Pop princess Britney Spears did it again with her newest video “Everytime,” or, as I like to call it, “Ode to Justin.” Just as she broke her teen queen mold with her erotic “In the Zone” video and a lip-lock with Madonna, she is now shocking the censors with her attempted quasi-suicide. After spending three and a half minutes watching her twisted view of her life with Justin Timberlake, I almost wished she actually did drown at the end of her video.
Let me back-track for a minute. We all know that Britney and Justin split. Justin aired their dirty laundry with his song of hottie heartache over the split in “Cry Me a River,” and even featured a Britney clone in his video. Almost a year later, Britney is singing about how she hearts Justin but cannot get over him and what they shared in their fantasy romance, and she casts a Justin look alike, without much success, and proceeds to document her version of what really went down in the relationship.
So here we have a scantily clad Britney, fighting with her hot-headed boyfriend, played by a rugged Stephen Dorff, slip into the bathroom and then slip out of her already barely-there shirt. In the tub, she holds up her wrists, and to her horror, and supposedly the viewers, her wrists are slit and she drowns.
Britney then walks through a hospital and sees herself on the operating table, dying, while she passes a mother and her newborn daughter. We then see a concerned boyfriend run to the bathroom, how we never know he even found out that she was drowning, and saved her, wrists in-tact and a Crest White Strip smile plastered on her face.
Now, I understand the Kiss seen round the world. I understand the nudity and the provocative stripper gyrations that she calls dance numbers, but why a role model for young girls and a sex symbol for the majority of guys goes and “commits” suicide in her video is beyond me. If Britney is so infatuated with Justin and regrets the breakup, document it in a creepy yet classy manner like Justin. Who wants to see their idol and goddess bleeding in a bathtub? Honestly, someone should tell Britney that all she had to do was strip and hop into the bathtub.
But viewers are now left with a bad video directed by a fabulous photographer, David LaChapelle. We are left with a horrible voice and no glitz and glam to make us say, “Okay, Britney must have some talent.” We are just left with Britney Spears, the girl who thinks she is an artist, but does not realize that any statement that she want to make has already been made by her idol Madonna ten years earlier. In fact, Madonna did the video-suicide thing two years ago with her “What it Feels Like for a Girl” video. She slams her car at the end of the video into a telephone.
Give it up Britney, it’s been done. Maybe she should be original and accept the offer to pose for Playboy, something the original Material Girl has yet to do. Until then, TRL viewers and pop radio listeners have to suffer through generic pop, a nails-on-chalkboard voice and a lackluster video vision.
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