Weighing In On Britney, Madonna & Demi

I've seen footage of Britney Spears as a little girl, singing confidently and on-key. After she'd had a few hits, I saw her sing live on "Saturday Night Live," just sitting on a stool with a hand-held microphone, and thought she did a good job. But Britney's appeal has been more about her hot dancer's body and her choreography - some nice moves, but certainly not too difficult for most high school drill teams to pull off -- than about her voice.

In case you are Amish or from the planet Neptune, I should mention that the voice we've heard on CDs and in concert was created in a studio. (To find out how modern hit songs are manufactured, just click here.) In concert or on TV, Britney is always lip-synching to a backing track. If you think that's because she can't be expected to sing while she's dancing, you haven't ever been to a Broadway show. And her songs, while catchy in the beginning, are now just tuneless and annoying attempts to be seductive, delivered in that generic overproduced whisper that also marks the "music" of Janet Jackson and countless other pop and hip-hop artists who really don't have much voice at all. (To be fair to Britney, these other artists also lip-synch.)

I don't know what happened to Britney's voice. Maybe she just got so accustomed to lip-synching that she lost her confidence for singing live. Or maybe she spends so much time in loud clubs, talking over music, smoking Marlboros and pouring hard liquor down her throat, that she's fried her vocal chords. Whatever the reason, Britney is a musical performer who never sings.

So what does she have left? Her ability to lip-synch, her smooth dance moves, her hot, sexy body? As we saw on the recent MTV Music Video Awards show, the lip-synching and the dance moves didn't come off well. Some of the choreography didn't come off at all. Later, it was revealed that Britney was 4-1/2 hours late to rehearsal and showed up with a frozen margarita in her hand after clubbing all night. She has only herself to blame for that, but with all the personal trauma she's been through in recent years, self-inflicted or not, and the constant public scrutiny, I'm wondering whether--deep down--she even wants to be on stage. (Check out late-night host Craig Ferguson's monologue on the relentless criticism and joking about Britney.) If she doesn't, she should go somewhere secluded, find some serious help, and get her life together. This will take some time. There are plenty of attractive girls with talent who'd love to be pop superstars and who would definitely show up for rehearsal.

She did make the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and the feature story is all about her, but I'm sorry: there is such a thing as bad publicity, and this is it.

Some might say that Britney's missing rehearsal was a sign of her overconfidence. I speculate that it was the opposite. This was to be The Comeback, and she must've been feeling more pressure than she could handle. So she avoided the situation, preferring to down drink after drink of liquid confidence to get herself up on that stage. Yeah, that helped. Good plan.

So, simply through lack of preparedness, her dance moves didn't click. She wasn't sure of the lyrics, either, even though they seemed to consist of nothing more than "gimme, gimme, gimme," so at some point she simply stopped mouthing them.

That leaves her hot, sexy body.

The Internet has exploded with comments, pro and con, about Britney's appearance on that show. They range from "Most women would kill to have that body" (probably true) to "Britney is a fat tub of lard" (a gross exaggeration). Most of the "fat" remarks have been incredibly snide, and I'd be willing to bet that most were made by people who weigh more than Britney. Weight seems to be something that no one can get exactly right, and yet it's sooooo important. Opinions vary, and everyone has to "weigh in."

Two pregnancies - along with, it must be said, mass quantities of fried chicken and tater tots - had wrought havoc on Britney's trim, sexy body long before the MTV show, but she had gotten herself into pretty fair shape for The Comeback. It was revealed later that she rejected the flattering outfit created for her as "not sexy enough" in favor of the tiny black bra and little-boy shorts she must've been carrying around in her purse. That must've been the margaritas talking. Or maybe it was the outfit she'd been clubbing in the night before.

The body that might have looked stunning in the other outfit definitely lost its "wow factor" in the bra-and-shorts. Britney doesn't seem to understand what "sexy" is. It's not getting out of a limo in a short skirt and no panties. It's not wearing as little clothing as you can get away with on TV, especially if the outfit is unflattering. In other words, this discussion shouldn't even be about Britney's weight. It should be about her taste and her judgment.

Also, have you noticed that the emphasis on super-thinness seems confined to white girls? Beyonce has a little extra poundage - temporarily lost to shoot "Dreamgirls," but now comfortably back on -- and so does Jennifer Lopez. They are both considered sexy. Queen Latifah's career hasn't been hurt by her size. It's only the white singers who have to be matchstick thin. I just read a capsule review of white blues singer Joss Stone that mentioned she'd finally lost her baby fat; would that have been said of a black singer? Unlike Britney, Joss Stone is a tremendous talent, but we're still talking about her weight.

When looking at Britney's career, it might be useful to compare her with Madonna. Both started as hot, young dancer/singers with lithe bodies and small voices. Both had the early success in pop music that's typically associated with flashes-in-the-pan. Both appealed to a young, fickle demographic. Yet Madonna built on her early success, while Britney soon faltered. I'd say - and Madonna would no doubt agree - that the critical difference was Madonna's steely determination and singlemindedness. Critics say that Madonna has constantly "reinvented herself" (a term I hate; I'll have to write about that sometime), but I don't think that's it. Her various incarnations were always expressions of the Madonna we knew; the important thing is that she grew as an artist. By the time she sang the torch song "Sooner Or Later" for the film Dick Tracy, her voice had become a lovely thing. The chirpiness heard on early hits such as "Borderline" was gone, replaced by a rich, emotional, mature sound. She sings live in concert, though probably with a backing track, and she's kept her dancer's body, even at almost twice Britney's age.

Ironically, the very maturity that transformed her voice has been her biggest liability in the pop music world. Now in her late 40s, Madonna is the brunt of jokes about her age. It doesn't even seem to matter that she's kept her body in top form. Weight is something virtually all of us can do something about, but age...well. No one, repeat, NO ONE can turn back the clock.

Case in point: Demi Moore, who is in the news. (If an over-40 actress is in the news, you can bet the subject will be age.) In the London Daily Mail, Lucretia Munro writes that four years after undergoing a massively expensive, top-to-toe makeover, Demi has failed to win the big Hollywood roles she'd hoped for. It's estimated that she spent close to half a million dollars on personal trainers, nutritionists, yoga instructors and various surgical and cosmetic procedures. Those who follow such things say she even had an operation on her knees to lift the sagging skin. Demi showed off her lean, sexy body in 2003, emerging from the sea in a skimpy bikini for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

Since that time, she's appeared in only two films, with two more to be released this fall, while ex-husband Bruce Willis (almost a decade older than she) has appeared in 13.

Demi has said she hoped to overturn the belief that juicy roles should not be given to older actresses, but it doesn't seem to be working out that way, even though she's looking great. And the problem seems to be unique to Hollywood; European filmmakers tend to care much less about it. "If we are told we are not valuable once we hit 30, it is a problem," Demi said. "We have to say, 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.'"

The same article quotes Sharon Stone as saying, "When I went to the Oscars, it was like, 'Oh, there's been an archeological dig and look what we've found, a 40-year-old."

Her body looks great, too, but you don't see too many Sharon Stone movies coming out these days, do you? So maybe Britney Spears should just concentrate on looking like a normal, healthy woman, growing up, finding better friends, getting to know her kids, seeing a good therapist and living a happy life. Even if she starved herself into a size 2 and decided to get serious about a comeback, she'd have to realize that untalented pop stars have an even shorter shelf life than Hollywood actresses.