Rabble Rousers in Polyester Trousers

A meditation on Britney:

"This concerns a dream/nightmare. By what right can we call the lived experience of others a dream/nightmare? Not because the facts are so oppressive that they can weakly be termed nightmarish; nor because hopes can weakly be termed dreams."

"In the end, of course, it's pointless to characterize, categorize, and value [Britney] according to [her] gender, or to claim that women fixate on everything that irritates gynophobes about our sex. The best [performing] has as little to do with gender as it does with nationality or with the circumscriptions of time. A [performer] such as [Mariah] or [Whitney], a [song] such as [Christina's "Genie In A Bottle"] or [Lil' Kim's "How Many Licks,"] transcends not only the facts of its author's life but the manners and customs, the superficial gloss, of the era in which it was written. There will always be categories into which [music] falls, standards that have less to do with stereotype and preconception than with originality and revelation, with the ability to translate life--in all its simple and endlessly mysterious complexity--onto the [stage]. But there is no male or female language, only the truthful or fake, the precise or vague, the inspired or the pedestrian. If, in the future, some weird cataclysm should scramble or erase all the names of [performers], viewers may have trouble (and progressively more trouble, as more women join the professions and the military and more men immerse themselves in the domestic) telling whether ["Eat My Pussy Right"] and ["Hoochie Mama"] were created by women or men. The only distinction that will matter will be between good and bad."

"I have a terrible confession to make-- I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who [perform] today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to [watch] them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman [performer] until the first whore becomes a call girl and [dances] her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the [sweat] of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin's whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I've never been [able to enjoy Sarah Brightman] and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those [viewers] who do not share with me the ground of departure--that a good [performer] can do without everything but the remnant of his balls."