Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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Britney Spears gets candid about Madonna, Justin and her new CD BY JIM FARBER NEW YORK DAILY-NEWS NEW YORK (KRT) - Britney Spears doesn’t get it. On her new CD, “In the Zone,” she heavy-breafhes through 50 minutes of lines like: “I don’t want to be a tease/ Undo my zipper please,” “Baby don’t stop/ You’re halfway there” and “I got the boom boom/ That you want.” But she doesn’t see why this makes it a sexy record. “That’s what everyone puts the emphasis on,” Spears says with a ticked-off edge, as she sits in the lounge of the Hit Factory record ing studio, eating a banana. “Suddenly they act like, ‘Oh, you’re this sexy girl.’ They’re . . going to misconstrue it in the way they want.” It would be hard to misconstrue lyrics like: “My sex drive ... Outrageous,” “Grab my waist/ Take it lower” or “Pull on me baby/ I’ll take you higher” — each of which is matched to deep-grinding beats and chest-heaving vocals. Yet, Spears insists the album is “about expressing myself.” “Most true artists get it,” she says. “It’s like a spiritual experience.” Certainly, it’s an attention-get ting one. And Spears needs the limelight as she releases “In the Zone” on Tuesday. Musically, the album tries to prove that — like fellow ex-teen stars Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake PHOTO COURTESY OF KRT CAMPUS Pop idol Britney Spears gets racy on her new CD. (Spears’ ex-boyfriend) — she has grown up. Spears does seem much changed from the singer I inter viewed two years ago. Then, she was giggly and shy. Now, she’s more assertive and combative — if still puzzlingly coy about her sexier displays. Spears will admit that “three songs on the CD are really sensu al.” One, titled “Touch of My Hand,” is about self-stimulation. “It’s a healthy thing,” Spears says. “It’s not about going out and being with a guy and screwing around.” She believes the subject came up because “this time in my life I’m not really with anybody, so I’m curious about the whole thing.” On another song sure to get at tention, “Early Morning,” she sings of being “passed out on the couch at dawn” after a full night of “shaking my ass.” Such state ments play into the hands of gos sip columnists who’ve paid special attention to the time Spears spends smoking and drinking in nightclubs. Spears believes the reason she gets unusual scolding for such activities is because “I was growing up in the public eye from when I was 16. So they al ways think of me as 16.” This may also help explain why Spears’ open-mouthed smooch with Madonna at September’s MTV Video Music Awards gener ated worldwide chatter, while Madonna’s lip action with Christina Aguilera during the same number generated barely a peep. There’s more shock value in the worldly Madonna kissing the less-experienced Britney than there is in her kissing the more low-down Aguilera. Lately Madonna has been act ing like the president of the Britney Spears fan club. “She’s like my godmother,” Spears says. “When I’m around her I feel very safe, and there are few people I feel that way around. And she’s friggin’ Madonna!” Spears has no explanation for why the older singer has embraced her. The possibility that the elder icon may be trying to connect with Spears’ younger audience obvi ously hasn’t occurred to her. She has a better sense of humor about Justin Timberlake’s “SNL” appearance the week before hers, when he did a parody of Spears’ old single “I’m a Slave 4 U.” “It’s... cool that he did that,” she says, “because it makes everybody shut the f— up about everything.” Spears says that while she and Timberlake no longer speak, she’s now unperturbed when he’s linked with new loves such as Cameron Diaz. But when she first saw him with other women, it was a different story. “I’d been with him forever and seeing him everywhere felt really weird,” she says. But she was downright angry this past sum mer when she saw Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” video, on which he enacted revenge against a Spears look-alike by having sex with another woman in their bed room and leaving a tape of it for the mock-Spears to watch. “He was throwing it out there in a huge way,” Spears says. “I was like ‘What the hell’s going on?”’ She calmed down, she says, af ter she realized “men have egos, and they have ways of dealing with them. So I think it’s inevitable that he would do something like that because he was really hurt.” It isn’t the only pain Spears has had to deal with in the past year. She is upset about being linked ro mantically with dancer Columbus Short, whose wife is pregnant, sur mising rumors about the associa tion. Not that she minds all the ru mors. “The one about (me) and Colin Farrell wasn’t bad,” she says and smiles. “He’s really cute.” Besides, Spears knows that all this talk — like all the sexed-up lyrics on her record —- is going to keep people interested. Even more so if she confounds us by claiming to be unaware of the power of it all. “At this point,” she says, “I know how the press works.” Indeed. ■ , • •• -V. Love CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 that love is all around us. The real crux of the movie is that there is more than one kind of love. One of the drawbacks of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (also directed by Curtis) is that the minor characters always seem much more fascinating than the leads and steal the movies again and again. Those characters always deserved their own subplots. “Love Actually” takes this concept to as many extremes as possible! Perhaps this is a thinking per son’s movie. Even though the film stretches out over more than two hours to make sure each one has everything wrapped up nice and neat, there is a definite lack of satisfaction. Most of the talented actors are left floundering as two-dimen sional outlines, defined by then one act of love. With its bite sized character studies, “Love Actually” makes it virtually im possible for viewers to remem ber the characters’ names. One almost wishes the characters wore name tags relating their motivations and inner struggles. The movie could have easily been rated PG-13, but there’s one sweet but unnecessary sub plot involving two body doubles who connect while simulatin' k various sex positions that pe. " haps Curtis thought could not have been left out. Comments on this story?E-mail gamecockmixeditor(aihotmail.com wmmmm* F^^iwNov a 24th Spm M. RH PaIIroom 3 t Tickets ® RH Info desk Available Nov 17th For more information or special assistance call 777-7130 or visit www.sa.sc.edu/cp Event subject to change. 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