meltdown
09/21/2007
Amy Winehouse at the MOBOs -- Back to Black, or Back to Rehab?
Is Amy Winehouse pulling a Britney Spears? The "Rehab" singer's performance at the MOBO awards may not have been quite the trainwreck that Spears's VMA debacle was, but it was certainly enough to raise some eyebrows.
Winehouse wasn't exactly helped any by the tacky she's-a-fuckup-but-we-love-her-anyway intro, but her glassy-eyed confusion during "Tears Dry on Their Own" and her mumble-mouthed incoherence on "Me and Mr. Jones" were what really sealed the deal. Also not helping subdue the chatter were the leaked reports of her backstage rider demands: two bottles each of Jack Daniels, Rioja, and Champagne, a large bottle of vodka, and two 24 bottle cases of Heineken.
Here's the thing, though: I'm all for spotting a celeb meltdown in the making, but, well, that's how Amy Winehouse always looks when she performs. I, personally, have never seen her clear-eyed or witnessed a performance where I could understand a damn word she was singing. She was already, at best, a bleary-eyed mushmouth, and at worst a woman in a steady drug-addled holding pattern. So I honestly don't know if she's really doing any worse than before.
Which begs the question: How do you know if someone's in a downward spiral if their normal standard of behavior is so far off from, well, normal?
09/10/2007
Britney Spears VMA Performance, Giving MTV Awards Less
Britney Spears' new single "Gimme More" isn't such a bad song. The remix with TI is even better. Britney's performance of "Gimme More" at MTV's Video Music Awards, on the other hand, was really just... depressing.
In fact, the word "performance" is such a vast overstatement of what Britney did, I don't even know what word I could put in its place to adequately describe what really happened. Is there a verb for "show up and look incredibly unenthused while lip-synching badly and occasionally walking to another part of the stage?"
Wearing practically nothing and throwing in the occasional bump & grind, Britney should, in theory, come off as a mesmerizing vixen. Instead, she just seems tired and almost resentful to be there, as if to say, "Sure, you can wake me up from my nap and make me do lame choreography, but you can't make me like it."
The last minute is particularly painful; at that point, the only thing Britney could do to make things more morosely lethargic would be to lie down and finish the song while chain-smoking and eating Cheetos.
Sexy Britney was fun. Crazy Britney was fun, for a while, at least. Sad, limp Britney? Not fun. Kind of a downer. Somebody get this girl a Red Bull and some love, STAT.
