Kelefa Sanneh reports that Britney Spears' new album Blackout arrives in record stores "as something of a mystery." Spears has been uncharacteristically reticent about its release; typically the publicity machine gets clogged with Britneyisms immediately before the release of a new CD from her. But Sanneh also implies that Spears herself may not be entirely present in her own album. He writes, "she has done almost nothing, in the recording studio or outside it, to convince fans that 'Blackout' is really hers, or really her." Spears is missing from her own comeback album.
Spears' absence from Blackout shouldn't be so mysterious, considering how she's given up her day job as a pop singer and dedicated herself to selling her own image. The story of her recent career is a set of images--"The unworn unmentionables, the bobbled baby, the hewn hair, the umbrella attack, the loose lip-syncing, the benders and fender-benders," as Sanneh helpfully summarizes--that have become separated from her original incarnation as a singer. She has become a spectacle packaged and sold as a spectacle. Now that she's ostensibly returning to her material practice of producing music recordings, she appears as a kind of ghost. Sanneh notes that Spears's thin singing voice floats free of anything we would normally associate with a singing body. "Even when not buried in electronics," he writes, "her distinctive singing voice sounds unusually vague, and sometimes it's hard to be sure it's hers."
In Spectres of Marx, his reading of Marx's Capital as a kind of ghost story, Derrida reminds us that in Marx's view the commodity is a specter, a fetishized object that is really nothing, just something determined by its exchange value, a "phenomenological 'conjuring trick,'" as Derrida puts it. We can try to sweep away all of the extraneous stuff from the object to see it as a thing produced by real people, but it's still a commodity. We can't return to its original state. Instead, Derrida says, we only get a substitute, an "artificial body, a prosthetic body, a ghost of spirit, one might say a ghost of the ghost." In Spears' case, Sanneh concludes, "Ubiquitous, one way or another, for almost a decade, Ms. Spears has finally managed to become a spectral presence — on her own album." In other words, Spears isn't behaving like a self-destructive tabloid princess. Rather, she's behaving like a commodity.
It is the fate of all fetishized objects to become phantasmal, to become specters, mouths that say nothing, bodies without substance. No wonder the album is called Blackout.
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