One of the more interesting ironies about the all-autotuned, all-dancing Glee has been the instant mainstreamisation across the globe of a show whose basic premise is the celebration of ‘outsiderness’, represented in the series by the terminally uncool McKinley High School glee club.

Whether by design or by coincidence, this paradox has been nicely reflected by the show’s producers in the select pantheon of pop icons they have deemed worthy of having entire episodes dedicated exclusively to their music. In Series 1 we had ‘The Power of Madonna’ in honour of the Queen of Pop herself, whose reign as the most successful female recording artist of all time has nevertheless been punctuated by its own turbulent periods of outsiderness, most notably following the appropriately sadistic backlash that greeted the release of S & M-fest Erotica across Bush Sr’s America. Meanwhile, to look forward to in Series 2, I believe there will be a special soundtracked by the comparatively box-fresh catalogue of Lady Gaga, the current momentum of whose career funnily enough can be compared to that of pre-Erotica Madonna, yet the celebration of whom in the commentary of both the media and the general public seems to be one part adoration to one part ridicule, demonstrated at one time by the baffling traction of those ‘chick with a dick’ rumours.

And in between the two, we have had the ‘Britney’ episode, aired in the UK a couple of weeks ago. Never having suffered a commercial slump as dramatic as those now periodically endured by Madonna as she enters mid-life (2003’s American Life the severest so far), and, when on duty, salivated over as your conventionally sexy all-American pinup, unlike Gaga, it is hard to see how this bottle-blonde, breast-enhanced former Mouseketeer, having revelled in the limelight from the age of 12, fits into the themes of conquering alienation as espoused by the show that hosted her to so much hype.

Yet this view has been recognised for the over-simplification that it is by one particular community which, outside the American high-school choir competition circuit of course, has known the same feelings of alienation, outsiderness and isolation that Spears came to embody during her watershed moment in 2007-8. It may be a crude stereotype to propagate, and a rule with far too many exceptions to be construed as one, but there is a case to be made that the gays do love a bit of tragedy from our icons; not at all out of any pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but rather out of a sense of shared recognition of hardship both historically, in the struggles fought and endured on our behalf before the current age of relative enlightenment, and personally, in the memory of, or indeed the ongoing experience of, that individual process of reconciliation of what we are with both our own sense of self and our external circumstances. Of course hardship is not confined to any particular section of humanity, but when Britney Spears underwent what was an extraordinarily public breakdown, it was an easily accessible reminder to the gay community of the inescapable pervasion of real life and its imperfections (eerily presaged by early single ‘Lucky’), courtesy of a girl we always thought had it all: good hair, great songs, and first-hand experience of shagging Justin Timberlake.

And this strange, outwardly perverse, magnetism between suffering and homosexuality has certainly not gone unnoticed by Spears’ more knowing fellow gay icons. Where songs about her dead mother have now been relegated to one non-single track per album, there was a time, coinciding with the peak of her appropriation of gay subculture around the release of ‘Vogue’, when Madonna publicly revisited the subject with a frequency bordering on the concerning, culminating in the highly uncomfortable scenes in her notorious documentary, Truth Or Dare, of the star weeping over her mother’s grave, armed with the official sound and camera crew she had taken there with her. And while Lady Gaga may not yet have a similarly dead mother to weep about, she did have a father undergoing open heart surgery, on whose progress we were regularly, if unnecessarily, updated via an official Twitter stream (eg “And after long hours, and lots of tears, they healed his broken heart, and mine. Speechless.” Speechless being the title of the fifth track on her multi-platinum second album, obviously). In the same vein was the oddly timed admission that she had been tested for the potentially fatal disease lupus, live in an interview with US chat show legend Larry King, tossed out in between banter about Princess Diana and an eagerly awaited 20-second preview of her upcoming video for ‘Alejandro’, which she would later explain to be her tribute to the similar resilience of the gay community.

As a refreshing counterpoint to such self-conscious navel gazing, Spears seemed to adopt an altogether different approach to dealing with adversity: a ‘keep calm and carry on (or at least enjoy a massive fucking bender while you’re at it)’ strategy that resonated far more with the homosexual audience that Madonna and Gaga have somewhat over-earnestly courted. There is a point in a gay man’s life, in between those early stages of private self-realisation and hopefully an eventual coming out, when keeping calm and carrying on seems an option as good as any. And it was as the wreckage of her own personal life burned around her that the knowingly titled Blackout, arguably her finest album, was released. Conspicuous by its absence on the record was any reference to recent events in its (flashly-titled) Executive Producer’s life, such as her infamous head-shaving and substance abuse, an omission that was more than compensated for by the cutting-edge dance beats and electronic soundscapes that accompanied lyrics almost uniformly about heading to the club to get laid. Trailed with a substandard promo video and the ultimately disastrous performance of the album’s lead single ‘Gimme More’ at the MTV VMAs that year, yet exhilaratingly free of the predictable baggage of any soul-baring interview with the likes of Oprah, this ramshackle combination of the ‘just make do’ and ‘business as usual’ mentalities was a prime representation of the most basic human survival instincts that kick in during many a crisis of sexuality. Moreover the club-centric music on the record epitomised a brand of modern hedonism successfully employed by young gay men all over the world to come to terms with their sexuality at gay clubs established for that very purpose, with Spears herself practising as she preached as she came to terms with end of her marriage in the nightclubs of LA, as documented by the relentless pursuit by the paparazzi during that period.

And it is this basic notion of escapism on the dancefloor that is a common source of appeal among pop’s most celebrated gay icons. But where Britney stands apart from the Gagas and Madonnas of this world is in the complete escape she offers from real life through the comprehensive depersonalisation of her music, which, admittedly and understandably, is not to everyone’s tastes. The distinction is perhaps rooted in the separation of traditions that occurred as far back as the 1960s scene, when artists like Bob Dylan and The Beatles established the almost revolutionary model of singer-songwriter as a single entity, rather than continue the long accepted practice of performer interpreting the compositions of others that had been taken to great success by the likes of Presley and Sinatra. Today, performers of the Madonna and Lady Gaga mould belong (or at least aim to belong) firmly within the newer ‘auteur’ tradition of pop star, seeking to relate their output to their own private musical tastes and experiences, openly citing inspirations for lyrics that they may very well have written, and, in many cases, claiming credit as producers to confirm in writing their creative control over their work. Spears, on the other hand, belongs happily to the more old-fashioned ‘cipher’ tradition, recording output as randomly disparate as the range of collaborators assembled for her by her label, singing lyrics that she generally does not write, and concentrating her efforts in the dance, rather than music, studio.

And it is a plausible theory that this disassociation is a deliberate choice made out of a largely overlooked self-awareness of both her limitations and appeal, rather than out of any commonly, but wrongly, perceived laziness. When songwriter Cathy Dennis, hot property after the trans-Atlantic success of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, offered Spears’ A & R team her composition ‘Sweet Dreams My LA Ex’, a reply song (later handed to the UK’s Rachel Stevens, befuddlingly without any change to the lyric) to Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me A River’, which itself seemed to be the first salvo of an attempt to play out their recent breakup in public, it was rejected on the grounds of its content being too identifiable with its intended singer. Even ‘Piece Of Me’, by far the most self-referential thing Spears has ever committed to disc, does not actually boast the penmanship of its singer, and furthermore scuppers any chance of finding intimacy in its purported autobiography through the extreme distortion of its subject’s vocals to sound like those of a flu-stricken dalek, all set to one of Blackout’s typically harsh productions. Indeed 2008’s Circus, the post-breakdown album released to herald her full recovery, made no attempt to reflect from the safe haven of a visibly more stable present on past tribulations, but instead offered the likes of ‘If U Seek Amy’ for insight, the delightfully slutty lyrics of which barely worked as a single-entendre, let alone the double presumably intended. Yet Spears’ nevertheless continued success demonstrates that soul-searching craftsmanship is precisely not what her fans have sought from her for the last twelve years.

What Britney does, and always has, offered to her fans, the media and hundreds of highly skilled songwriters, is an entirely blank canvas, free from the the ties that bind most of her contemporaries through the commitments to meaning they make through giving interviews to explain their latest work, and self-conscious attempts to progress constantly as artists. Spears, on the other hand, represents pop music at its most meaningless, and while both strands together render the genre as wide-serving (and therefore ‘pop-ular’) as it is, it is Spears’ that is now in danger of dying out (see, for example, the post-assault transformation in Rihanna). For a gay community comparatively lacking in high-profile role models, particularly in the US, the blank likes of Spears allow for individual projections of personal aspiration for which the self-projected Gagas have little room left. Less healthy is the blank canvas that Spears offers to the media, most notably during her breakdown, where, in the absence of any official comment, the more salacious corners of the press were able to fashion their own (undoubtedly exaggerated, in light of her speedy recovery) narrative of self-destruction, an escalating process that would have been stopped in its tracks early on by the likes of Madonna, who has often taken to correcting what she has regarded as bullshit written about her on any platform that will have her, whether it be a national talk-show, an impromptu press conference assembled at an Italian airport, or, most curiously, BBC2’s Newsnight.

But perhaps most importantly for fans of the music is the blank canvas that Britney offers to songwriters across the world who, even now still predominantly male, require a vessel to bring their most adventurous works to life, often unable to do so themselves in a context where pop music performed by females is allowed to be sexier, more uninhibited, and far less concerned with cool than its restrained heterosexual male equivalent. So subsequent to the phenomenal success of her first two albums (thanks to gems like ‘…Baby One More Time’ and ‘Oops! I Did It Again’, almost classical in the Swedish craft of their melodies and chord sequences), and with her contentedness to abstain from creative interference, involvement in a Britney Spears project has offered songwriters guaranteed global sales, and more importantly, the huge boost to revenues and industry reputation that comes with it. This has engendered a sense of fierce competition among production teams across the world in order to ensure that it is their work out of the hundreds of submissions that actually makes it onto the 12-track official release, which, happily for pop music lovers, seems to have manifested itself in a thrilling rivalry among songwriters to outdo each other in boundary-pushing creativity.

Take, for example, ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’, 10 years later a still startlingly dissonant experiment in Prince-referencing minimalism courtesy of The Neptunes that pioneered the post-millennial urbanised pop that reached saturation point around the middle of the decade it opened, by which time Spears herself had already moved onto new fresher pastures with collaborators Bloodshy & Avant to fashion ‘Toxic’, a worldwide hit despite its decidedly weird mix of Bollywood strings and rhythm guitar supporting an almost comically disjointed melody line (just listen to the sheer range of notes covered by that chorus). Indeed her current smash hit, ‘Hold It Against Me’, shows that she has not lost her appeal among the world’s most exciting music-makers, dipping its pop toes into house, trance and, to shuddering effect, dubstep, within the space of three minutes. Even cuts her team has rejected demonstrate her role as a potent muse for talented songwriters, with Girls Aloud’s electrifying ‘Graffiti My Soul’ (the sound of Madonna going at it with Michael Jackson with the Prodigy on in the background) originally composed with Spears in mind, while Lady Gaga’s own ‘Telephone’ seems to have done well enough without its first-intended performer. Without willing muses like Britney to offer them unfettered licence to go wild, liberated from concern for meaning or coherence with anything beyond their allocated three minutes, inventive songwriters would lack the necessary blank canvas for their creations to reach public consumption uncompromised by the insisted-upon influence of other more hands-on performers.

And returning to her selection for her own special episode of Glee, perhaps this is where Britney finally embodies that sense of outsiderness that at first seemed to be lacking. In a world where auteurs like Lady Gaga are issuing such self-important lyrics as “I’M BEAUTIFUL IN MY WAY, ‘CAUSE GOD MAKES NO MISTAKES, I’M ON THE RIGHT TRACK BABY, I WAS BORN THIS WAY”, and as both artists prepare to do chart battle when they release their forthcoming albums in the coming months, we need mindless ciphers like Britney, now the outsiders, to fly the flag for fearless, unpretentious, instantly gratifying pop.

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