I am totally not her target audience (I’m 48, female, straight), so I hope I may be forgiven for not getting her at all.
She’s inescapable at the moment, since she apparently has a new album coming out. She was on the cover of “Entertainment Weekly,” and ABC is been building to her sweeps concert special on its “news” shows recently. (How much should we read into the fact that it was Diane Sawyer, not Barbara Walters, who interviewed her in prime time?)
Can she sing? Apparently she can dance – or at least shake her money-maker. She can take off her clothes. Her stomach is very taut. She’s not afraid to French Madonna. (And who was using who in that clinch?)
Who is her target audience? And what are they seeing when they watch her? What are they hearing when they listen to her?
Any explanations at all would be very helpful.
twicks, shaking her head over what “these young people” are up to these days.
Actually, I don’t think it’s about snaring the target audience any more.
I think it’s about snaring the paparazzi, and convincing THEM that YOU are what a given audience WANTS.
I have yet to encounter anyone in Britney’s target audience who thinks she’s hot stuff, aside from any number of teenage boys who wouldn’t exactly kick her out of bed, so to speak.
This does not mean that they buy her albums… although it does help sell copies of “Rolling Stone” and other magazines that feature her in various states of undress…
She is the perfect, pre-packaged, audio-visual product. Pre-teen, teen, and twenty-something females want to be her, and those same males (and then some) want to, ahem, f*** her.
In short, her success is due to her looks. What’s not to get?
I don’t like her music anymore, but come on; her appeal is precisely the same as any number of female pop artists. She’s sexy and she performs catchy dance tunes. I think it’s pretty obvious what the appeal is even if you don’t have to like it.
Who’s her audience? Kids, obviously, because kids like catchy dance music and they look up to attractive people.
What are they hearing? Catcth, well-produced dance music. Catchy dance music has been selling well since the dawn of recorded popular music, so I don’t know how that could come as a surprise. Britney’s catchy dance music is catchier and better-produced than most.
What are they seeing? An attractive young woman who gives them someone to look up to and fantasize being. Popular music stars are generally appealing for one of two reasons; you want to screw them or you want to be them. It Britney’s case it’s mostly the latter, some of the former.
As a twenty-something female, I can assure you that I have never felt any need to be more like Britney Spears.
When her first album came out, she appealed to pre-teens and teen girls because her songs were somewhat catchy and fun. She exuded a sexuality that some teen girls believe they are supposed to have.
But now she’s grown up and so has her audience. The teenagers whom she appealed to have already moved on to artists who can write their own songs and play instruments. But like Master Wang-ka said, she uses sex to sell her image, and that’s a powerful force. It has kept her around longer than Debbie Gibson or Tiffany, but she’ll fade eventually.
You mean like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland…?
Because that’s what she is - a vehicle to sell music and rake in money to the owners of the publishing company and the record company. In the process, if that Primetime show is to be trusted, she became the most powerful person in showbiz, according to Forbes Magazine, and earned 100 million dollars.
I don’t care about her one way or the other. Some songs are catchy, but anyone could’ve recorded them. Her looks are kinda cute, but she’s much to vapid.
I dunno, sometimes I think:
Whenever someone her asks other dopers to explain something, they seldom want to learn how to appreciate it, be it Catcher in the Rye or Ms Spears. It’s just a roundabout way to rant about something they don’t like.
Had the SDMB been around 400 years ago, people would’ve been ranting about that hack of a writer, who’s only writing his plays to please the cheap crowd, using incest, murder, blood, mayhem, and smearing famous people in the process.
Not that I’m implying that Brittney is anywhere near Will Shakespeare, it’s just that I get kinda fed up with people slamming some current popular phenomenon. I’m not saying that is the case of the OP, but I get a distinct feeling that the slamming, on many occasions, is part of trying to convey a feeling of artistic superiority. I don’t have the energy to do a search, because it would be a monumental task to find all posts where someone slams:
Jennifer Anniston, J.Lo., Ben&Jen, Gigli, Gwynneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman, Leo Di Caprio, boy bands, girl bands, C. Aguilera ASF.
I once read that 79% of teenage females feel their appearance is inferior to Brittney Spears. That means 21% of teenage females are delusional nutcases. Anyway, yes, it is all about looks. Within 20 years George Cloony or Tom Cruise will be President (and it will depend on who will provide the most attractive first lady).
I don’t like pop music in general, but I don’t deride Britney’s success. I just hope she knows that she’s not unbelievably talented, just unbelievably lucky.
And I don’t think its acurate to compare her to, say, Madonna, whom I also don’t much care for but recognize as a genuine talent. Britney Spears is not much of an artist. She’s a cute, hot, sexy music-delivery-machine. I defy anyone to try and claim that her two big hits, Hit Me Baby & Oops, I Did it Again aren’t the exact same song rearranged a little.
Plainly, Johnny Bravo’s eleven-year-old sibling has a brain in her head, and will not grow up to be one of those people who will do any freakin’ thing under the sun to be on TV or to get famous or whatever.
We are not all so blessed with self-esteem, or perspective. Or brains, for that matter. Blessed is the Bravette…
Yes and no. What I think The Gaspode is saying is that people are singled out for fame and glory all the time, and that history will determine which of these are meant for eternity, so to speak. No one barely even mentions the Spice Girls anymore, while at the time they seemed like a sensation of Beatle-esque proportions. Regardless of talent, Sinatra, Crosby and Garland are like Britney in the sense that they were just record/film company vessels to sell someone’s elses music. You might say that those three were far more talented than Britney, but that’s all hindsight, and there’s no telling what future generations will think of her.
I’m strangely drawn to Britney. She is the complete personification of everything I hated about high school, but that first video, with the schoolgirl outfit…
Oops. I did it again.:smack:
I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact she’ll be washed up by the time she is 23. Or, she could be just like Madonna, and keep reinventing herself, you know, start studying the Kabbala on Mondays, and playing Dominatrix on Tuesdays, flirting with Antonio Banderas on Fridays. God, I hope she doesn’t have a kid. She’d probably name it some idiotic thing like Princess Spears. Because, like, Prince is such a great artist, and she, like, totally thinks of him as her main influence, but she had a girl…
