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The kind Mrs Britney Spears has recently graced the world with a contorted little
poem that we shall reproduce bellow, without bothering to ask for permission, not
because we don't care about such things, which we don't, but because her English
reads as if it were spoken by dogs, and mongrel dogs at that, which in a sense it
is, yet nonetheless we feel an entire generation of somewhat undereducated young
men and women might benefit from some of the same castigation that their
grandfathers enjoyed back in the times of the Great Depression.
Let us now attempt and point out what's wrong with this crap. Generously we will add a coma right before the date in the title, so nobody mistakenly imagines the young singer a May flower, and say it was probably meant to be there, but somehow the brown mouse ate it. "No more chains / That you gave me." would make an excellent statement, seeing how it has it's own period and all, if only it could find a verb. Then again a verb could be easily implied, so we can put this one down to poetic license. Maybe so, although this then leaves open the matter of what exactly is being implied. Importantly, are the chains a positive or negative element ? Is the woman asking for more, or is she merely announcing her liberation from them ? We shall never know. Onwards through the swamp, we battle the knights that say "Enough of pain / Now I'm craving / Something sweet, so delight / How do you stand sleeping at night?" We would have preferred eeky-eeky. Should we understand the reference to pain as another statement in itself, accidentally devoid of a verb, or is it in fact intended to make a sentence together with the next bit, in which case the topic is slightly removed from the more common, and thus obviously not poetic, "Enough of the pain I'm now craving". Sadly, this construction would be still needing a verb, leaving the reader unable to choose between "I have had enough..." or "I have not had enough...". Of course, logic seems to prefer the later, seeing how the former tends to sound a bit self contradictory. Given our experience with mentally retarded adolescents learning languages, this part is simply intended to mean "Beyond this point, there be dragons." Indeed, there are. "Something sweet, so delight" Ah, the delights of turning a noun into an adjective, which in this case it can never be since a derivative adjective exists, and then ruthlessly using the poor thing in the wrong comparative form, when it would have been more than happy to compare as the noun it's Mommy made it. "So last week" is one thing, but "So week" is quite another. The word would not have objected being mated with "such", but "so" simply lacks the body parts needed for a happy relationship. The payload of this Blubberistical Missile is delivered by the unthinkable interrogation "How do you stand sleeping at night?" On the face, unless the unseen addressee is in fact some bat kin, the question is beyond rhetorical, since not only it doesn't expect an answer, but it could never have one. The mastery of Mrs Speare is obvious here, with one daft strike of the fox tail that is her pen she fools the metaphorical hounds of reason hounding her thoughts. She means "stand" as in "suffer", but by the crafty addition of the word "sleeping", she practically torch-welds the word into it's other, and in this case inappropriate meaning, "to be erect". That she would have said hounds erect in spite of whether it is appropriate or not might in fact capture her life, her philosophy, and her contribution to the cultural history of humanity, or footnotes thereof. That she would kiss the Mummy of Pop on stage is then no act of brash fronde, no unforeseen accident, but in fact a move entirely coherent with her own ideas and something that represents her, as a person. That the readers of her poem can, in fact have to, understand something of her, as a person, by simply reading the poem undeniably proves both her craft as a writer and her value as an artist. But let us continue. "Silly patterns that we follow / You pull me in / I'm being swallowed." A coma might have helped. "By the ones you think you love / They pull you down / You can't see up above." The mastery of the Bardess of Avon, pardon me, Arden, is not apparent in this particular piece. Unless she in fact means that someone pulled her down by pulling on someone else, whom she thought she loved, and was incidentally still quite physically attached to. The strange perversity of someone, anyone, pulling down on a poor, unfortunate girl by using her lover as a handle is revolting. Not to mention that, unless the affair was being consumed in outer space, it would have been a lot more practical to pull on the bed. Conceivably. The situation is further complicated by the reference to seeing above, or moreover the impossibility thereof. If indeed seeing above was impossible, one would have to presume that someone else was on top of the poetic ego, and that would put Mrs Spears on the bottom. If however someone was to pull down Mrs Spears by the one she thinks she loves, that lover would conceivably be on the bottom, leaving Mrs Spears on top. Barring a very lively, dynamic coupling, which would be improbable seeing how it would make gripping difficult, mayhap difficult enough so as to render any pulling out of the question, this is total nonsense. "Manipulation is the key / They screw it in / Because you're naive." "The Screwed Key" would incidentally make a great title for a novel. Possibly one in which a very nice, yet naive girl is forced to wear a screwed key around her neck, eventually, so everybody knows what's going on. This cunning reference to classical literature shows the true breath of Mrs Spears' education. Nobody who did not read Literature at Oxford could ever so delicately, so evanescently, yet so undeniably bury such a reference in such drivel. Again, the very Britty sort of genius is seen at work, in the false comparative suggested. She does not mean they screw in the key. She means they screw in manipulation. We are well advised to observe that screwed and turned are never interchangeable, since screwed always means causing something to rotate and at the same time move on the axis of rotation, while turned always means causing something to rotate that doesn't at the same time move on the axis of rotation. Thus you can't turn a light bulb nor screw a key, and thus manipulation never actually goes in any. The meaning of this passage is then revealed to us, something along the lines of "They try to manipulate, but it never works". The explanatory "you're naive" is then clearly not intended in the direct, but moreover in the subjective "you seem naive to them" The lesson we have decoded could be, less gracefully said by someone of less talent "You will be able to avoid manipulation by presenting yourself as naive to the would-be manipulators". That she was able to condense such an important, and sadly often ignored lesson in precisely 11 words, and further, 11 words that at the first glance make no sense is, again, bright proof of both the talent and the skill of a young woman so far ahead on the path of textual perfection that this Doctor of Philosophy can do naught but bow his head in reverence. "You come to me now / Why do you bother? / Remember the Bible / The sins of the Father." Here we come to perhaps the most obscure part of this entire delight of obscurity. The sins of the father affect unto the sons. However, "the Father", as opposed to the more general "the father" would normally suggest God himself. No mention of the sins of God himself can be found in the Bible, nor did any knowledge on the matter turn up upon discussion with a few prominent scholars and saints, which might suggest that in fact Britney is more advanced in her Kabbalah studies than anyone would have imagined. She not only knows the name of the Father, but his sins to boot. Then again, all this might be a false alarm, and she might be referring to that TV thing about Southern Baptists and their exciting adventures in La La Land, with Tom Sizemore in it. Whom we know was arrested for using a fake penis, with Paris Hilton if memory serves. A couple years after he battered his ex, Heidi Flesh. A prime candidate for the father, he is. Sadly, sons he has not, unless none that the public knows about. The icy feeling that Brit is about to confess something is sneaking in. "What you do / You pass down / No wonder why / I lost my crown." She has lost her crown as a result of the sins of the father ?! She is really the daughter of Tom Sizemore ? Could this be true ? Come to think of it, there is some facial similarity... did Lynne have a bit of a torrid March a few years ago ? Could that have been the real reason behind the Spears' divorce ? We'll let the investigative reporters take it from here, our job lies with the text, but let us mention that saying "*This is for everyone who thinks they know me..." as a closing argument seems to really seal the deal. "You don't see me now / You ask yourself why / My crown is back / And it's way too high." Is this a bit of healthy self irony, or are we to take the word "high" as a reference to metaphetamine, the backwoods of Louisiana and fake cocks ? Decisions, decisions. Also interesting, is someone asking himself "why is the crown back ?" or "why doesn't he see her ?" Decisions again. This might eventually evolve into a sort of new feminist literature, something a la Luce Irigaray, so stupid as to be almost funny, so absurd as to be almost unassailable. "The sense that is not one" sort of thing. "For you to be in my presence / Especially my son / You should bow down / I've only just begun." Why is it I have the eerie feeling this fragment talks directly to me? Yet another clear sign of true, eternal art. Why should I bow down? I am certainly not her son, or maybe what she means is that if I were to bow down in prayer, she'd appear with the son ? A sort of Mary with child, a Madonna if you will ? Hmm... The guilt you fed me / Made me weak. / The voodoo you did / I couldn't speak. Could she not speak because of the voodoo ? Or about the voodoo ? How do you "do voodoo" ? Is it similar to doing food, Jason Biggs style ? You notice how the readers are induced to ask themselves questions, which is good. The social aspect of Mrs Spear's poetry is thus apparent. She does not aim to merely spurt words, assembled together in defiance of all sense or reason. She has a mission, she serves a purpose. And she makes the reader ask questions, particularly difficult questions. "You're awakening / The phone is ringing. / Resurrection of my soul / The fear I'm bringing." Openly admitting she's a harpy, the sort that brings fear upon her hapless victims. Steel claws and hardened beaks, the Greeks said, and it sounds about right. This kind of honesty takes courage, even if it's safely buried away, entombed so to speak in the collected grime of fifty generations of non-English. "What will you say / And what will you do? / She's not the same person that you're used to." Who ? "You trick me one, twice, now it's three." There is a missing, yet clearly implied verse here, "I'm clearly stupid, let me be." "Look who's smiling now / Damn, it's good to be me!" The advantage of the proverbial monkey with a typewriter. It doesn't have to read, it can just keep right on writing, leaving us stuck with trying to make sense of it. And make sense we will. In conclusion, let us observe that Mrs Spears can shake it just as well as a certain gentleman of by comparison undeserved fame. We can't be sure if her crown is too high, but his certainly is, and the hordes of witless commentators would be well advised to move on to more curvy, satisfying subjects. This new Sappho of Lesbos, the ancient Greek name of Louisiana, is certainly deserving of the crown of laurel. Let her have it so we can have some peace. This article contains 1 references. How many did you find ? |