Whereas now it’s all very heavily manicured and curated.” It was the last time you could have people like Britney, or Lindsay, or Paris, imploding in front of the world. “It’s right before social media really took off as a tool for celebrities to curate and create their images. “The way I see it, it’s the last unfiltered moment in pop culture,” Di Troia says of the mid-to-late 2000s. But as the title of one wildly popular blog tells it: Pop Culture died in 2009. Some of those sites have since shut down, others stumble on. It was a time when tabloid magazines were still a force to be reckoned with (Britney sold wedding and baby pictures to People for $1 million a pop), TMZ was fresh on the scene and the gossip blogger was ascendant, with DListed, Gawker, Just Jared, Lainey Gossip and Perez Hilton all raking in the clicks. ![]() Fan videos devoted to the era are dotted around the internet: one calls 2006-2008 “one of the greatest and most iconic time periods” another exhaustively explores Lindsay Lohan’s celebrity entirely through found media footage from the period. Liberally breaking the fourth wall and determinedly queer, “everything in the play tears away at that glitzy, polished surface,” says Di Troia, “in order to show this seething violence and craziness underneath.” Truly Madly Britney digs deep into Britney fandom.īritney’s meltdown was one defining moment of a particular era in American popular culture that inspires ongoing nostalgia among certain gossip devotees. “I started to think about why we’re so obsessed with these figures, and what that means for us, as queer people, to identify with people who are so tied to a system of violence and abuse.”ĭi Troia and Fallowfield met while studying Master’s programs at the Victorian College of the Arts, and the play received intensive workshopping last year thanks to the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Cybec Electric development program. The more Di Troia worked through his obsession, the more he realised that beneath the mediated surface of Britney’s meltdown lay systems centred on exploitation, abuse and violence in the entertainment and music industries, particularly against women. ![]() “If Britney can make it through 2007”, the saying goes, “I can make it through today.” Such was the chaos that Britney became the “most dangerous detail in Hollywood”, according to TMZ’s Harvey Levin, and her resilience has since formed the basis of a widely shared meme. The image of her shaving her head was front-page news, and she was constantly hounded by paparazzi. It’s hard to overstate how wild things got at the height of Britney’s meltdown. I think it’s helped me, as it’s helped a lot of gay men, to kind of form identity around Britney, and other female pop cultural figures.” “That’s tied really deeply to my identity as a gay man. “I’ve always been obsessed with Britney and especially the mythology around her breakdown era,” Di Troia says. He dug into his own obsession with the pop icon while writing. When that’s subsequently cancelled, things spiral absurdly out of control. She didn’t hide it, she didn’t pretend it didn’t happen, she used it.”Īlberto Di Troia wrote the play, which follows two Australians who are long-term boyfriends and Britney super fans as they travel to America for a meet-and-greet with their idol. I remember Piece of Me coming out and the lyric ‘with a kid on my arm, I’m still an exceptional earner, you want a piece of me?’, like, I just died when I heard that song. “No cultural figure or pop star who has broken down has ever come back and released something like the Blackout album,” says director Hannah Fallowfield. It’s also the first and last thing heard in the new play Truly, Madly, Britney, now showing at Theatreworks as part of Melbourne’s Midsumma festival. Released at the height of her 2007 meltdown – labelled by Rolling Stone as the “most public downfall of any star in history” – her album Blackout has since cemented its status as a modern pop classic, defining a dominant strain of popular sound while also directly addressing the vortex of events that led to its creation. These three words, uttered by Britney Spears at the start of Gimme More, have since entered the pop cultural lexicon, an enduring cri de coeur against a media-driven obsession with destroying our idols.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |