Brittney Spears vs Robert De Niro

[Szlia]

There seem to be a agreement around here that people like Brittney Spears, who are just singing and dancing over tracks they do not write, are not artists.

Oddly, I have also the feeling that there would be an agreement on the fact that Robert De Niro is a great actor, a great artist.

Yet, other than in a very few exceptions, Robert De Niro does the exact same type of job than Brittney Spears: He says lines written by others in movies directed by others, in clothes chosen by others.

One can even argue that Brittney Spears is probably more involved in the making of her songs than Robert De Niro in the making of his movies. So... is Brittney Spears more of an artist than Robert De Niro?

[Bronyaur]

First, acting and singing are apples and oranges, you cannot compare the two. Secondly, music is art in the sense that the musician writes a song about something and then performs it in a way that conveys their message in the best way possible. An actor is an artist in the sense that they take a character and bring it to life. The two proffessions are quite different, and cannot fairly be compared......by the way I am incredibly drunk so i apologize for my incoherency......

[Fender]

The thing is....

Could any good looking girl with a decent voice and some big titties replace britney spears? Probably. Hell it's been done, like 3 of them came out shortly after Spears hit it big.

Could any decent actor read the same lines with the same clothes on replace DeNiro? No.

[Voron]

It's a pretty stupid comparison altogether.

[somecleric]

People only bring up the 'he/she doesn't write their own music, what poseurs' argument when talking about people they don't like.

No one ever says, 'god Elizabeth Fraser is shit, she's just riding Robin Guthrie's coat tails' or 'Dave Gahan sucks, Gore writes everything he sings'. Nor does anyone ever get down on Elvis, despite the fact he wrote virtually none of his own material. You like The Beastie Boys? RunDMC wrote a lot of their material. You like rap? Virtually all of the commercial rap is ghost written by a handful of producers these days.

There's lots of reasons to dislike Britney (like the fact that she can't sing, to start), criticizing her for not writing her own material is stupid, especially when only a tiny minority of performers actually write 100% of what they play.

[Samus Aran]

I think Fender hit the nail on the head. I'm just gonna go "Ditto"

[Szlia]

I am not comparing them on a quality angle, but on a "functionality" angle. Their works seem totally comparable to me, they are both performers, both the top of the iceberg of a complex machine involving a lot of people in the creative process.

Maybe I am miss-reading, but the agreement around Brittney Spears seem to be a pure and simple denial of her artistic status, not just attacking the quality of her production.

I am not trying to play the part of the fan boy here. As a matter of fact I find her stuff pretty weak save for the 2 songs produced by The Neptunes (Slave for You, Boys) that play around with all these voice samples of her speaking, laughing, breathing, etc. My main concern is to try to make people take a step back and put things in perspective.

To develop, Bronyaur said:

First, acting and singing are apples and oranges, you cannot compare the two. Secondly, music is art in the sense that the musician writes a song about something and then performs it in a way that conveys their message in the best way possible. An actor is an artist in the sense that they take a character and bring it to life. The two professions are quite different, and cannot fairly be compared

How conveying a message in the best way possible is related to the writing process? Wouldn't you say that acting is also conveying a message, or at least the ideas of the writer and/or director, in the best way possible? Wouldn't performing a song be a way to bring it to life? Aren't songs often fictions in which the singer becomes a character? I don't really understand the strong distinction Bronyaur or Voron seem to make between acting and singing. Can you please try and explain it further?

[Millie]

Acting and singing cannot be compared qualitatively. Even so, I'll try my best to explain why Britney and Robert cannot be placed in the same category.

For one thing, De Niro's job is about making choices. There are an infinite number of ways he could perform a given role, speak a given line, or relate a given facial expression or action. What separates De Niro from 99% of actors is that he makes interesting choices -- he performs his roles in a highly stylized, unusual, and yet totally 'believeable' manner. He can play characters we cannot relate to whatsoever, and yet make them totally realistic. Alternatively, he can play very common character types in very innovative and intriguing ways. He can turn any role, good or bad, into a solid performance. Moreover, he has demonstrated a remarkable range in his acting ability, excelling at every genre in which he has worked.

Singing doesn't involve quite as many decisions as acting. If you're not writing your own music, then you're really either going to be doing it 'right' or 'wrong.' Someone like Britney is expected to sing her songs precisely the way they were written, with no opportunity for interpretation or personal expression. There would be no room in her line of work for 'interesting,' unless she were a very talented vocalist. But Britney is no such vocalist. Since she doesn't bring any creativity to the table (even her dancing is choreographed by someone else), she really is just a puppet for her music.

As has been said, any girl with big boobs and a pretty face can do what Britney does. Very few actors can do what Robert de Niro does.

[Szlia]

Ok ok ok... on an acting scale, De Niro ranks probably higher than Spears on a singing scale (Idealizing De Niro would be a mistake though since he made some pretty horrible performances, but that's not the board to debate this ). Putting celebrity obviously was not a good idea to drag attention because it seems to put shadows over the real question, which Millie addressed partially when she mentioned the idea of choices and room for creativity.

I think defining an artist as someone who makes choices in a creative process is pretty convincing, but not totally so. Let's take the example of ballet dancers for example. Wouldn't you say that everything down to their most subtle moves are directed by the choreographer? It's his vision, his ideas, his creative process (or her, but I am writing this with Maurice Béjart in mind). What room is there for the dancer's creativity? The dancer brings his energy, his body and a subtlety that cannot be worded, call it charisma, soul, aura or whatever.

Back to Brittney Spears. Doesn't she suddenly seem to have a huge range of choices she can make as a performer? I personally really don't think that for each song there is such a thing as a "right" way to sing it, lost in a sea of "wrong" ways. It seems to me that her room for creativity might greatly vary from a producer to another, osome having a very definite idea of what they want and others more opened to dialogue and ready to hear Spears' ideas.

I am pretty sure it works with acting in the very same way. Some directors leave close to no room for their actors (Bresson comes to mind) and some others let them improvise and are confident in their actors ability to understand and embody the part by themselves or with minimal guidelines.

I would guess that in a creative process De Niro can bring more to the table than Spears can, but I still stand to the fact that they both have pretty similar works and that it is pretty unfair to call a performer in music less of an artist than a performer in dramatic arts. Hell! Pavarotti never wrote a line of his music too!

[Schar]

Just adding to what millie said, artistry really comes down to creativity. How is Britney being creative, when she dances someone else's dance moves, and sings someone else's songs? All she is doing is using her vocal and dance talent to express other people's creativity.

Robert Deniro on the other hand, gets to choose what roles he wants to play, and how he reads each character's lines, and of course adds his own personal touch to each character he plays.

[somecleric]

You can't compare what De Niro does with what Spears does. De Niro is a respected actor, and directors give him a lot more leeway than they give most actors. If he has more freedom to express himself than Spears through his chosen medium, it's because he's earned that freedom.

The parallel is a lot more clear when you compare Spears and De Niro to people of approximately equal stature in their mirror industries. Is the difference between what Spears does in a studio and what JLo does on a movie set all that different? I guarantee you JLo doesn't rewrite her lines, or set her own blocking, or even decide what emotion to convey with her reading, the director does all that for her. JLo has no more creative expression in her movies than Spears does in her music.

And De Niro? He's a legend. Directors let him do whatever he wants, within reason. His closest parallel in the music industry would be someone like Johnny Cash. Cash performs a lot of material written by someone else, but no one lumps him in with Britney. Listen to his cover of Hurt then listen to the NIN original. The arrangement is nearly identical (Cash cuts out the piano and the percussion, but the guitar is identical), the vocals are nearly identical (one word is changed), but the songs are incredible dissimilar. Cash gets a bye on the 'compose/cover' issue much for the same reason De Niro is an artist, while Britney is not. It's not because De Niro and Cash do anything different, it's because they've proven they can.

But that should be irrelevent. If you don't like Britney, there's many, many reasons that have more relevance and substance than 'she's just a studio robot'. Well, guess what? Yo-Yo Ma, Maxim Yegenov, Pavarotti, Elizabeth Fraser, Charlotte Church, Oleg Volkov and many other highly revered musicians are studio robots in exactly the same way. This doesn't mean Britney is good, or deserves to be mentioned with that group, it just means whining about the fact that she doesn't write her own material is just petty and stupid and pointless.

Hate her because she sucks, not because she's not some one woman music machine.

[Voron]

There are good reasons to be a "studio robot" and then there are bad ones.

Certain singers have phenomenal voices. And even if they don't write their own music, they can use their voice to bring something totally great and unique to a song. And that's perfectly fine. Anyone would rather have Pavarotti singing someone else's music over a far worse singer who wrote their own music.

Britney on the other hand is a "studio robot" because of her looks. In today's pop music -- image is everything, and more. She has absolutely zero control over her entire career; her managers tell her what to sing, how to sing, how to dance, where to perform, which ass cheek to show, which pimple to pop, etc. She, as a musician, only brings image to the table. And in my eyes, that's grotesque, and should be insulting to any music fan. Image is not music. Music videos are the worst thing to ever happen to music.

[Schar]

Originally posted by Voron
Music videos are the worst thing to ever happen to music.

I agree 100%. So true, on so so many levels.

[AngryGerbil]

My question is Szlia, how the HELL did this thought ever even enter your mind?

And you can refer to Mille's and/or Fender's posts for my opinion.

[Szlia]

I guarantee you JLo doesn't rewrite her lines, or set her own blocking, or even decide what emotion to convey with her reading, the director does all that for her. JLo has no more creative expression in her movies than Spears does in her music.

I have no idea of how Jennifer Lopez works on a set, but let's assume for a moment, for the sake of the argument, that she works in the way you describe it. In the end she is the one playing the part, working within the boundaries set for her by the director. These boundaries might leave her a very limited room for creativity, like in my ballet dancer analogy earlier. But like a ballet dancer, Jennifer Lopez is an artist and so is Britney Spears.

It is certain than within an artistic profession talent is not shared equally. And like somecleric and Voron explained, the creativity room that enjoys an artist is not directly proportional to the talent of said artist. Some people shine in constraint while some shine in freedom.

I wonder though if the mental barrier that seem to prevent people to consider Britney Spears as an artist lies in what Voron said:

Britney on the other hand is a "studio robot" because of her looks. In today's pop music -- image is everything, and more. She has absolutely zero control over her entire career; her managers tell her what to sing, how to sing, how to dance, where to perform, which ass cheek to show, which pimple to pop, etc. She, as a musician, only brings image to the table. And in my eyes, that's grotesque, and should be insulting to any music fan. Image is not music. Music videos are the worst thing to ever happen to music.

Again, I have no idea what exact degree of control Spears has over her career (I think she has pretty more than what you seem to think though), but let's assume again what you say is correct so we have a common starting point.

It seems to me that image has for a long while been a very important factor in culture in general and in pop culture in particular. Elvis Presley and the Beetles are obviously good examples of that, but I would not be surprised if we could find older examples of that, and by older I mean in centuries before the XXth. What might be more recent though is the acknowledgement of the importance of the image and all the work to control it and/or to build one.

The main grief against Britney Spears and other pop culture artists might be just that: the fact that their image is a fake one, build and controlled to be recognized from others, to allow identification and to boost sales. But is that "bad" in nature? I personally find that pretty fascinating, but I agree it is not music. It is more than music. Music is just a piece in a puzzle. But is this strategy only used in pop culture? I think, to a certain extend, it is used in every cultural fields, if not in the whole society.