Tomorrow, having all but colonised the pop culture of the Anglo-American world, Britney Spears releases her second album, the cheekily titled Oops! I Did It Again. "Serious" rock groups might place gaps of three or four years in between their records, but Spears operates according to the production-line mores of the pop market So this album comes little more than a year after her début. To date, that record, Baby One More Time, has sold 9 million copies worldwide, so it's not hard to see why she was in such a hurry to create a follow-up. The haste, according to the record's 18-year-old author, has not impacted on its quality: Oops.. is "50 to 75 per cent better" than its predecessor. To cynical ears, it simply perpetuates a formula: polished, chart-friendly R'n'B - like Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones, Spears represents the appropriation of black music by a more saleable white face - that sticks to the age-old themes of boy/girl romance. Her record company is sufficiently convinced of her commercial clout to have kept the record out of the hands of journalists, lest it finds its way on to the internet. They may have nothing to worry about - if the Britney Spears newsgroup, at alt.fan.
britney-spears, is anything to go by, the cyber-distribution of Spears's music is a side issue. The minority of Spears fans who congregate on the net appear to have rather more grubby concerns. Somewhere on the World Wide Web, there is a picture of Britney Spears having sex with a horse. That's what one of the newsgroup's subscribers has heard, anyway - so on 8 May, he posted a message headed "Photo of Britney Spears banging a horse", inquired as to its whereabouts and waited for replies. Only one was forthcoming: a coolly dismissive posting that told him that he was in the wrong place and he should try the altogether more outré newsgroup alt.sex.bestiality.
If the picture does exist,
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it's another example of the cut-and-paste celebrity porn facilitated by photo manipulation software. Such material goes a long to way to defining Spears's rather sinister male fan cult: via the net, they also swap pictures - both doctored and au naturel - of Britneyesque teen sensation Christina Aguilera, and the British adolescent star Billie Piper ("Billie Piper nipple slip pic," reads one excited posting). In addition, they trade sex-related Britney myths, too multifarious and improbable to be worth repeating."I don't want to be part of someone's Lolita thing," Spears recently told Rolling Stone. "It kind of freaks me out." The newsgroup, unfortunately, gives off exactly that kind of odour.