HBO has Britney Spears performing live from the MGM Grand in
Las Vegas, on November 18. In case you didn't already know,
this show will be her very first live television concert. Las
Vegas will be just one stop on Britney's 2001 US Tour.
Britney's Las Vegas
show Sunday night gave fans - and 800,000 U.S. soldiers
stationed around the world plenty of fodder for sweet dreams.
From her sequence
Elvis white jumpsuit, to the fans dressed as Elvis in the
front row, Britney put on definitely Vegas show. The concert
began with a host informing the audience of the night's theme:
Dream within A Dream. Turning on a metal wheel, that looked
like something out of a post-apocalyptic vampire movie, a
black lace-clad Britney emerged from the fiery stage singing
"Oops I Did it Again." Her black and white-costumed dancers
join her for the next number, "Crazy" After several futuristic
dance sequences, the show took a childlike turn as a
storyteller (played by Jon Voigt) tells young Britney a
bedtime story, inspiring a dream where she becomes a mystical
music-box dancer
The similarities between
the lives of Britney and
Elvis, two of the most
successful acts in the
history of pop music, are
striking. Born in
Mississippi more than 45
years apart, their lives
have followed a similar
course, encompassing not
only No 1 singles,
Grammys, wealth and fame,
but substance abuse,
divorce and a dubious
attraction to Las Vegas.
Last week, Spears launched
her new album, Blackout,
to critical applause, but
after a year of
increasingly unpredictable
behaviour at luxury drug rehab, attacks on the
paparazzi and an ongoing
child custody battle, it
remains to be seen whether
the Princess of Pop can
navigate the immense
celebrity - and attendant
excesses - that destroyed
the King.
Both
performers owe much of
their ascent to stardom to
the marketing of their
sexual allure. The Elvis
controversy was sparked by
a performance on The
Milton Berle Show in 1956,
during which he performed
a cover of Hound Dog, a
song which, like Spears'
1998 debut ... Baby, One
More Time, carried blatant
sexual undertones. But it
was the performance as
much as the lyrics. With
Elvis it was the pelvis,
the seductive shake that
drove female fans to
distraction and saw one of
his early TV performances,
on the Ed Sullivan Show,
censored so that viewers
saw only Presley's upper
body. Britney, of course,
skipped into the public
consciousness
provocatively clad in
school uniform and
pigtails. Her currency was
raised by the disclosure
that for all her saucy
cavorting, she was in fact
a good little church-going
girl and a virgin to boot.
There have been
other visual similarities
along the way - the
hair-cutting for example:
Elvis was publicly shorn
for his stint in the
military; Britney, for
less explicable reasons,
wielding the clippers
herself before the baying
paparazzi. They have both,
too, demonstrated a love
for cat-suits and sequins,
and last week, as Britney
unveiled her newly
augmented pout, there was
an echo of the King's
famous lip-curl.
