnote in the introduction, but none in the story.

THINGS THAT ARE TRUE

SOUTHERN-FRIED SEX KITTEN

Britney Spears is the most famous person I’ve ever interviewed. She was also the weirdest. I assume this is not a coincidence.

The main thing I remember about this interview is that I spent (what seemed like) twelve thousand years waiting for her photo shoot to end. There was minor chaos during the shoot, because—at the last minute—Britney decided she did not want to be photographed pantless, and that specific pantless image was (in truth) the main reason Esquire wanted to do a story on her. They needed a pantless Britney on the cover of their magazine. Her refusal created an intense dichotomy among her handlers: Britney’s family members didn’t want her to do anything overtly sexy, but her publicity team (whom she later fired) only wanted her to do things that were overtly sexy. She eventually agreed with her publicist. The singular upside to the photo shoot was the cookies; someone was responsible for providing Britney with warm chocolate chip cookies at all times, and they were fucking awesome.

After I spent my time with Spears, people kept asking me, “What is she really like?” My answer was usually, “I don’t know, and I don’t think she does, either.” And that’s not sarcasm; I honestly believe Britney Spears was so insulated from the public (and so exhaustively governed by the people trying to control her image) that she became unable to differentiate between (a) the person who was famous and (b) the person she actually was. I suspect this is why she kept making so many strange decisions in the wake of this interview (i.e., getting married in Las Vegas to someone she barely liked, wearing T-shirts that said things like “MILF in Training,” constantly being photographed barefoot in public, etc.). Her management team directed so much emphasis toward turning her into an unsophisticated semi-redneck that she now has no idea what is normal and what is marketing. I suppose her life is exciting, but I suspect it’s a pretty terrible way to live; I don’t think she has any idea what’s really happening to her.

That said, I did notice that her Southern accent always seemed to mysteriously disappear whenever she became annoyed with my questions. Maybe she’s the blond Machiavelli.

Because the photos that ran with this story were pretty hot, Esquire cut about seven hundred words out of my profile to create more space for the pictures. This is the original draft.

BENDING SPOONS WITH BRITNEY SPEARS (NOVEMBER 2003)

Twenty feet away from me, Britney Spears is pantless. Her sculpted hair makes her look like Marilyn Monroe on a date with DiMaggio, assuming they’re going to Manhattan’s finest pantless restaurant. She’s wearing a sweater that probably costs more than my parents’ house, and her white heels add five inches to her five-foot-four pantless frame. Oh, and did I mention she’s pantless? She’s not wearing any pants.

This is a hard detail to ignore.

This is a hard detail to ignore because the number of men who have seen a pantless Britney belong to a highly select fraternity: it’s Justin Timberlake, her gynecologist, the photographer who’s doing this particular photo shoot, and (maybe) the frontman for a fourth-rate rap-metal outfit from Jacksonville, Florida. That’s more or less everybody.¹ And—perhaps stupidly—I actually thought I was about to rush this semi-pathetic frat; I honestly believed the reason I was invited to this Manhattan photo shoot was to glimpse Britney’s vagina and write about its cultural significance. Somehow, that seemed like the only logical explanation as to why Britney’s naked ass was being unleashed on the cover of this magazine; this whole affair must be an aggressive, self-conscious reinvention. I mean, why else would I have been invited here? Why else would Spears have just released the (ahem) “news” that she lost her virginity at the age of eighteen (a story that surfaced only thirty-six hours before this very photo session)? Isn’t this how the modern media operates? Isn’t everything wholly overt?

Actually, no.

Britney’s secret garden will not be seen this afternoon, or at least not seen by me. All her pictures are ultimately shot behind a fifteen-foot-high opaque partition, and nary a heterosexual man is allowed behind its wall. Apparently, the reason I am here is to be reminded that the essence of Britney Spears’s rawest sexuality is something I will never see, even though I know it’s there. This is why I am a metaphor for America, and this is also why Britney Spears is a metaphor for the American Dream. Culturally, there is nothing more trenchant than the fact that Britney Spears will never give it up, even though she already has.

Over the next ninety minutes, I will sit on a couch next to an ostensibly fully clothed Britney and ask her a battery of questions. She will not really answer any of them. Interviewing Britney Spears is like conducting a deposition hearing with Bill Clinton: regardless of the evidence, she does not waiver. “Why do you dress so provocatively?” I ask. She says she doesn’t dress provocatively. “But look what you’re wearing right now,” I say, and I have a point, because I ask this while looking at three inches of her inner thigh, her entire abdomen, and enough cleavage to choke a musk ox. “This is just a shirt and a skirt,” she responds. I ask her questions about her iconography, and she acts as though she has no idea what the word iconography even means. It is not that Britney Spears denies that she is a sexual icon, or that she disagrees with the assertion that she embodies the “madonna/whore” dichotomy more than any human in history, or that she feels her success says nothing about what our society fantasizes about. She doesn’t disagree with any of that stuff, because she swears she has never even thought about it. Not even once. When I ask her to theorize about why American men are so fascinated with the concept of the wet-hot virgin, she legitimately acts as if it is the first time anyone has ever brought that query to her attention.

“That’s just a weird question,” she says. “I don’t even want to think about that. That’s strange, and I don’t think about things like that, and I don’t want to think about things like that. Why should I? I don’t have to deal with those people. I’m concerned with the kids out there. I’m concerned with the next generation of people. I’m not worried about some guy who’s a perv and wants to meet a freaking virgin.”

And suddenly, something becomes painfully clear: either Britney Spears is the least self-aware person I’ve ever met, or she’s way, way savvier than I shall ever be.

Or maybe both.

---

Britney smells excellent. She smells like fruit (kiwi in particular). Like many celebrities, she seems smaller in real life than she appears on television, but Spears also looks a little harder—sometimes brittle, sometimes fragile. As I ask her questions, I can tell she isn’t comfortable (at one point she gets up and walks away, but stops after five steps and returns to apologize). And the more I badger her, the more I find myself feeling sorry for dragging her through this process. For whatever the reason, I really want to love this person.

Compared to the depletion of the ozone layer or the war in Liberia, I concede that the existence of Britney Spears is light-years beyond trivial. But if you’re remotely interested in the cylinders that drive pop culture, it’s hard to overestimate her significance. She is not so much a person as she is an idea, and the idea is this: you can want everything, so long as you get nothing. The Western world has always been fixated with the eroticism of purity; that was how Brooke Shields sold Calvin Kleins, and that was how Annette Funicello sold the beach. But no one has ever packaged that schism like Britney Spears. She is the naughtiest good girl of all time. However, this philosophical chasm is not what makes her important; the chasm merely makes her rich. What makes Spears different is her abject unwillingness to recognize that this paradox exists at all. She never winks, she never cracks, and she never relents from her abject naïveté.

I realize this does not seem possible; it did not seem possible to me, either. But this is the crux of her genius. Over and over and over again, I interrogate Spears about the motivations behind her career arc, starting with the first video she ever made, “… Baby One More Time.” Arguably the last transcendent clip MTV ever aired, the sexual overtones of “… Baby One More Time” seem almost stupidly symbolic. Yet when I tell this to Britney, she finds the suggestion ridiculous.

“I was wearing a freaking Catholic school girl’s outfit!” she exclaims, which is (of course) exactly why everyone else in the universe views it as the hyperdriven exploitation of an unabashed taboo. But there is no subtext in Britney World. “I was just dancing and doing what I love. To me, that’s truly sexy. In so many videos these days, you see girls with their bras on, and they’re just hoochie mamas. Men don’t like that! Well, maybe some men do—the kind of men I’m not attracted to. But real people just want to see someone having a good time. They want to see someone shine.”

This is what makes Britney so different: she refuses to deconstruct herself. That falls in stark contrast with the previous generation of blond icons, most notably Madonna (who makes it clear that she controls every extension of her existence) and Pam Anderson (who refuses to take her own Barbie Doll bombast seriously). Madonna would never claim an outfit was merely “a skirt and a shirt.” Pam would never deny that her stardom is founded on strangers wanting to sleep with her. Both of those women know exactly what they’re doing, and they want you to realize that, too. But Spears wants everything to look like an accident, and this is crucial. If Britney were to forfeit anything—if she were to even casually admit that she occasionally uses her body as a commercial weapon—all of this would be over. She would immediately become like everybody else. But this will never happen. What keeps Britney perfect—what makes Britney perfect—is that she can produce a video where people lick the sweat off her body (as they did in 2001’s “I’m a Slave 4 U”) and still effortlessly insist the song has no relationship to sex whatsoever. (“It’s just about being a slave to the music,” she tells me.) On the day of our interview, Britney took another photograph for this magazine wearing only panties and pearls, and she pulled down the elastic of her underwear with her thumbs; if she would have pulled two inches more, Esquire would have become Hustler. But that reality does not affect her reality, which is that this picture has nothing to do with sex.

• Britney: Haven’t you ever seen girls on the covers of magazines before? Did you see the J-Lo cover? She was wearing a bikini. Did you see the cover with Cameron Diaz on it?
• CK: Yes I did. And why do you think those women did those photo shoots?
• Britney: Because it’s the freaking cover of Esquire magazine! Why not? You get to look beautiful. It’s not that deep.
• CK: So why exactly do you think the magazine puts women like that on its cover?
• Britney: I don’t know. Maybe because those people are pretty and appealing, and they work their asses off, and they believe in themselves.
• CK: Do you honestly believe that?
• Britney: Well, some people might say it’s just to make money off of them and to sell magazines. But another reason—a better reason, and the one I choose—is that they do it to inspire people.

Britney is like the little kid who freaks out Keanu Reeves in The Matrix: You say you want to bend a spoon? Well, the first thing you need to realize is that there is no spoon.

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I’m not supposed to ask Britney about Justin Timberlake. This rule is made very clear to me the moment I arrive at the photo shoot. Granted, everyone knows that Spears and the former ’N Sync member used to live together, and everyone knows about their breakup, and everyone knows they (evidently) had sex when Spears was eighteen. But her handlers still request that I don’t ask any questions about their relationship. When I eventually ask Spears about this anyway, her response is extraordinarily innocuous. “The bottom line—and I hate talking about this, but whatever—is that we were both too young to be that serious with each other.” However, she does say that the alleged postbreakup “dance-off” at the L.A. club Lounge never happened, and she admits that she and Justin don’t speak anymore, even though she considers him a “creative genius.”

Viewed retrospectively, there’s no doubt the Justin-Britney romance helped Timberlake’s career more than hers—especially since Spears always insisted she was a virgin, even when they were living together. Optimistic thirteen-year-old girls could imagine Justin as the ultimate gentleman, perfectly content to keep his paws to himself while the foxiest girl on the planet sat around the house in her underwear, sucking on Popsicles and telling him to wait until she was ready. They were, in a sense, Virgin Royalty: super-rich, über-clean pop stars who epitomized just how wonderful teenage Americans could still be.

This is why it was so jarring to hear Fred Durst on The Howard Stern Show in February, graphically discussing his alleged sexual dalliances with Spears. Her encounter with the Limp Bizkit vocalist—regardless of its truth—publicly cemented Spears’s fall from grace; Durst is universally perceived as rock’s sleaziest baboon. Yet the moment Britney “explains” what happened, the gravity of the situation deflates. Here again, Spears’s persona becomes weirdly Clintonesque: deny, deny, deny… and then classify everything as old news.

“That was my fault for hanging out with people like that,” she says of Durst. “Fred was a very great guy. He was a nice guy. And at the time he was trying to come on to me, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have a relationship with anybody. So maybe I did hurt his ego, and [going on the radio] was his way of dealing with that. But I learned my lesson. And at the time, I was kind of confused, because my tour had just ended. Me and my girlfriends went out one night, and I was feeling like a free bird. But I really don’t want to talk about this.”

I have no idea what those last two statements are supposed to mean; either she obviously slept with him, or she obviously didn’t. The odds are 50–50. And this is a balance Britney either (a) consciously strives for, or (b) sustains without even trying. Cliché as it may sound, she is truly all things to all people: a twelve-year-old girl thinks she’s a hero; that girl’s older brother thinks she’s a stripper; that older brother’s girlfriend thinks she’s an example of why women hate themselves; that girlfriend’s father secretly wishes his own twelve-year-old daughter would invite Britney over for a slumber party. As long as she never dictates her character—as long as Spears never overtly says “This is who I am”—everyone gets to inject their own meaning. Subconsciously, we all get to rebrand Britney Spears.

“The public knows when someone is being honest,” she says. “The people know what’s real. This might be a weird analogy, but it’s like watching Friends on the TV. You just get what those people are talking about. It’s funny to you, and you’re drawn into them.”

Here again, we see the brilliance of Britney: on the surface, this statement is insane. Anyone who watches Friends would never argue it’s successful because of its authenticity, nor would it seem like those characters have conversations that reflect any kind of tangible normalcy.² But every single week, twenty million people watch Friends. They see something in Chandler Bing and Phoebe Buffay that makes them happy. And what those twenty million people see is something that Britney sees—and perhaps Britney understands—in a way that most of us do not.

“Had I not went into music,” she tells me, “I probably would have gone to college and became a schoolteacher. That was my dream, because ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• 1. Things That Are True
• 2. Things That Might Be True
• 3. Something That Isn’t True at All
• Acknowledgments
• ‘Downtown Owl’ Teaser
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright