For American gay men of a certain age and social milieu it is an eternal debate, one that seems to have no beginning and certainly no discernible end: are you a bigger fan of Britney Spears, or Christina Aguilera? The terms of the disagreement are by now well-established and even a bit shopworn. While Britney has been the more commercially successful of the pair, Christina (often signified through her ca.-2002 moniker “Xtina”) has achieved more critical success and possesses the more obvious and impressive vocal ability.
For those who fall into Xtina’s camp, Britney’s blockbuster career is a sign of popular culture’s misguided turn away from “real” music-making and emphasis on raw talent towards a slickly-manufactured, generic pop product. On the other side, Britney fans see Xtina as a prodigious talent who nevertheless failed to master the routines and expectations of the contemporary pop music industry, often relying on vocal pyrotechnics at the expense of memorable music or a coherent public image. The terms of the conversation speak to its fundamentally circular character. Each diva represents different criteria for talent and success, ones that are in many ways irreconcilably opposed.
At the core of this debate, however, lies something deeper. What is at stake here is not merely a preference for a specific diva or a particular style of pop music. Rather, one’s allegiance in this tête-a-tête signals a certain sensibility and disposition towards the idea of the “real” that is central to the cultural shift known as postmodernism.
Postmodernism is generally thought to have emerged as the cultural condition of Western society in the late 1960s, a function of the rapid expansion of global capitalism and the increasing significance and influence of popular culture. If the modernism of the preceding era had preserved or enshrined some kind of “authentic” culture based largely on technical skill and innovation (whether in music, writing, or the visual arts), postmodernism ushered in a proliferation of signs and images that largely dispensed with the idea of authenticity. The business of culture was now primarily to advertise products and encourage consumer spending; at the same time, however, the postmodern image-world remains tied to a specious version of the “real” that no longer exists. In Frederic Jameson’s seminal book Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he summarizes this shift succinctly: in the postmodern world, he writes, “depth is replaced by surface.” If premodern and modern societies relied on or had access to some kind of fundamental, authentic reality, postmodernism masks “reality” behind a screen of images and appearances that eventually point to nothing.
The public face-off between Britney and Xtina exemplifies this cultural transformation and brings it into sharper focus. Although Christina is the clear winner in terms of vocal talent, her failure to match Britney in the realms of commercial and cultural influence speaks to her inability to master the codes and dictates of the postmodern image-world. Where Britney produced a series of memorable videos in the early period of her career that established a clear and consistent image as the slightly-naughty-but-still-virginal girl-next-door, Xtina’s presentation was ultimately more scattershot and ill-defined. Her self-titled debut album pushed a teenybopper, pop-princess style that hewed closely to Spears’s own model, but her sophomore effort Stripped (2002) veered sharply in the other direction, towards a raunchy, sex-driven image that was confounding and alienating in its suddenness and severity. Not only could Xtina not seem to find her footing in terms of marketing and self-promotion, she always seemed to be one step behind Spears, who had made her own shift towards a less saccharine persona with her 2001 album Britney.
In contrast to Xtina’s struggle with self-presentation, Britney’s success is a model of effective management and a careful understanding of music-as-product. In Britney’s case, the albums and singles, while usually successful on their own, were largely subsidiary to the vision of tempting, budding female sexuality that she proffered from her very first single: the seminal …Baby One More Time (1998), whose now-iconic video shows her parading around the halls of an archetypical American high school in a suggestive schoolgirl uniform. If the early stages of Britney’s career still depended on the notion that she was a solid performer or vocal talent in the traditional sense (her performance at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards — where she sashayed provocatively around the stage with a living snake draped around her shoulders — at least testifies to her ability to command a stage), her later work gradually abandoned these pretensions. Her more recent singles rely heavily on Auto-Tune to mask her vocal deficiencies, and it is widely known that the majority of her residency show at the Planet Hollywood Hotel in Las Vegas is lip-synced, a fact that she barely attempts to conceal onstage as she allows her backup dancers to do the majority of the choreographic heavy-lifting.
But to demand a display of captivating, once-in-a-lifetime talent from Britney is to miss the nature of her appeal. If Xtina relied on old-school belting and vocal prowess to define the contours of her career, Britney’s innovation was her aura, her ability to exist as a series of images that constitute an identity both specific and nebulous. She is the ultimate postmodern “product” — an evocative commodity that can resonate with many people without really saying much of anything. Is she a chaste, wholesome girl of sixteen, a tantalizing Jezebel and proverbial piece of jail-bait, or — in her later career — an unwitting victim of the music industry and its lack of regard for her own creative instincts and personal well-being? That Spears could occupy a number of these subject positions simultaneously explains her appeal to such a wide segment of the American population and reveals the malleability and effectiveness of her self-promotion. Her life and work offer a space into which our culture can project a range of competing narratives and desires, all of which are both eminently true and patently illusory.
In Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, he defines the simulacrum as the final stage of postmodern capitalist existence, a moment at which the world of images no longer refers to any kind of specific or concrete reality, but only reflects back on itself. One might argue that Britney Spears circa 2016 is approaching this simulacral limit. Released from the expectation of delivering a convincing performance as well as from the historical situation that marked her rise to fame (it must be remembered that her debut album is now approaching its 20-year anniversary, beyond the cultural memory of anyone born much past the early 90s), she exists now, like Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe before her, almost entirely as image, a simulacrum that stands in for abstract notions like “fierceness,” “diva,” and, most importantly, “nostalgia.” If singing ability and expression had constituted the core of the musician’s enterprise until the late 20th century, providing its grounding in a sense of authenticity and the “real,” those prerequisites have now fallen away, replaced by an emphasis on provocative imagery and a memorable public persona.
And what of Xtina? Her most notable role today is surely her position as a judge on the TV program The Voice, where she dispenses (sometimes rambling) vocal advice to aspiring superstars on the national stage. But while she is certainly more visible than she has been in recent years, perhaps even more so than Britney at this moment (who has largely retreated to her act in Vegas after a series of commercial flops), Xtina’s image seems to signify and resonate much less. Now that the comparatively smaller catalog of hits on which she made her name in the early 2000s has faded from memory, Xtina’s innate gifts have done little to cement her status as a pop-cultural icon on the same level as Ms. Spears. Her work, then, really does belong to a different era, one that is distinctly modernist in its concern with performance ability and vocal bravura. Xtina’s natural gifts may supersede Britney’s, but her inability to understand and make use of postmodernity as a set of cultural codes has left her relatively invisible in our collective consciousness.
Of course, Britney was not the first to usher postmodernism into the realm of pop music. That distinction belongs to Madonna, an entertainer to whom Britney is frequently compared and on whom she has modeled a large swath of her career. Like Britney, Madonna is also not a prodigious vocal talent, but cemented her relevance through a series of carefully-crafted reinventions which made the realm of “surface” and image at least as important as the music itself. Even the great pop voices of the late 20th century — Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey chief among them — were sensitive to the role that branding and image-making played in the cultivation of their appeal: witness Carey’s studied reinvention as R&B-sexpot on her 1997 album Butterfly, or Houston’s turn towards acting as a way of rendering her music and image an all-encompassing cultural product in the early 90s. Though advocates for Xtina bemoan what Britney represents, she was hardly the first to adopt the model of the performer-as-icon: to become a screen for our collective societal imagination that is saturated with meaning and bereft of it at once.
It would be a stretch to argue that Britney’s career offers a self-reflexive, critical look at postmodernism in the way that often surfaces in Madonna’s best work. And yet there is a certain seduction inherent in Britney’s self-promotion, a joy to be found in her often-masterful play with the strictures of celebrity and fame as they have been altered and transformed in the early decades of this century. If Xtina represents the consummate musician, focusing on her craft in a manner that was frequently to the detriment of her self-image, Britney’s medium is culture itself, her life and person a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk that sees performer, music, and personal narrative as tools to be manipulated and reworked in infinite ways.
That Xtina failed to reach this same plane of influence evinces either a stubborn unwillingness to recognize the epistemic cultural shifts at the core of the postmodern condition or a profound failure to adapt to them. In either case, there is tragedy inherent in the missed opportunities of her career, and a haplessness to the way in which her diehard supporters cling to a model of artistry and personal authenticity that has long since disappeared. The postmodern world may provide few spaces in which to offer works of meaning and substance, but in her inability to understand the layout of this cultural terrain, Xtina has managed to offer even less than the woman against whom she has eternally positioned herself as foil and foe.