Rules Of The Game #23: Out From Under

[koganbot]

I REVIEW BRITNEY SPEARS (down at the end of this)!

The Rules Of The Game #23: Out From Under

The review obviously owes a lot to my livejournal convos earlier in the week with anthonyeaston and skyecaptain and blue_russian (not to mention Tom and Kat and Lex and Jeff and [your name here] in general).

I call Britney "The world's last real rock star." Discuss.

Also, once again I'll pose the question, "What are we trying to get out from under?"

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

No comments yet! Here are two:

(1) "Just noting something: Her messy recalcitrance makes me feel like I’m getting out from under a lot of platitudes and fake concern and bullshit—Britney as the world’s last real rock star—but it doesn’t get her out from under her mess, which, after all, might kill her."

Which platitudes and fake concern and bullshit? Is Blackout "tasteless"? (Actually, I think it's kind of rock-tasteful, in the sense of it being a cohesive album with a relatively consistent sound, no embarrassing soppy ballads for one thing...)

And I think "Piece of Me" in particular is occasionally very full of shit: "don't see any harm in workin' and bein' a mama, and with a kid on my arm I'm an exceptional earner," and "no wonder all this panic in the industry I mean please." I mean please -- that's some bullshit.

(2) "What’s crucial, at least for me, to make the story a good one, is that the person who’s telling it thinks that he’s complicit in what he’s trying to get out from under."

I think I agree with you -- I definitely feel what you're saying, but I'm not sure why complicity is the key to a good story. Can't "everyone's being snookered but me" be a good Hero Story variant, after all? Isn't a feeling of unavoidable complicity in "capitulating to something" pathological at a certain point? And what can we do to change something if we're always complicit in it? (I.e., at what point are we actually free of the Wrong Something, hence no longer complicit in it?) (PS, from my very limited understanding of him, Lacan might call what we're "getting out from under" a lack [Das Ding versus What Thing GO] from which we are never free and can only search for it/project it in the real world, with inevitable disappointment in never truly finding That Crazy Thing. And this is one thing that potentially -- if I'm understanding his gist -- rubs me the wrong way about Lacan.)

[koganbot]

(1) Yeah, that final line of mine is very poorly written - not sure how anyone will make sense of it, will know which bullshit I'm talking about (the world's? Britney's?) or how Britney gets me out from under it (whatever it is). Comes from finishing the column at the last minute. In any event, I meant that Britney's messy recalcitrance is an antidote to the world's bullshit and platitudes, since she somes uninterested in cred or figuring out the most politic thing to say - so I find her liberating to observe, but still, she's stuck in her own mess (even if it doesn't match the world's bullshit; and if she's genuinely an addict in denial, I'm sure she's bullshitting herself a lot).

(2) My guess is that even the people going "everybody's getting snookered but me" identify their former pre-wised-up self with the snookered. I'll have to think about this more, why I like the complicity story most. Is very Stones and Dylan.

[koganbot]

since she somes uninterested in cred = since she seems uninterested in cred

[koganbot]

(PS, from my very limited understanding of him, Lacan might call what we're "getting out from under" a lack [Das Ding versus What Thing GO] from which we are never free and can only search for it/project it in the real world, with inevitable disappointment in never truly finding That Crazy Thing. And this is one thing that potentially -- if I'm understanding his gist -- rubs me the wrong way about Lacan.)

This is why I was so intent on dissociating myself from Zizek et al. in The What Thing issue of Why Music Sucks and from poststructuralism in general in "Superwords Revisited," the fact that they took something that sometimes happened (as opposed to its not happening other times) and rendered it worthless by dogmatically insisting that it happens all the time.