Burn Baby Burn

After a weekend away in Amsterdam, I return to find the UK newspapers devouring and obsessing about the Britney Spears’ shaved head moment.  The Dutch don’t seem to have this same fixation about a feckless pop star going through career breakdowns in the most pubic way. You don’t have to be a Harley Street shrink to work out that it’s obviously a cry for help. I hope that Britney can exorcise her demons; at the very least, she needs to undo her pact with Beelzebub.  Once you are up there, defied as some sort of pagan cultural icon, it’s impossible to find a way out of the escher maze. The punters don’t really understand the life nor the contract that was signed.  Few read the small print on the contract that they signed when embarking on a career of fame and fortune.

Clearly Britney Spears realises that there’s no way out. She’s trapped in the hall of mirrors that surrounds her life and she’s trying to smash all of them.  Britney wants fame, but on her own terms.  Her desperate public actions show that although there may be a volume button, there’s no OFF button.  All she does is generate more negative headlines and falls in a PR cul de sac.  Britney is identified in every sleeping and waking moment as a cultural pop idol and therefore anything she does is preyed upon by an industry that existed way before she was even born.  Perhaps she knows she’s lost in one of the passages of purgatory, but the coming weeks and months will reveal whether she will be driven completely insane, or if those with a keen interest in Britney Spears Inc. can save the day.  Like some Brunehilda, she should throw herself on a pyre of burning newspaper cuttings – now that would be a fitting end that just might burst the celebrity bubble.