SECOND ROUND

(8) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll”
rolled
(1) Britney Spears, Toxic
186-132
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll” and the Monsters of Influence By Erin Keane

First, the invocation: Nick Zinner’s synth-ceremonial curtain-raising, an indicator that something electric and epic is about to begin. Karen O, conjured, draped in fabric, raises high her mic like the Statue of Liberty in neon kicks, and layers on her incantation: lose yourself, stop thinking so damn hard, follow your instincts, and sure, swallow some of these, maybe. You summon me like that, I tuck my flip phone I’m too broke to upgrade into the tragic pockets of my skinny jeans, point a drink to the sky, and heed the call. It’s the end of a decade that began with terror, hung together with paranoia, and was only just beginning to reveal how much we were being watched. Facebook had overtaken MySpace and Twitter was still a bunch of nerds shooting the shit, but we were excited about the president still, and it felt good to be in Chicago’s Grant Park, where he had given his election night victory speech last November, and where Yeah Yeah Yeahs were filling in as Lollapalooza headliners after the Beastie Boys bowed out because of Adam Yauch’s diagnosis. We’re two songs in when the dance anthem begins. When Brian Chase’s beat comes in, on the floor is where we already are.
A Yeah Yeah Yeahs jam, especially one like “Heads Will Roll,” is no passive experience but tell that to the bemused audience in Richard Ayoade’s floor show-turned-massacre video. (Indie rock videos were important again for a while there, thanks to music blogs.) The video opens on Zinner’s hands on a light-up synthesizer playing the overture—what Andy Thompson of the delightfully lo-fi site Planet Mellotron dismisses as “really obviously sampled strings,” sourced from the Mellotron M4000D (“described by the manufacturer as 'a Mellotron'. No. No, it isn't.”—Ibid.), and specifically, from the Sound Card 02’s Roxy SFX 2 series, which you can hear in its unadulterated state on YouTube, where in comments, Zinner’s exact sequence can be found. Then the camera pans up and across to Karen, a Queen of Hearts fancy-dress fetish dream, all cellophane and red satin and chrome studs and scarlet lips and those iconic bangs framing her kohl-rimmed eyes. Chase in shades, impenetrable, and the camera spins and we see the audience from the band’s point of view. Couples at little cloth-covered, civilized tables. Watching. Not waiting, exactly. They don’t know something’s coming.
Fifteen years should be far enough in the rearview to say something definitive about the sound of a dance hit, and yet. Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out their third full-length album, It’s Blitz!, in 2009, locking down Karen O’s pedestal in the rock-god pantheon with the one-two punch of its opening tracks. From the first lines of “Zero,” it’s clear It’s Blitz! is an elevation from their previous records, though the precise effect is hard to put into words, a common limitation of writing truthfully about music that we can swaddle in instrumentation details and production reports and clumsy metaphors but never quite overcome. You can call it a ripening of the sound, I guess, but also, it’s not simply that artists—the trio, producer Dave Sitek—plus time equals change, though there had been plenty of that on display: Karen’s fall off the stage and recovery, her move to Los Angeles, that SPIN cover story for Show Your Bones, etc. Take a fist, explode your fingers into a sunburst, trace an arc in the air, like you’ve just pulled off a magic trick. It’s like that. They kind of had to. If a blistering debut like Fever to Tell is a birth announcement via dynamite and the introspection of Show Your Bones a declaration of survival, with a third album a band enters kill or be killed territory. They’re either on their way out or they’re here to fucking stay. (Back then, anyway. Now who knows what you get before the algorithms bury you alive.) It’s Blitz!, and “Heads Will Roll” specifically, displays earned confidence: What doesn’t kill you gets cut up into confetti and blown back at the world.
“Every now and then I’ll hear, ‘Thank you so much, you really got me through high school.’ Or ‘Thank you, you really got me through freshman year of college.’ Or ‘Thank you so much, you really …’ I have heard that from fans who don’t really know what to say to me and I don’t know what to say back, except for, ‘Oh really? Thank you! I’m happy I got you through that,’” Karen says in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, the indispensable account of the New York City Aughts rock revival. “But really in my head I’m like, ‘I manifested that shit for you! I wanted to get in there like a motherfucker and that’s what I did.’
 “Heads Will Roll” certainly manifested some shit for me. Alice taking over Wonderland and turning it into a revenge blood bath was something I didn’t even know I needed until I heard it. One Christmas, some twenty-five years before this song came out, my uncle gave me the Junior Illustrated Library hardcover copy of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, with John Tenniel’s almost-grotesque illustrations in full color on the cover. There’s Alice, looking hassled and indignant, as the Queen of Hearts points at her, commanding. There’s no dialogue bubble emerging from the sovereign’s mouth, but there’s also no mistaking the sentence: Off with her head! The mock turtle and the dodo and the griffon lurk in the background making comments, while the Mad Hatter gawks, useless. I’ve met those dudes a million times over since I first read the book. (Speaking of dudes, another standout moment on Planet Mellotron: Thompson deeming the cello on Oasis’ “Wonderwall” “[f]ar more memorable than it deserves to be” and I’m sorry for the intrusion but I’ve become obsessed with this website, I love contrarian purists, and would absolutely binge a one-and-done season of a TV show about this guy but only if Richard Ayoade directed it. Anyway!) Pretty much everything I needed to know about being born into a finite human-girl life and growing up in a hostile world I absorbed from this book, buried deep in anarchic nonsense so I’d have a shot at paying attention.
The story begins with a jump down a rabbit hole and ends with a death sentence and in between, Alice encounters tests everywhere she goes. She stumbles through a series of nightmare scenarios, quizzed by disturbed creatures who don’t care if she fails, set up for breaches of etiquette she’s never taught, scorned for being a stupid girl, her disgusting, out-of-control body berated at every turn. Eating mystery cakes. Drinking off-label potions. Swimming in a pool of her own tears. Even though she’s never alone, throughout her adventures Alice is still lonely. But when she’s put on trial, she outsmarts the system, escapes her own elimination, and lives to wake another day.
“Was I the same when I got up this morning?” Alice wonders to herself at one point. “But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?”
2009 wasn’t the exact year I started taking that question seriously—that was more of a drawn-out process, a test of how long one could be considered “emerging”—but we can ballpark it. I had had my extensive warm-up, my twenties, all those nights in dive bars and at the shows, every band a bar band back then, some you’d recognize by name now and others you wouldn’t unless you had been there. And my god, the iPod changed everything—a whole CD collection the size of a pack of the cigarettes you could no longer smoke inside, a choose-your-own-adventure with every spin of the clickwheel: the White Stripes, the Walkmen, Interpol, all the bands who sounded old and new at once. If I am telling time by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and why wouldn’t I, when Fever to Tell came out I was in the throes of a prolonged and poorly-hidden adolescence that had bled into my mid-twenties, getting an MFA in poetry, living in a starter home and marriage, both of which I would leave by the time their EP Is Is hit iTunes.
These days the last thing anyone wants to hear are the leftover neuroses of those tagged “academically gifted” as a child, and believe me, I get it. But I regret to admit there was a time—around my second semester of graduate school—when I said out loud that if I hadn’t published my first full-length book by the time I turned thirty I would consider myself a failure. (By failure I meant regular.) This notion—that I had until thirty to break through—would have been laughable in more youth-oriented disciplines like garage rock, but it’s what the literary world told us in the pre-Instagram era: That a writer of thirty-nine, even, could still receive a meaningful title of “Younger Poet,” which was clearly the next best thing to simply being young. What better way to stay younger forever than on a campus? According to our professors, all we would need was that first book, a handful of letters, and a little teaching experience to land a tenure-track teaching job and be set, more or less, for life. Being a (lower-case for us losers) younger poet was fun, and I don’t know why I was in such a hurry to outgrow it. Sure, there was the enduring of things like the calculation of how badly it would, hypothetically, screw my chances to get published in a print journal I wanted on my CV (online journals were considered borderline then, imagine!) if I called out the editor staring down my shirt in the conference hotel lobby bar. But there was also driving my VW with the top down singing “Y Control” and “Maps” through the suicide curves and cackling hills of the rural corners of the region, on my way to present at a conference, visit a friend’s classroom, give a reading in a little series at a cool coffee shop in the middle of nowhere, hoping the machines wouldn’t drown me out. Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always in rotation for my in-car vocal warmup.
How did all that work out for me? I didn’t have a book out by the time I was thirty, but a week after my birthday, I did land a contract, hallelujah, with an indie label, I mean press. I celebrated by barhopping with dudes who were not my husband, who stayed home because midterm election results or something. He was already an adult; I was getting kicked out of a seedy karaoke bar after one of the guys kicked over a chair singing “Night Moves” and we were deemed too rowdy for a Tuesday night. Je ne regrette rien! By the following spring I was living alone in my own apartment, revising my acknowledgments page, building out my record collection, iPod tucked away in favor of vinyl, and a promise to myself that I would never again be with another guy who wouldn’t dance with me.
Then came the book. I applied to every full-time, permanent or visiting, creative writing job, my new and promising boyfriend—who, yes, would and did dance—said he was open to moving with me wherever the AWP Job List would take us. I remember marveling at how far north the rest of the state of New York actually goes. I was a finalist for one job but didn’t land it. By spring most of those searches had been canceled, victims of the Great Recession, sections re-assigned to adjuncts, where they’ve probably stayed. That boyfriend and I adopted a magnificent shelter cat, and then all three of us signed a lease together timed to the academic calendar and I vowed not to acquire any furniture that wouldn’t be easy to move or leave behind.
Do we ever know when we’re out of the exposition and into the real action until it’s over? If I think about it too much it starts to feel like the whole first decade of this century was an exercise in learning how to survive in the beginning of an end. The next year, there were way fewer jobs and they needed more CV burnishing. I kept at it, got a contract for my second book, the deeper one that would mean my work had legs, not just dirty jokes and a couple of good moves. The summer before it came out, we bounced through that Yeah Yeah Yeahs Lolla set at Grant Park’s bucolic North stage, with its trees and skyline lights as a backdrop. It’s hard to really dance during a festival headliner set—you end up kind of jumping up and down in place for an hour, crushed in with the crowd that’s been drinking giant beers or those weird boxes of wine all day. But we did our best. Everything about the last show of the day feels epic after all the side stage antics and heat-addled mishaps, and this set was no exception. Karen was a controlled explosion; the crowd sang our hearts out on “Maps” as she blipped on the words. I spent the weekend feeling by turns younger and old as hell next to the girls in sundresses young enough to be my students. I was tired of living temporarily. I put away the dream of tenure, and the following month took my first full-time job in journalism, scoring a newspaper staff writer job in the last days of the actual paper claiming to be as important as the website. The buyouts, of course, had already started.
Are any of us aware of the weight of our decisions when we make them, or only in hindsight, when the critics start dissecting our moves? Maybe this was my real talent after all, coming in at the beginning of the end of something, and figuring out how to hide out there in plain sight.

*

Ayaode’s “Heads Will Roll” video really picks up when the main character arrives, a ponytailed werewolf in a skinny tie—tailor, introductions—eyeing the crowd, his prey, with contempt. The audience won’t dance, but he will, and they will watch with fascination.
But first, a word about dancing werewolves: Yes, there’s Michael Jackson’s varsity-jacketed “Thriller” routine and Michael J. Fox boogeying in a white suit and full “Teen Wolf” fur. But also, if you haven’t seen this clip, you really should: there’s Tom Cruise as upstart pool shark Vincent in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 adaptation of The Color of Money, his sequel to The Hustler. Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) is on his way to collect his protégé, a baby-monster he can’t control, who’s showboating as he runs a table. Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is playing over the bar’s sound system, and Vince—wearing a VINCE T-shirt, for chrissakes—is feeling himself and the song. He's sending the balls in one by one, and between, he’s dancing. And there’s this shot, set to Zevon warning us to stay away, where Vince does this little spin then leans down to sink a ball one-handed, and he pauses to grin—presumably he’s aiming this contemptuous pity at his mark, but cut to him looking right at the camera as he bares his teeth and it lands like it’s meant for the viewer. (Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, is a genius too.) The next time the camera is back on Vince we stay with him for a continuous dizzying shot, and with every ball he drops, his arrogance swells, his improvised choreography grows more intricate. He’s wielding his cue like a combat staff, like a sword. He bites off the irresistible line, “his hair was perfect,” as he rakes his fingers through his mane with a leer. I mean, is there anything more terrifying than Tom Cruise’s own teeth?
Back to our wolf: While the band plays cool on stage, our guy’s solo floor show is all balletic menace. The floor lights up in homage but he’s all loose flips and careless elbows, more “Napoleon Dynamite does New Order” than “Billie Jean” en pointe, than “Thriller” precision. A pause, a howl on his lips. Then comes the carnage.
Michael Jackson himself died on June 25, 2009, just about a month after the video for this song, which would hit Number 1 on the Billboard Dance charts on August 1, premiered. How do you outlive a pastiche like that? The night of Jackson’s death, word spread by mouth and text and, probably, Facebook: We’d meet at this intersection and see how big of a party we could throw before we got shut down. This intersection was exactly the kind of spot you’d expect to encounter a flash mob (I’m sorry! It was 2009!) shutting down traffic to “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough.” And all the terrible things we had heard about Michael Jackson were put inside a box and placed on a high shelf for a half-hour of sweaty chaos in the street. We danced, soaked with sweat in the humid river town summer night, like we did when we were kids and “Thriller” first entranced us, like we did in the ‘90s when his elaborate, technically dazzling videos ruled MTV. Almost a decade later, years after I married the boyfriend who went out dancing with me that night, and after I managed to make a career in journalism that feels to this day like it’s borrowed and I’ll have to return it on short notice, we stood outside the Adlon in Berlin where Jackson once dangled his infant son off a balcony with a blanket over his head, and said, Well, that happened here. I have a similar thought when I’m sitting at a red light at that intersection: Once upon a time, when we didn’t pour all our anger or mourning out on the internet, we danced in this spot—not for him, but for our younger selves.
And speaking of monstrous influences, when you’re a girl falling in love with Alice in Wonderland, nobody tells you about the metanarrative surrounding those books. You find that out decades later, and you wonder why so many things you thought were beautiful when you were younger had to have something rotten at their core. What was Charles Dodgson’s damage, exactly? Scholars and historians differ on the specifics, but here’s Virginia Woolf’s observation:  

For some reason, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. … And therefore as he grew older, this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins.

Woolf did have a flair for the devastating detail. The image of “little girls whose frocks he pinned up” lingers terribly, to say nothing of the myriad psychosexual interpretations of his life and rumored predatory designs on a real girl, Alice Lidell; the contemporaneous gossip, the postmortem literary analysis, and the growing acceptance that there was something deeply fucked up and malevolent about this guy whose aesthetics also, oh yeah, course through my veins. Knowing this, what am I supposed to do with Alice’s persistent body horrors? With the sinister depictions of eating and appetite, of the fantasy that should a girl move enough among monsters she could become one herself?
“It’s no use going back to yesterday,” as Alice told the dudes. “I was a different person then.”
These texts shape us before we can know the people who made them or hope to understand their actions. What “Heads Will Roll” does for me—song and video together—is subvert those formational texts, bending their influences into something new and yes, useful. The video’s wolfman is a monster, but he’s defanged on the dancefloor at least, revealed to be just a chaotic terror. And that’s Alice’s voice that Karen is channeling, not any made-up queen’s—she’s giving the orders now, and she’s not going to settle for being made to feel abandoned in Wonderland for one second longer.

Third books function like third albums in a career; mine was a leveling-up, too. It came out almost a decade ago and went out of print nearly as fast, a casualty of the precarious economies of indie houses. (I have never been the major label type.) In that book I wrote a series of “exam” poems, and at readings I would set them up by saying that while I was writing that book, it felt like life was a series of tests I was failing, one by one. Another way of saying I couldn’t answer the riddles because they didn’t make any sense then.
But what if dance til you’re dead isn’t a curse but a blessing, an invitation, one rule worth following. I wrote a better book, and I found a way to teach on my own terms. I’m not younger anymore, and I’m a more resilient writer for it. What I really am is a slow learner. You could call that being a late bloomer, but blooming is just a response to conditions. When you apply the metaphor to a person, it becomes Wonderland-level nonsense.
Back in the wolfman’s dance, by the time the dance floor turns orange, the audience sees all too late what it sees. They can’t outrun him. But when he slashes them with his claws, confetti spills out instead of blood. His monster eyes match Karen’s dress. He takes her down, too: decapitated and bisected across the torso, Black Dahlia-style, she’s still singing. Inside, she’s all red glitter. I think of this image when I contemplate the “dissection” model of writing about art, of slicing something open to see what it’s made of: Was I expecting a raven or a writing desk? And what, together, do I think they would they tell me?

Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poems, and two are even still in print. She’s the editor of The Louisville Anthology and author of Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (both from Belt Publishing), one of NPR’s favorite books of 2022. She teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University and is Chief Content Officer at Salon. She can’t believe she found that photo of herself at the Michael Jackson dance party.

IT’S BRITNEY, BITCH: LISTENING TO “TOXIC” AT THE END OF THE WORLD BY KENDRA DECOLO 

We hear it for the first time in the back of taxis, filter-less cigarettes cutting sparks outside cracked windows. We hear it on the dance floor, air thick with muscles dripped in seance and sweat. We hear it in the laundromat, galactic swish-swish, hear it sipping absinth with someone’s glorious head murmuring between our legs, the smell of spunk and tenderness. We hear it until our veins flush with a thousand tiny sequins and it never once gets old.
If you’re like me, you came to Britney Spears late, understanding her genius only after “Toxic,” the second single off of In the Zone, was released, becoming a massive hit, and in some ways a cross-cultural phenomenon, possessing a soundscape that could have been produced by Beck. Maybe you, too, spent the late 90s feeling resentful of girl pop and boy band culture taking over MTV, eclipsing your beloved plaid-shirted men screaming into the abyss; on the cusp of losing your virginity to a metal drummer and spending most of your time writing poems in a crack den made from the bones of a burnt down mansion, Ani DiFranco’s Dilate concussing through the walls.
But Britney came, fluid and evanescent, delivering us from the murky cum-stained couch of adolescence into the gel-glittered cracks of a true Y2K sexual awakening. She did it without battle cry or sad girl hymn, no empowerment messaging, not even the so-called bottom bitch variety, and so it was easy for us—me—to dismiss the era of girl pop as commercial and exploitative, hiding in my JNCOs, smoking parliaments, because I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
In the Zone, Britney Spears’ fourth album came out three years after the “poor-selling” Britney; the ideal setup for a metamorphosis. In 2004—that gem-drizzled midsection of the naughty noughties—yacht hip hop and proto-indie sleaze ruled the clubs in platinum fizz and filth; those of us who had resisted poptimism either resigned ourselves to it or gleefully gave into its pleasures. We had Napster and Limewire now. No more Tower Records walk of shame. Avril Lavigne could snuggle incognito next to the White Stripes and Aesop Rock. 
In Fall of 2003 I lived in Seville, becoming a pro at dissociating in nightclubs, a stranger often wiping vomit and blood from my face, fucked up because I was in love with a man who couldn’t love me back, who would detail his other conquests and ask for advice. Despite the constant heartache, the most sacred place was the passenger’s seat of his car. Driving through the cathedral and fountain-lined streets, our soundtrack was whatever bootleg he had in his deck: “Cameltoe” by Fannypack [1] or Ann Lee’s “No No No”—the club B-sides. Back home friends in New York were blasting “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” and “Through the Wire.” Dave Chappelle was becoming immortalized as Rick James. But here I was blissfully unaware of the American pop machine, catching only what survived the airwaves and landed in his car.
When “Toxic” first played on his hard-earned, portable car stereo that November, I had nothing to compare it to, but instantly ingested the moment like broken glass in my blood. It was iconic: joyful, low and high-stakes, and different from anything else on the radio. There’s 1980s Bollywood in the samples [2] and James Bond in the DNA; melodic leaps and the breezy-synth textures of Britney Spears’ voice colliding into counterpoint registers, simulating drags of hyperbaric oxygen. The smash-up of jump-cut orchestral strings and surf rock guitar made us feel dangerous and sexy, urgent and silly. We heard it for the first time on the way to a club, but most likely pulled into an abandoned lot, not to fuck around but to turn up the stereo, jump out of the car and dance, smashing our Cruzcampos on the ground like derelict confetti.
“Toxic” wasn’t supposed to be a hit. Cathy Dennis who co-wrote the song said in an interview, “I didn’t even like it! It was just weird. I mean, I wanted it to be weird, but afterwards, I couldn’t stop criticizing it… it’s such a quirky song, I just don’t know how I got away with it!” [3] Britney’s label, Jive Records, wanted the second single to be something more club-friendly, like the almost unlistenable “(I Got That) Boom Boom” But Britney knew exactly what the single should be, and as always, she was right.
My favorite Britney Spears moments are when she embraces her weird, which is to say, the pleasure of being herself. I don’t mean shaving her head or any of the other private moments of despair captured by pariahs for our entertainment. I mean Britney Spears annunciating “Babay Babay” in a way that reinvented the word. Britney Spears in her turquoise flight attendant uniform hunching her shoulders like an alien predator about to attack. And more recently, her Instagram dances, including the ones with knives, which she describes as coming home to her body, a healing.
The most uninteresting songs on In the Zone echo the worst of its era—scuzzy electronica, strategic collaborations, arrangements meant to accompany gin-infused oblivion, passing out or tag-teaming the bartender with your best friend in the bathroom. But the best songs on the album are a revelation, the ones where Pop Princess Britney is full-throated and in control. The songs where she goes for the punk rock gesture, like on “Everything” which sounds like Kate Bush and Mariah Carey’s love child or “Brave New Girl,” how the chord changes and chorus give both Sheryl Crow and Dirty Vegas. You can hear Britney’s willingness to take risks and shed the calculations. To let herself get weird.
Britney’s quirks and self-exposure seemed to only be mainstream-palatable when orchestrated by someone else; ie David LaChappelle and the Teletubby photoshoot; which places us as having power over her—to gatekeep her weirdness. The concept for the “Toxic” video, which is now considered to be one of the most iconic and influential of that era, was largely Britney Spears’ vision. So it isn’t surprising to recall how it was removed from regular viewing hours by MTV and relegated to late-night, (because… Justin Timberlake botched a half-time show and couldn’t take credit for his own lukewarm stunt)... [4] Similarly the “Critical Reception” section of In the Zone’s Wikipedia page reads like an Incel message board. From Rolling Stone: “In the Zone offers strip-club, 1-900 sex, accommodating and hollow. Beyond the glittering beats, Spears sounds about as intimate as a blowup doll."  Jesus. Let that one sink in. Then there was All Music: “…while Aguilera comes across like a natural-born skank, Britney is the girl next door cutting loose at college, drinking and smoking and dancing and sexing just a little too recklessly, since this is the first time she can indulge herself." And possibly the most egregious from Slant: "For a girl who's always seemed too sexed-up for her age, In the Zone finds Britney finally filling her britches, so-to-speak. Her little girl coquettishness actually works now—maybe because, at 21, she's finally a woman."
Somehow after 40 years of being a woman on this earth, this language used to describe Spears since she was 16 years old—no, 10 years old (see the Star Search footage), violent as the paparazzi who violated her most vulnerable moments, still upsets me. I’m not shocked by the focus on her body or sexuality, but I am floored by the lack of care and respect—the pompous and smug need to cut her down, to prove dominance, to own her. When I hear these men talk about her body, I hear the Tennessee state senator right after the school shooting in my city, who said of the survivors’ and grieving mothers: “all the attractive moms in Nashville came out to protest guns.” [5]
But I don’t want to talk about the sad parts, or claim that suffering is what makes the music joyful. I don’t want to think about Sinead O’Connor ridiculed with her shaved head and torn picture of the Pope, or Dolly Parton reduced to a punchline, or the million indignities any woman must face as she marches on her hero’s journey, (the one that Joseph Campbell said doesn’t exist for the female protagonist, because they are already the object). The deadbeat. The Paparazzi. The children taken away. The monstrous Trump-like father towering over her body hissing, “I’m Britney Spears now.”
We can’t listen to Britney Spears without thinking of the injustice she endured or the scabrous oppressors of her life. Fuck them all. And yet, when I listen to “Toxic,”—the fuzzed out low-end throbbing before the liftoff, the Charlotte Gainsbourg-like vocals plunging into ruin like a gilded smirk—I feel her power, the propulsion of a woman riding the wave of her own ascent. The song is brilliant because of the counterpoint and production, but also because she is herself—without the storylines, without having to earn the public’s respect or love. Bare-assed. Glistening in our face with a thousand diamonds.
When we listened to the song in his car, we didn’t acknowledge that Britney was narrating our relationship, that when she sings, “With a taste of a poison paradise I'm addicted to you/ Don't you know that you're toxic?” she was talking about the way I would stare at my lifeless cell phone, sobbing so loudly that my host brother once came in and lectured me: “Don’t ever weep for a man, Kendrita,” or the day we returned from our first trip together, leaving smears of my menstrual blood behind on his family beach house wall, I passed by a bar that evening and saw him, already drinking with another woman. Cathy Dennis said, “I think pop and darkness can sit comfortably / uncomfortably together. It is the friction between the two that is fulfilling.” [6] The weight of my growing grief was made light in the lyrics, transformed into a jewel crusted costume that I could wear and disappear into.
The pleasure of listening to “Toxic” is the subliminal feeling that Britney is doing what she loves, what she feels like she was put on this earth to do, that it isn’t a choice but the ecstatic wisdom of her body propelling her forward. During the ghoulish 2003 interview with Diane Sawyer, Britney responded to the condescending and craven questions, such as “Do you like your voice?” with her blunt and generous truth: “I think my voice is okay. I like the feeling I get when I sing.”  In her memoir she writes, “What I love is sweat on the floor during rehearsals or just playing ball and making a shot. I like the work…”
I love “Toxic” the way I love Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”, or watching Courtney Love eviscerate an enemy—Sally Rooney’s “casual intellectual hooliganism” [7]—the fuck-around-find-out joy and feminine swagger of reading a room and knowing exactly how to play it. Watching a woman stripped of everything she loves and publicly shamed is nothing new. But watching her rise from the ashes and get the last word against mediocrity—that is medicine.
At the end of my time in Seville, he drove me to the airport and we wept in each other’s arms, the car pulled to the side of an unlit road. When Whitney Houston’s voice eased into the brutal tenderness of “I Will Always Love You” on the car radio we broke into laughter because it was so intensely perfect that the absurdity gave us delight. The gift of what I thought had been a heavy and devastating love suddenly became clear.
“Toxic” gave me the gift of pleasure and embodiment: rooted in the home of my body and floating beyond it, like Britney with maraschino-red hair on the back of a motorcycle, like Courtney Love crowd-surfing into oblivion, like a chorus of middle-aged women and Gen Z-ers singing along, “Intoxicate me now” in a suburban Trader Joes at noon, the ghosts of our past and future selves tingling and untouchable. When I hear it, I am 20 again, sticking my hand out the window, groping the humid and perfect Seville air. But I am also 40, heavy and light with all of my heartaches, playing this song for my eight year-old, as if to show her a version of myself she will luckily never meet but who will be there guiding her when she crosses that threshold into womanhood; who will be there to mother us both with her wisdom in a way that I never was, in a way Britney never was. The 20 year-old in me is singing at the top of her lungs and learning to leave it all on the floor, but to keep something for herself.
Britney says in her memoir of life before conservatorship: “Even the hard days were my hard days.” “Toxic” gave me a soundtrack to fuck and feel my way back into life—the grief was all mine and so were the unexpected joys.

Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She co-wrote a chapbook with Ellen Bass, Graffitied Heart: Poems in Conversation & A Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2024), and Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), a collaborative chapbook written with Tyler Mills. She has performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues including the Newport Folk Festival. She enjoys knitting while listening to metal and once gave Woody Harrelson a high five at the airport.