It was only years later, during a long stint working in Siberia, a five-month stretch when my loneliness, so to speak, was killing me, that my resolve to ignore the mainstream finally began to melt—all because of Britney Spears. At the time, my work kept me traveling constantly. I spent many of my nights on the Trans-Siberian Express, going to sleep in one province and waking up the next morning hundreds of miles away. When I wasn’t working, I would still go out exploring with my old Hasselblad, photographing midget circus performers, male strippers, a man in Tomsk who shared a one-bedroom apartment with eleven cats and a dead tree. It was as though, having run out of U.S. territory to be weird on, I had upped the ante by committing myself to documenting some of the most obscure denizens of one of the most obscure territories on Earth. But being weird full-time was hard work. It required eating lots of bad food. It necessitated the frequent use of squat toilets. Worst of all: it left me prone to unhealthy bouts of nostalgia. I was weird, but I was weak. The sight of a dusty Snickers bar in the window of a candy kiosk was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I missed America in all its mass-produced, culture-annihilating glory.
Throughout my epic tour of the world’s least-heard-of places, there was only one constant, one never-varying soundtrack to even the most unlikely expedition, and that was Britney Spears’s new hit, “Toxic.” Or, to put it more accurately, the Swedish production duo Bloodshy & Avant’s new hit, “Toxic.” Actually, if you listen to the way the backup vocals swell suspiciously whenever any real singing is required, you start to wonder how much Britney really had to do with this song. But let’s not quibble! The first time I heard it was in the overheated restaurant of the Hotel
Krasnoyarsk. There I was, having just returned to my table from the breakfast buffet with a bowl of cereal soaked in kefir and a mug of instant coffee, when I noticed the video blaring out of the television bolted to the wall in front of me.
The video begins with Britney on an airplane, playing the role of slutty stewardess. After serving some passengers their food using primarily her butt muscles, she lures an unsuspecting fat guy into the toilet for a make-out session, only to pull his face off and discover he is secretly a totally hot guy(!). Then Britney disappears—perhaps sucked through the airplane’s waste disposal system—only to emerge as a red-haired, leather-clad dominatrix, clutching Tyson Beckford’s back as they zoom through Paris on a motorcycle. From there it’s on to a spaceship designed by Ikea to pick up a green elixir and dance amid red laser beams in a tunnel. After some random footage from what appears to be somebody else’s shampoo commercial, Britney transforms into a black-haired vixen and cleverly suction cups her way up the side of a building to break into the hot-guy-from-the-airplane’s hotel room. Once inside, she is torn between the desire to make out with him and the desire to beat him up but eventually settles for just pouring the green elixir down his throat. That done, Britney runs away, jumping off the balcony, and lands right back in the airplane just in time to alert her passengers to stow their tray tables, using mainly her breasts. Intercut throughout the entire video is footage of Britney writhing around seductively wearing nothing but some glitter artfully applied with a Q-tip. The song won Spears her first and only Grammy. The video cost one million dollars.
From that moment on, “Toxic” followed me everywhere. And I mean everywhere; there was no escape, no hope of refuge even in the deepest, most godforsaken outposts of Siberia. On a bus rattling its way toward the village of Ongudai in distant Altai Republic, as “Toxic” assaulted a smattering of stone-faced
Babushkas, I remember getting angry. Rally yourselves, Comrades, I thought to myself. Fight the imperialist invaders! Doesn’t Russia have its own cheesy blondes? Its own terrible pop music? But the Babushkas endured Britney without blinking. They had survived purges and the gulag, mass deprivation on an unimaginable scale. Britney was nothing—a mere hemorrhoid on the vast buttock of Russian suffering.
Somewhere, I pictured a marketing executive at Britney’s label, Jive Records, standing over a digital map of the world studying mysterious clusters of pulsating LEDs, his finger traveling to a lone yellow blip, glowing in the dark penumbra of Russia’s Arctic north like a french fry in outer space. Pressing an intercom button, he speaks:
“Jeeves? How is our market saturation in Siberia?”
“One hundred percent, sir. We have achieved maximum coverage.”
“Is that right? Because I have some data here that shows there is a man in the Taymyr Autonomous Okrug, not far from the city of Dudinka, who has yet to hear the hit single ‘Toxic.’”
“Some of these rural, ice-bound regions are extremely isolated, sir, well beyond the reach of the average radio signal.”
“That’s no excuse, Jeeves.”
“Roger that, sir. I will contact our media buyer to increase radio presence in the Taymyr Autonomous Okrug immediately.”
“See that you do, Jeeves. See that you do.”
My father told me that back when he was a soldier in the Soviet army, the same two songs played all day long over the barrack’s loudspeaker. The first was “Za Togo Parnya,” about a soldier whose soul mate died during the war. The second, somewhat paradoxically, was a song written by a member of the indigenous Chukcha whose chorus went, “We will ride on deer into the dawn. You will see that the north is boundless and I am giving it to you.” Papa’s reaction to this aural onslaught followed the
Kübler-Ross model: his initial denial deepened into anger before culminating in eventual acceptance. And now that Siberia had become my personal Britney Spears boot camp, I too began to feel the effects of indoctrination. At first, the change was subtle. “Toxic” simply failed to annoy me anymore. And then soon enough—it could have been days or weeks or months later; I was somewhere, perhaps a salad bar in Kemerovo with plastic tongs suspended over the pickled herring—I found myself mouthing the words. A bit listlessly, true, but still. Then one day I simply woke up one morning with “Toxic” already thrumming through my thoughts, the start-up sound to my brain’s computer.
Was “Toxic” a good song? I didn’t know anymore. I was no longer fit to judge. There were more powerful forces at work here, engineering an allure that went far beyond the matter of the song’s actual goodness. Millions of dollars had been spent on my conversion, the bandwidth of entire nations brought to heel. And some small part of me, I admit, was flattered by the attention. Britney Spears’s music sounded like money, true, but it gave me a feeling that only money could buy.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering where all this would lead. Every addiction starts with a harmless gesture—a puff, a taste, a sip, a snort. I would start off humming one Britney Spears song under my breath in Siberia and end up folding tube tops for a living at a Hot Topic in a mall on Staten Island, with nothing to look forward to but nights of scanning QVC for deals on gold plated jewelry. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that liking this kind of music
did
something to you, hollowed you out. What about that lost decade I spent lolling around on the carpet in my parents’ living room, sucking on Capri Sun and mouthing the words along with Milli Vanilli? Even as my foot tapped along, I was filled with an infinite sadness. The sadness of every thirteen-year-old girl who loves to sing, who spends days staring into the flickering television screen at another singing girl who scarcely
seems real. The thirteen-year-old girl who tries and tries to figure out a way to somehow get from her kitchen, with its humming appliances and sticky vinyl flooring and crushing normalcy, to that glittering, magical place. And then comes to the realization that it just can’t be done.
It was Konst who first introduced me to the concept of “Growing into the Universal,” a philosophy that was downright heroinlike in its ability to make my qualms about liking Britney go away. We met at a seminar in Novosibirsk, where Konst was working as an English translator, and even before we were introduced, I’d already taken notice of him in the halls. A heavyset man who bore more than a passing resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock, he favored bowler hats, chunky black glasses with clear lenses, and what appeared to be t-shirts from Brooklyn Industries, though of course that wasn’t possible, was it? Over lunch one day, we found ourselves sharing a table in a cavernous hall, empty save for the enormous bouquet of fake flowers stapled to the wall, its dusty plastic vines trailing eerily all the way down to the floor.
“So what do you do back in New York?” Konst asked. I noticed that his English was impeccable, with only the faintest hint of accent.
“I work. I sing in a band too, and sometimes we play clubs in the city.” I had long since put away my own Maxi Mouse street amp and upgraded to “real” venues, even though my songs were no less depressing and turgid.
“Really? What clubs?”
“Well, you probably wouldn’t have heard of them …” because you live in what appears to be a total nonplace, you poor thing, I finished in my head.
“Try me.”
“Well, our last show was at this place called Lit Lounge—”
“Oh, I know Lit. Cool place.”
“How do you know Lit?”
“Nick Zinner likes to hang out there, right?”
“How do you
know
that?”
“Gothamist.”
My forkful of fried beetroot froze halfway to my mouth. A man from the armpit of Siberia was telling me things I didn’t know about a rock club across the river from my apartment in Hoboken.
The next afternoon, between sessions, Konst pulled me aside in the stairwell.
“Did you know that Matthew Barney is looking for interns?”
“How do you
know
that!?!”
“I read it on Gawker.”
“What’s Gawker?”
“What’s Gawker? Are you fucking kidding me?” And with that, Konst pulled a flash drive out of his pocket and waggled it at me. “Hey, what do you say tonight my iTunes come over and have sex with your iTunes?”
We became friends and I learned that Konst was a recovering poet and aspiring screenwriter. He had grown up in Berdsk, a city not far from Novosibirsk, a place of anonymous plants making anonymous parts for anonymous weapons that distinguished itself mainly by virtue of not being Iskiteem, another city down the road, built around a cement factory that Berdsk dwellers had commemorated in rhyme:
On top there’s dirt, below there’s steam
That’s the city of Iskiteem!
Konst was kicked out of high school in tenth grade, not long after
Lenin’s Path
, the city newspaper, published an article declaring
that all punk rockers were Nazis. Without a higher education, his options looked grim: a choice between either joining the army and risking getting sent to Afghanistan, or becoming a
fartsovshik
, selling jeans in the market. His father ended up finding him a job making coffins at a local factory instead. He spent his nights reading—Babel, Olesha, Nabokov—and attending the Berdsk School of Working Youth, a kind of reform school for Soviet losers. Then, one day, Konst took the entrance exams for Novosibirsk State University, one of the top schools in the country. To everyone’s surprise, he passed.
Once in college, Konst became a full-fledged intellectual, able to discourse at length and in detail on any given subject: the Tartu school of semiotics, transformational grammar, the impact of
lubok
on Soviet poster art … But by the time I met him, this zeal for all things obscure, quirky, brainy, and difficult was something he was determined to beat out of himself. Konst called this quixotic mission “Growing into the Universal,” a phrase he lifted from a book by Hans-Georg Gadamer called
Truth and Method
. One day, while perched on the Ikea sofa he and his girlfriend, Erika, had shipped to Siberia from Moscow, I asked Konst to explain exactly what “Growing into the Universal” was supposed to mean.
“It is the search for the mythological archetypes resting in the subconscious, the kind of iconography so primal that it appeals to everyone.”
“Okay.” Whatever that meant. “Like?”
“Like guns. Or girls. As Godard once said, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. I might be wrong about this, but I am also considering that maybe helicopters are universal. And car chases—car chases are
definitely
universal. I can watch the same car-chase scenes over and over, even if it’s a movie I’ve seen before. I get so caught up in the moment that I still find myself wondering what’s going to happen next.”
I wasn’t sure whether I agreed with him on this point. Car chases made me tired. I found shoot-outs boring too, and could probably fall asleep watching four people sink to the bottom of a lake, trapped in a Toyota Camry, pounding on the windows and screaming as the cold water hit their privates. But Konst looked ready to dispatch all kinds of box-office statistics against me to prove his point, and besides, what did I know about the universal? My idea of a good movie was a documentary about the building of a hydroelectric dam across the Yenisey River.
There was really no mystery as to why Konst had come to embrace the universal and I had turned my back on it. While I spent the eighties watching ladies with impossible hairdos wrestle one another into swimming pools on
Knots Landing
and
Falcon Crest
, Konst was watching Soviet humanist dramas about real people living real lives and having real problems. Movies with titles like
Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears
and
The Irony of Fate
.