Jim DeRogatis

Encompassing more than 70 million people born between 1980 and 1996, Generation Y is, at its core, the largest group of teenagers in American history, dwarfing even its parents, the baby boomers who came of age in the ’60s. In the next decade, it will come to represent 41 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau. Until recently, its entire existence has been spent in a period of unprecedented prosperity and a cocoon of creature comforts the likes of which we’ve never seen before — or at least not since Camelot, which, after all, was quickly interrupted by the unfortunate ugliness of assassinations, the war in Vietnam and riots in the streets.

For the business press and many sociologists, the defining characteristics of this generation to date have been its buying power ($275 billion spent annually, according to some estimates) and — despite an astounding degree of media savviness, thanks to being raised with cable and the Net (and literacy be damned) — its cheerfully compliant consumerism and gleeful malleability at the hands of the shrewd and ubiquitous über-brands and lifestyle firms. (From a piece published in the Washington Business Journal last spring: “Smarter marketers such as Tommy Hilfiger and Old Navy have understood that coolness is an important ingredient in cultivating Y’s. Abercrombie & Fitch has done it best. What was once a conservative, white-male sporting goods store is now the coolest spot in the mall. … [C]odifying what today’s teenager cool is all about.”)

If there could possibly be a bright side to the obscene events of two weeks past, it’s that Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, “Total Request Live” and Limp Bizkit, “Survivor,” Sony PlayStation, ‘N Sync and their ilk will never be enough again. Everything changed on Sept. 11 — it’s a cliché, but it’s true — and that includes the sudden realization for many that their current opiates were nothing but placebos.

For Generation Y, nothing much has ever been at stake, even during our most galvanizing and engrossing national news events. (Did O.J./Clinton/Condit really “just do it,” in the words of Nike? Who cares!) Hence even the “edgiest” of its music (Rage Against the Machine? Brought to you by Sony! Eminem? Vanilla Ice as hate-filled slasher-movie obsessive!) has just been another piece of empty but well-hyped product meant to be purchased on credit, displayed along with one’s $150 sneakers as irrefutable evidence of hepness, and then consumed and shit out (just like the news), to be replaced the minute a new and improved model is sent hurtling down the corporate pipeline.

As the celebrated Gen X eggheads of the Chicago culture zine the Baffler have theorized, perhaps any form of genuine protest or real community (post-Seattle/grunge, they favored the word “scene”) is impossible in an era when Madison Avenue has perfected its ability to transform everything into a marketing pose, “turning rebellion into money,” as the Clash once sang.

Nevertheless, a revolution is a-brewin’. A small but passionate vanguard of Generation Y has been galvanized by the issue of globalization. They see as their enemy the mega-corporations that are trying to spread consumerism to every corner of the globe, killing Western culture and turning us all into the equivalent of those cannibalistic zombies traipsing through the shopping mall in “Dawn of the Dead.” In addition to our souls, they believe that corporatization is claiming the blood of the Third World, as child laborers from Beijing to Jakarta and sweatshop workers from Tijuana to the Philippines manufacture the overpriced jeans and useless sunglasses that American companies brand with their copyrighted logos and spend billions to market to us as indispensable accoutrements of our hip, modern lifestyles.

Who are these contrarian anti-consumerists? They’re the computer hackers who live to torment Bill Gates and Microsoft. They count among their numbers some of the legions of college students who use their dorms’ T3 lines to distribute and download vast libraries of MP3 files — the marketing of music through relentless tour sponsorships, saturation airplay via the monopolistic mediums of corporate radio and MTV, and overpriced major-label CDs ranking among the corporate byproducts that they hate most of all. Rare is the 20-something who is unaware of “No Logo” (“The book that became part of a movement,” to quote the banner on the book’s Web site) — regardless of whether they’ve actually read Naomi Klein’s phenomenally successful screed against globalization, or just seen it name-checked in interviews with Radiohead.

Some of these Y’s have been motivated to more serious action. They disrupted the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, and rioted again at the Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy, in July. (The last event even produced a martyr, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani — and how’s that for an ironic name right now? — who was shot dead by a police officer as he tried to rush a jeep with a fire extinguisher.) Maybe all dissent is instantly commodified these days, as the Baffler boys say. But what’s to stop youth from rebelling against the act of commodification itself? To bite the hand of anyone who tries to sell it anything — including (or especially) music? Here is the battlefield of the real “new war.”

So far, the activists’ advance guard has been limited to the smallest fraction of Generation Y, but it has had an impact nonetheless. The movement is certainly being monitored in high places: On Sept. 13, just two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Wall Street Journal published a Page 4 analysis of how the outbreak of terrorism in the U.S. might result in a crackdown against “America’s homegrown radicals … members of the burgeoning antiglobalization movement.” The hopeful tone of the article was unmistakable, though the writer never bothered to spell out how tree-hugging environmentalists and Starbucks-defacing graffiti artists equate with murderous, suicidal hijackers.

Two questions will loom large in the coming weeks. The first: Whither Generation Y now?

Rudely awoken, will this now-alert giant listen to the beating of the war drums, parrot the ubiquitous television commentators’ jingoism, applaud the bloodlust of the hawks; buy the benefit single that’s being planned by the pathetically lapsed King of Pop, Michael Jackson; and be conned once more by the Viacom-owned MTV? (Speaking of logos, the cable music giant has turned its symbol into a waving flag, which appears in the corner of the screen through all its programming, including regular showings of “Overcome,” a video by the ridiculous fourth-generation grunge band Live that, according to its spokesperson, “is dedicated to the tragedies’ victims.” It also helps hype an album that’s due out on Tuesday.)

Alternately, will the masses of young America start thinking about the political movement that has been embraced by some of their peers? Will they begin to seriously question the substantive problems facing America and the world, challenging the unilateral foreign policies and the global corporatization that are clearly a part of what provoked the reprehensible actions of Sept. 11? (There’s a third possibility, too, and that’s that absolutely nothing will change and everybody will go right back to ringing up credit-card debt — which in some ways would be even more awful than the warmonger option.)

Make no mistake (as our president is so fond of saying): Only an idealist who’s even more hopelessly naive than the hardest-core holdover from the Age of Aquarius could think the Generation Y will actually affect what is about to go down. How Bush’s “war on terrorism” plays out will be determined by the top-level power struggle that’s currently being waged between the old-line military-industrial hawks that Ike famously warned us about and the new forces of globalization, epitomized by the split between Cheney/Rumsfeld on one side and Colin Powell on the other. (I’m betting on Powell and the corporations — war is very, very bad for business, and in the new millennium, business is everything. You’ll notice that W. hasn’t started bombing anyone yet, and that can’t possibly be because of Christian restraint.)

So no, Generation Y won’t control world events — at least not yet. But that brings us to our second question: What sort of an impact can we expect the indelible images of Sept. 11 to have on popular culture, especially rock ‘n’ roll, which, four generations of commodifiers be damned, is still the last great bastion of “truth” in popular culture?

At its best, rock has always given the finger to the self-important forces of the reigning hegemony. The music first sprouted as a race-mixing juvenile delinquent scourge on the otherwise picture-perfect ’50s. It blossomed at the height of an unjust war in the ’60s; was rejuvenated by punk during the recession of the mid-’70s, and flowered again with indie rock and hip-hop during the cultural conservatism ushered in by Reagan, trickle-down economics and AIDS in the mid- to late ’80s. That wonderful fuck-you spark has been missing for some time now — it was muted at best during the alternative era of the early ’90s, as Gen X’s antiheroes struggled with an irresistible penchant for irony and their own ambivalence toward stardom (cf Nirvana and Pearl Jam). Some would have us believe that it was buried for good along with the generation gap at the dawn of this new century — that it is now safe enough to permanently enshrine in a Hall of Fame in Cleveland and chart through VH1′s “Behind the Music” in neat 30-minute segments that all seem to have identical plot lines.

But if we accept that at least some of the enduring music of the Woodstock Nation was inspired by the anger of young women who saw babies being killed in their mothers’ arms and the fears of young men reluctant to get their butts blown off in Southeast Asia for a cause that no one could explain, what kind of soundtrack will be produced by the sudden awareness that — regardless of age, sex, race or class — random annihilation at the hands of an unseen enemy can arrive almost anywhere and at any time? And that the enemy, partly produced by American arrogance in the first place, is being fought with nothing more than another dose of that same arrogance, a whole lot of brute strength and bushels of money?

Which side will Generation Y be on? All we have to do to find out is listen. As Bertolt Brecht said, “In the dark times, will there still be singing? Yes, there will be singing. There will be singing about the dark times.”

Somewhere along the way Ozzy lost his cool. He went from being rock to being pop, from being a private pleasure, albeit to a huge audience, to becoming a mass commodity, ever willing to pander to the lowest common denominator for a buck. And while the metal faithful are all too willing to settle for a two-word explanation for this — Sharon Osbourne — nothing in rock or in life is ever quite that simple.

Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler first came together in depressing, industrial Birmingham, England, in 1967 as a jazz-blues fusion band named Polka Tulk (later Earth). By 1968, the direction had shifted toward something much heavier and darker. Rechristened Black Sabbath, the quartet recorded its self-titled debut on eight tracks in a day and a half, and heavy metal was born as a hybrid of amped-up blues riffs, lumbering rhythms, a comic-book obsession with horror-movie imagery and a mysterious extra ingredient that has confounded mainstream critics ever since.

As one of the most recognizable faces in a largely faceless genre, Ozzy has long been seen as the Clown Prince of Darkness, the living embodiment of the film “This Is Spinal Tap.” With Sabbath, and later with Randy Rhoads during his “Crazy Train” solo period, Ozzy delivered a visceral musical thrill that was more instinctual than intellectual, and unrivaled except in the best punk for its liberating, joyful wallop.

Iommi’s riffs were always Sabbath’s musical strength, while the devilish Butler built the band’s image and wrote the most memorable lyrics. Ozzy, however, was the band’s soul. His stage moves were awkward (he was forever flashing the peace sign and leaping like an epileptic frog), his voice was strained and homely, and he seemed like kind of a doofus (just like the rest of us). But he was authentic. As drummer Ward put it in “Black Sabbath: An Oral History,” “The amazing thing about Oz was that he could take Geezer’s lyrics and spit them out ‘Ozzy.’”

Implicit in the maximum enjoyment of metal’s kick is that one shouldn’t think too much about it; at its best, the music is sheer Dionysian revelry. It’s ironic, then, that while much of America now views Ozzy as the village idiot, his real problem is that his every move has come to be as coldly calculated and manipulative as possible. And this is where Sharon comes in.

Mrs. Osbourne is the daughter of Don Arden, who managed Sabbath and the Electric Light Orchestra in their heydays, was president of Jet Records and has a reputation in the U.K. akin to that of Irving Azoff in the U.S. — which is to say, he was a music-biz thug of the old school. Sharon first met Ozzy in the early ’70s through her dad; they married in 1982, and she became the singer’s manager shortly thereafter. She had to buy Ozzy’s contract from daddy Don for $1.5 million, and while the deal caused a bitter rift between the two that remains in effect to this day, Sharon clearly learned her management tactics at the heels of her Faustian father.

According to a recent story about Sharon’s bare knuckles, for the recent reissues of Ozzy’s first stellar solo efforts, 1980′s “Blizzard of Ozz” and 1981′s “Diary of a Madman,” Sharon ordered that the parts of bassist Bob Daisley and drummer Lee Kerslake be replaced by Robert Trujillo (ex-Suicidal Tendencies) and Mike Bordin (ex-Faith No More) from Ozzy’s current touring band. Daisley and Kerslake have a $20 million lawsuit pending for back monies they claim Ozzy owes them, and Sharon didn’t want to have to pay them performance royalties for the reissues. Nice lady, eh?

Ozzy had been fired from Sabbath in 1979 because of his drug and alcohol problems. Sharon rightly deserves the credit for not only saving his life, but for resurrecting his career by encouraging him to inject a dollop of the post-punk energy of the so-called New Wave of heavy metal. The cartoon became a bit more simplistic, but the essential oomph remained. Sharon also ensured that the legend of Ozzy would still be larger than life: She’s the one who famously suggested that Ozzy bring a dove to a 1980 meeting with Epic Records, though she claims she never suspected he’d bite its head off.

In a way, it doesn’t really matter whether this stunt and the many others that followed were engineered by Sharon, by Ozzy or — my own theory — by both in something akin to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s unholy, scheming alliance. Hardcore metalheads and devoted Sabbath fans tend to portray Sharon as the Iron Maiden, a puppet master who pulls Ozzy’s strings, but this is as unfairly insulting to a strong woman in an unforgiving business (after Courtney Love, who has expressed her admiration, Sharon is pretty much the most demonized woman in rock) as it is to Ozzy (who, despite all appearances, is said to be much smarter than he ever lets on. Sometimes it takes a genius to portray a dumbbell — witness Harpo Marx).

While we speculate about the power balance in the Osbourne household, the fact is that since the late ’80s, Ozzy’s music has increasingly lost touch with metal’s essential wallop as Ozzy Inc. has turned its back on the basic metal formula to chase the trends of the moment. Metal is one of the few rock genres where progress can actually be an impediment. (As with the Ramones, fans have no problem with Motorhead or Slayer remaking the same basic album every time out, as long as it fuckin’ kicks ass, man.) Instead, the Oz has turned to crooning power ballads and imitating the post-grunge Sturm und Drang of modern mainstream metal, and here I use that term loosely indeed.

One of the few ongoing successes of the troubled summer concert industry, the Sharon-initiated Ozzfest was conceived to cash in on the wretched n| metal genre, and to position Ozzy as one of its heroes — never mind the fact that his work in the Sabbath days and in his early solo career has about as much to do with joyless, angst-ridden, down-tuned bands like P.O.D., Drowning Pool and Adema as it does with Burt Bacharach. The only worthwhile act on the main stage of this year’s Ozzfest is System of a Down, the radical political band from Los Angeles who worship at the altar of Frank Zappa. But the artistic bankruptcy of the festival has nothing to do with whether or not metal is dead.

The influence of Sabbath continues to loom large on the stoner-rock scene, as well as in the hardcore metal underground, with its infinite subgenres of even death metal and black metal. The thing is, while all of those bands have a lot more cred (and pack much more of that crucial kick), none of them sell like the n| metal boneheads. And as the myriad magazine covers and newspaper features prove, Ozzy today is all about money and celebrity, two things that never much mattered to metal bands in the past.

In striking his devil’s bargain, Ozzy’s public persona has been transformed from a cartoon that was dumb but cool to one that is just plain dumb. In other words, it’s been bye-bye, Bugs Bunny; hello, Garfield.

Needless to say, the major vehicle for this has been “The Osbournes.” I am not above laughing at metal’s excesses — “Spinal Tap” is as much a brilliant homage as it is a vicious spoof. Each week, the show invites us to laugh at Ozzy as the doddering old fool who is so wrecked by booze and drugs that he no longer has the capacity to work the TV remote, while Sharon is happily cast as a caricature of the Evil Genius, and two of their three kids (Kelly and Jack; eldest daughter Aimee famously opted out) are portrayed as typically whiny, spoiled, fucked-up examples of the teen demographic their parents are ever so eager to milk.

Some wrongheaded cultural commentators have lauded “The Osbournes” for showing us a “real” (i.e., fucked-up) family as opposed to TV’s usual fictional fare, but that’s a laugh. “The Osbournes” have about as much to do with how most of us live as the folks on “Friends.”

You want reality? Noticeably absent from the show’s frequent mocking of Ozzy is any discussion of his bladder problems, which have long been legend in the rock world. The reason Oz continually dumps buckets of water on himself through his concerts is to mask the fact that he’s peeing in his pants, according to some who are in the unenviable position to know. A friend of mine who once visited the Osbourne manse reports that Ozzy has a “special bathroom” whose walls are lined with rubber because his aim is so bad. Somehow, MTV’s cameras have avoided showing us all that.

As I said, I choose to believe that Ozzy isn’t a complete moron, just a bit of a mess. But whatever his actual psychiatric diagnosis, there is something distasteful about the show goading us to mock him, while nary a word is ever said about his very real musical accomplishments. Would we want to visit a blues great in the old-age home and chuckle as he gums his oatmeal, or stop by a rehab facility to laugh at a jazz giant as he tries to kick his junk problem? Why don’t we just drop in on Syd Barrett or put a sandbox in Brian Wilson’s front yard and laugh at them for a while? Goofing on Oz is hardly any better.

No one ever laughs at Sabbath guitarist Iommi, whom Sharon is said to hate. (Legend holds that she once set Iommi up on a blind date at a tony restaurant, and when he was seated at the table, she sent over an elaborately wrapped box containing her feces.) The veteran Sabbath instrumentalists may now be fat, old and grizzled, but when they reunite onstage, they still deliver the goods, avoiding the dreaded curse of rock nostalgia through the undiluted force of the music’s punch. Not so with solo Ozzy.

“I’m not the kind of person that you think I am/ I’m not the Antichrist or the Iron Man … I try to entertain you the best I can,” Oz sings on “Gets Me Through,” the lead track on 2001′s execrable “Down to Earth,” which is reprised on the equally avoidable new concert album, “Ozzy Osbourne Live at Budokan.” Having invited us to pull back the curtain to see “the real man” (who is in fact just another cardboard caricature and — even worse — a “professional entertainer”), it’s become impossible to enjoy the old metal myth.

The Ozzy of yore may have sold his soul for rock ‘n’ roll, but he would never have auctioned it to be just another MTV cash cow, a Britney Spears with nasty old hair and a Brummy accent.

“Why are you constantly complaining about Britney Spears’ image? Why are you so bothered by the idea that older men may desire Britney sexually? Perhaps you feel ashamed for wanting Ms. Spears yourself in some manner? Or does it have to do with the fact that you have a young daughter?”

The first charge was easy enough to dismiss: I’m a healthy, red-blooded fella, and there’s a long list of female pop stars who get my motor running, from Jill Scott and Angie Stone, to Pink and Shakira, to the fair Justine Frischmann and the risqué art-rapper Peaches. But Barbie Doll Britney? Uh-uh, no way. Sure, I recognize her obvious charms, thrust out front and center from the cover of the current Rolling Stone. But she’s too synthetic, too “perfect” and ultimately too cold in that airbrushed Playboy centerfold way. Hell, I’d sleep with the guy from Staind before I’d tumble for La Brit.

The daughter thing, though — that hit a nerve. Could my disdain for Spears’ helium chirp and cynical, sugar-coated musical calculations be motivated by some deep-seated fear of seeing my 5-year-old daughter grow up and become a sexual being? I thought I’d accepted the fact that some day, sooner rather than later, she’ll become her own person, do what she wants to do, fuck who she wants to fuck. Hell, we’ve been singing “Mr. Suit” by Wire since she was 3 and a half (“I’m tired of being told what to think/I’m tired of being told what to do/I’m tired of fucking phonies/That’s right I’m tired of you!” — though we change the words slightly to “big bad phonies”).

Still, could I be falling prey to the whole paternalistic “daddy’s little girl” trip, and letting it cloud my critical judgment to boot?

The question lingered for the better part of a week, until shortly after my daughter’s fifth birthday party a few days before Thanksgiving. Among the presents she received from the other members of her preschool class were a tackle box-sized makeup kit (lipstick, eye shadow, nail polish — the works); a life-sized vanity-table play set with a bigger mirror than any we had in the house and a doll from the “Diva Starz” series, a little plastic pop singer who says different things when you dress her in different outfits (all sold separately). Sample dialogue: “Let me wear my blue pants!” and “Hyper-sweet! I’m loving this purple skirt!”

The manufacturer, Mattel, says Diva Starz are intended for “Ages 6+,” though a similar, competing line called “Bratz” (“The girls with a passion for fashion!”) from MGA Entertainment advises “4+.” Both collections boast a young, blond diva who looks amazingly like You Know Who, complete with a pneumatically inflated, Britneyesque chest, bountifully curvaceous hips and a camel toe in the crotch.

I realized then and there that the most sinister thing about Spears isn’t the sex, it’s the selling. My objection is not dad-driven Puritanism, it’s a gripe against the hyper-capitalism of America’s massive, all-encompassing Teen Fashion/Beauty/Culture Machine, which has now moved the lower threshold of its target demographic from just pre-puberty to barely post-toddler. I’d like to grab hold of the Man (whoever he or she is) and choke ‘em with his own marketing plan: “No, no, no, no, no, Mr. Suit.”

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Kiddie sex is big business today, but by no means is it restricted to obscure corners of the Internet, as some would have us believe. A friend of mine who’s the head buyer at Minneapolis’ largest chain of magazine stores says that Hustler’s faux-teen spin-off Barely Legal is their third best-selling sex mag; ultra-respectable businessmen invariably come in and buy it along with a copy of Seventeen or Cosmo Girl, which creeps her out to the core of her being. And more than once she’s found a sticky, dog-eared copy of the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen fan magazine in the employee’s bathroom.

After the horrified kiddies’ voices that Michael Jackson inserted at the end of “The Lost Children” from his new album “Invincible,” there has been no creepier kiddie-porn moment in recent musical history than during Spears’ HBO concert special, when actor Jon Voigt (father of the troubled Angelina Jolie) sat a young stand-in for the pop star (in fact her 8-year-old sister, Jamie Lynn) on his knee after telling her a fairy tale about how all her dreams will come true when she meets a man who will whisk her away.

Just thinking about it makes me want to take a shower.

But the pervs may be reaching their saturation point. Relentlessly promoted by MTV, HBO and corporate pop radio, “Britney” sold more than 745,000 copies in its first week, according to SoundScan, the company that tracks album sales. But that was considerably less than the 1.3 million units that Spears’ sophomore effort “Oops! … I Did It Again” moved in its first seven days last year.

One reason is that, no matter how tantalizing or taboo, any act gets tired the third time around. Another is that Spears is getting too old for the role of the coquettish nymph; she turns 20 on Dec. 2. But mostly, I think, the horny, jaded masses have pretty much seen all that she has to offer. If she really wants to keep our attention, she’s gonna have to produce that Pam ‘n’ Tommy-style hardcore sex tape with her boyfriend, Justin “N ‘Sync” Timberlake. Otherwise, America will move on to its next illicit fantasy girl — and this time, she may not even be flesh and blood.

While Spears has definitely benefited from modern science — if not via the surgical enhancement of her breasts, then certainly by the pitch-shifted digital tweaking of that god-awful voice, which she doesn’t even pretend to really use “in concert” — the technology exists to build an even dreamier diva. On Halloween, the Supreme Court heard the government’s defense of a federal law overturned by an appeals court barring pornography using computer-generated images of children. If the top court holds that this material is legal because no harm is done to real children in producing it — and many think that it will — then the floodgates will open, and the high-tech trickery used to bring us “Monsters, Inc.” and “Shrek” could give us kiddie-porn versions of “Deep Throat” and “Debbie Does Dallas.”

Measured against that kind of competition, “Britney” is old news. “For the just under 40 minutes that the album lasts, people of all ages and genders can feel like a dirty old man,” Jon Pareles harrumphed in his New York Times review of the album. But Spears has been working the comic-book “Lolita” angle since long before her first album in 1999, and writer Strawberry Saroyan did a fine job of dissecting it all in Salon in May 2000. “She’s a Mouseketeer trafficking kiddie porn, a school-girl queen selling sex in a leathery cat suit,” said the headline that ran with her essay. “Does Britney Spears have any idea what she’s doing?”

Saroyan concluded that she did not, and that would seem to be confirmed by a “roundtable teleconference” that Spears’ label, the teen-pop monolith Jive Records, arranged with some two dozen journalists a week before the new album’s release. Each reporter was allowed to ask one question, with no follow-ups; you posed your query and were immediately muted while everyone on the line listened to the diva’s response.

I got to ask the first question for the Chicago Sun-Times. From the official Jive transcript (which was e-mailed to journalists so they wouldn’t have to tape or even type up the quotes):

Q. “Britney, this is a fairly hot and horny record — a lot of people are comparing it to Madonna’s “Erotica.” Now, when I’ve seen you in concert before, I’ve generally been surrounded by 12- to 16-year-olds — young kids — most of them girls. I wonder if you’ve thought about the message you send to them? I see them looking at you, twirling around the pole in that Demi Moore sort of strip-tease, and I wonder if you worry about them getting this message of sexuality at a pre-sexualized age?”

A. Britney Spears: “Well, I think it’s … You know, first I’m very flattered that such young kids look up to me, because the innocence of them is a really beautiful thing. But I think it’s honestly up to their parents to explain to them that I’m a performer, and that when I’m on stage, that’s my time to perform and express myself. I don’t wear those clothes to the supermarket or to a ballgame. You know, little kids, just like when they go into their mom’s closet and they dress up in their mom’s clothes, it’s fine and fun, and it’s like their time to play at home. But that’s not what they’re supposed to wear out into reality in the real world.”

A disarmingly reasonable answer, and Spears had clearly been prepped and ready with it; the all-about-dressing-up defense even seems plausible for a moment when you consider that she sported no fewer than 13 different designer outfits during her 90-minute HBO concert special, building to a wet and wild climax with the “caught outside in the rain in a chain-link bra” ending. But if I hadn’t been on mute, I’d have asked how many moms have latex dominatrix outfits in their closet, much less the live python she wore to the MTV Video Music Awards.

Spears seemed less practiced later in the interview. Since she sported a white jumpsuit in the HBO ads, someone asked if she was an Elvis Presley fan. “Yes, I am a really, really big Elvis fan,” she gushed. “And I think the real reason why we did the whole Elvis thing is because, you know, he’s from Vegas.” (Actually, he was from Tupelo, Miss.)

Next, she was queried about her cover of “I Love Rock and Roll.” “I just love the song,” she enthused. “I love Pat Benatar, and I just think she’s amazing. It’s like she’s a rock ‘n’ roll chick and she’s just having a good time and it’s a very empowering song.” (It was Joan Jett, not Pat Benatar, who recorded the most famous version of the tune.)

Finally, toward the end of the session, a reporter from Vegas (naturally) stumblingly asked if, since she’s always making a point of saying that she’s, you know, still a virgin, whether there are any, um, things that she and Justin can do to just, er, have fun?

The shock that Spears registered at this intrusive but not unwarranted question (she’s the one making sex an issue, after all) could be felt right over the phone line; she didn’t show nearly as much revulsion for the snake that was licking her ear on MTV. How could anyone even ask such a thing! “We can go to the next question, ” she snapped.

At the same time, in her latest Rolling Stone cover story, Spears insists that sex is wonderful and should be shared with everyone, and she maintains that she is the one who is wholly responsible for engineering her drool-worthy image. “What would you say to people who say of you, ‘Oh, she’s all constructed by other people, she’s just selling sex’?” Mim Udovitch asked. Replied the singer: “If I wanna show my belly in a video or show a little bit of cleavage, I just don’t see anything wrong with that. … I come up with the concepts for all my tour ideas, all of my videos. It’s just so lame that people wouldn’t understand that.”

Spears has a point. Why should we assume, as Saroyan did in her essay, that some man designed the pedophiliac fantasy that has propelled her career thus far (and which is a heck of a lot more complicated than a glimpse of belly button in a video)? Her telechat unwittingly displayed her shallow knowledge of the musical traditions she references, but she may be completely aware of the how to use sex as a sales tool. After all, she was brought up to be expert at it, schooled by a stage mom since before she could walk, just like JonBenet Ramsey.

In the liner notes to “Britney,” the singer writes, “Mama — thanks for being the best role model in the world. I want to be just like you when I’m older.” In an interview, the singer Natalie Merchant recently told me a revealing story about being stuck in a line of golf carts backstage at a music awards show. Someone behind her kept frantically leaning on the horn, and finally she turned around to look. There was Spears in the passenger seat, sitting beside her mom, who was pounding on the horn and shouting, “Get out of the way! Britney goes first! Britney’s got to go first!”

And here is Lynne Spears in “Britney Spears’ Heart to Heart” (Three Rivers Press), the autobiography that she co-wrote with her daughter last year:

“The way we saw it, our family was making an investment in Brit’s future. How could we not help her realize her goals? It was so clear that Brit loved performing, and it would have broken my heart to get in her way. I always used to tell her, ‘Don’t worry about what it costs. Just do your very best.’ Dreams should never have a price tag on them. I believe that if you want something bad enough, you’ll find a way to do it. And we did.”

Mind you, Mama Spears is discussing dance lessons for a 2-year-old in that passage. When my own daughter was 2, the dreams she had for the future involved not having to pee in a diaper. Whenever it addresses the mother-daughter relationship, the Spears’ book reminds me of Louis Malle’s pedophiliac-prostitute fantasy, “Pretty Baby.” When Susan Sarandon turns her daughter out to trick, it’s with a mixture of pride, jealousy and self-loathing. For her part, Brooke Shields tries her damnedest at the job, partly because she doesn’t want to let her mother down, and partly because she wants to prove she can be a much better lay.

There’s a sort of panicked desperation to the attempted seduction of “Britney”; rarely has a coldly calculated sexual come-on been so plainly unsexy. As producers the Neptunes and Rodney Jerkins nudge the grooves away from Swedish pop perfection toward generically glossy and soulless R&B, Spears tries to update her lyrical concerns by whining about the hard life of a superstar (“Overprotected,” “What It’s Like to Be Me”) and bemoaning the difficulties of growing up and coming of age (“I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman”). This is all a bid to stay ahead of her audience as it moves from pre-teen to puberty, of course. But for all her talk of self-empowerment, the submissive sex toy is still the role Spears plays best. She returns to it again and again (“Boys” and “I’m A Slave 4 U”), and it’s certainly the pose that’s being used to peddle the disc.

In Chicago, the Clear Channel Communications dance-pop station Kiss-FM celebrated the release of “Britney” with a contest offering young female listeners the chance to win Brit’s tits. Engineered by the station’s general manager and marketing director (both women), the tag line ran, “Wanna be like Britney? You first met her on ‘The Mickey Mouse Club.’ You’ve watched her grow into every guy’s fantasy slave. Now you want what she’s got! Enter to win ‘Boobies Like Britney’ and the $5,000 grand prize!”

In defending themselves after they were criticized by local media columnist Robert Feder, the contest’s architects maintained that it was all in good fun, and their listeners knew that the prize money could be used for clothes or a makeover, not necessarily new, massive mammaries. The executives were probably right; the teenyboppers who listen to their station and tune in to MTV’s “Total Request Live” have been effectively programmed almost since birth. The message, as it’s been paraphrased by many a feminist critic, is: You will never be smart or sexy enough as you are; the only hope of being like Barbie or Britney is to buy, buy, buy. So start spending!

Sex has always been an inextricable part of pop music; it was thus long before Elvis (wherever he was from), and it will be so long after Spears is cast off onto the slag heap of fallen idols somewhere between Twiggy and Tiffany. And while I celebrate rock ‘n’ roll at its best as one of popular culture’s last forums for “truth” and (only marginally commodified) rebellion, I won’t deny that selling has always been a big part of the mix, too. The Beatles blew the minds of a generation and changed the music forever, but they happily moved a whole lot of boots, haircuts, posters, etc.

Spears is notable for temporarily marking a new low in the crass shamelessness of both the commercialism and the koochie-flaunting. But she isn’t the first singer to emphasize tits over talent, or to shake her hips to move designer jeans and plastic dolls. And she won’t be the last.

As for this dad’s particular dilemma, my daughter has thankfully shown no interest in Spears as yet. If she ever does, I plan to follow the singer’s advice and not only explain that she is playing dress-up, but lay bare the whole insidious con job. Then I’ll offer some alternatives.

My daughter may not go right away for X-Ray Spex or Hole, Salt-N-Pepa or Angie Stone’s new album, “Mahogany Soul” (which ends with the memorable declaration, “It’s that time of the month, don’t even mess with me!”). But I bet I could convince her that “M!ssundaztood” by Pink is a whole heckuva lot better than “Britney.” No one’s submissive sex toy, the former Alicia Moore is a real and complex young woman, albeit one with artificially colored chartreuse hair. I love it when she sings, “Tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears/She’s so pretty, that just ain’t me.”

“Does rock ‘n’ roll have anything to do with anything?” Tosches asked. “Once it adopts pretensions of meaningfulness outside of that of a self-contained expression, matrical and flashing, doesn’t it become art or pop/kitsch?”

Yes, it does — though it’s hard to complain when it reaches the level of the former. “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” the Sept. 22 televised concert organized with lightning speed by veteran MTV producer Joel Gallen and the vile music impresario Jimmy Iovine just days after Sept. 11′s terrorist attacks, was presented with a striking spareness and taste and included a surprising number of performances that rivaled Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock for their urgency and emotional wallop — that did, indeed, smell a lot like art.

The highlights of that night included Paul Simon delivering a hymnlike reading of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Wyclef Jean singing a heartbreaking version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” the ever-crotchety Neil Young envisioning the utopia of John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Bruce Springsteen investing “My City of Ruins” with the same immediacy he’d brought to the cop-critical Amadou Diallo tribute, “41 Shots.”

Although it was three times as long (clocking in at a marathon six hours), much more heavily hyped and fat with corporate underwriting, McCartney’s “Concert for NYC” produced nowhere near as much memorable music. In place of its predecessor’s understated dignity, it substituted annoying telethon glad-handing, unbearable bathos and disturbing outbursts of unrestrained blood lust and blatant jingosim, mostly from the procession of New York public safety workers who were trotted out like props to stand beside the celebrity emcees. (It was also unbelievably weird to see Sen. Tom Daschle dressed and talking like Phil Donohue, and Bill Clinton saying he hoped Osama bin Laden was watching on TV. Do evildoers have VH1 in those caves that we’re trying to smoke them out of? Can’t we ask their cable providers for their address?)

The performances that were not just imminently forgettable pop stars doing their usual awards-show shtick (Five for Fighting, Jay-Z, the Backstreet Boys, Bon Jovi, the Goo-Goo Dolls and Janet Jackson) were mostly just incredibly lame (Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy’s bluesy shucking and jiving, or David Bowie’s weak rendition of the obvious “Heroes,” both of which were driven by the ubiquitous Paul Shaffer and his bland band of Musician’s Union hacks).

Then there were the tunes that were astoundingly wrong-headed, given the ostensible cause of the event. Melissa Etheridge emoted solo-acoustic through Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” a song about desperately wanting to escape from a city that has become “a death trap,” while the rock band formerly known as the Who rotely thundered through “Baba O’Reilly,” urging a crowd that included thousands of young rescuers still mourning the loss of their peers to sing along in homage to a “teenage wasteland.”

That the crowd cheerfully complied was irrelevant — it would have been hard to find a rowdier, drunker or whiter group anywhere on television, outside of a monster-truck or pro-wrestling match. While the cameo superstars continually told us that this night “was about so much more than what was happening onstage,” it was quite obvious to everybody else that it was just entertainment as usual, and pass me another beer.

Whether the genuinely entertaining moments were worth the grueling endurance fest was debatable. It depended on how big a Stones fan you were (Mick Jagger showed uncharacteristic selflessness by eschewing the opportunity to hype his forthcoming solo album in favor of bringing out his ol’ pal Keith Richards to croon on the seldom-heard “Salt of the Earth” and join him on the classically New Yawk anthem “Miss You”), how much you’re amused by Macy Gray’s gonzo grooviness and how intrigued you are by the prospect of John Mellencamp and Kid Rock dueting on “Little Pink Houses.”

As for Macca, he did not deliver the reunion with George Harrison and Ringo Starr that many had hoped for, appearing instead with a band of faceless young mooks a third his age. He started out promisingly enough with a fiery run through “I’m Down,” but quickly devolved into pure pop schlock, including a strings-laced version of “Yesterday,” two songs from his new album and two runs through a cheesy would-be anthem “Freedom,” which he wrote in the wake of Sept. 11. Plus the obligatory superstar singalong on “Let It Be,” of course.

Setting aside the question of how much real help “The Concert for NYC” will bring to anyone — and let us not forget that reporters subsequently proved that “The Concert for Bangla Desh” and Bob Geldof’s 1985 “Live Aid” did very little indeed to help the people of India or Africa — what was the purpose of all of this ballyhoo?

Why, to make the strong and the surviving feel good about themselves! (In stark contrast to the first benefit, which was essentially a plea for peace under the then-gathering ominous war clouds.)

Like the food we’re dropping on Afghanistan along with our bunker-busting bombs, “The Concert for NYC” was a pointless gesture that is only likely to backfire in time. “Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful, and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm,” Nietzsche warned. And it was certainly easy to dislike those heroic cops and firemen as they bum-rushed the stage to pay tribute to fallen comrades without once mentioning the thousands of dead office workers at the World Trade Center, much less the innocents who are being killed along with the guilty as we wage war in Central Asia.

The most depressing thought is that we’re likely to see even worse before all of this is done. Not to be outdone by his former “Say Say Say” buddy, the King of Pop turned Elephant Man freak Michael Jackson hosted his “United We Stand: What More Can I Give?” concert on Sunday night at RFK Stadium in Washington. Featuring, among others, Mariah Carey and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, highlights will air in a two-hour special on ABC a week from Thursday. Mark your calendars now.

Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga by Stephen Davis
Speaking of Satan’s soundtrack, Davis’ account of the career of those hard-rocking, runes-lovin’, Aleister Crowley-emulating Brits is perhaps a bit heavy on the marauding Viking and “selling your soul at the crossroads” imagery. But it’s a wonderfully trashy summertime page turner that’s justified in its more or less complete lack of subtlety by the like-minded approach of its subjects. (These were, after all, the men who urged us to squeeze their lemons till the juice ran down their legs.) Decades before Marilyn Manson’s Neil Strauss-penned autohagiography, Zep forever secured the mantle for wretched rock ‘n’ roll excess with a little stunt involving a groupie, a sand shark and the overactive imagination of roadie Richard Cole, the book’s primary Deep Throat (but by no means its only one).

Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosches
A rare combination of absurdly diligent researcher and distinctive, fluid, some would say florid stylist, Tosches has actually given us two great rock biographies; I chose “Hellfire” over “Dino” because I prefer the Killer’s music to Dean Martin’s, though the latter is also essential for illuminating the Italian crooner’s contributions to rock and the way the entire record business was changed by the advent of folks like Jerry Lee. The tale of Lewis’ hard-drinking, cousin-marrying, piano-busting career reads like a powerful novel — Faulkner on speed decked out in leather, as filtered through Tosches’ native Newark, N.J. That voice is why everything he writes reads like rock ‘n’ roll, even when the subject isn’t music; his latest is a wailin’ bio of boxer Sonny Liston.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth
Another fastidiously reported life story that reads like literature, and the only Stones book you’ll ever really need. Deftly intertwining the sad tale of band founder Brian Jones with the even sadder (and more violent) story of Altamont, Booth produces no less than an autopsy report of the Utopian ’60s dream. The Memphis native had an all-access pass from the world’s only rock ‘n’ roll band at the moment the music was seduced, deflowered and turned out to trick by the pimps of big business. From there it was only a matter of time before $150 concert tickets, Volkswagen commercials and pathetic pandering to the hollow gods of celebrity and nostalgia followed, as Booth makes abundantly clear in a new afterword tacked onto the recent edition from A Cappella Books.

The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman
Don’t give me that sanctimonious bullshit — you know you read it, and its 700-plus pages sucked you right in. And if you didn’t, you oughta. The way I see it, the harsh, clear spotlight of the much-reviled Goldman doesn’t even begin to balance the unending fellatio accorded all things Fab Four-related in every other corner of the media universe, Lennon especially, he being the “murdered martyr” and all. Puh-leese. As Lester Bangs wrote in a memorable obit, Lennon was just a guy, and as Goldman shows (in breathless detail, page after page after page), he was a really screwed-up one at that. You want musicological analysis and philosophical examinations of the lyrics? Go somewhere else. You want big stinking heaps of prime Beatle dung, this is the place.

The Family by Ed Sanders
Another end-of-the-’60s epic. What can I say — as a Gen X-er who missed the party, I love dancing on Woodstock’s grave. Not really a rock bio per se, “The Family” was written by a legendary rocker (founder of proto-punks the Fugs!), and the music certainly provides the soundtrack to this book about Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murders. Less sensationalistic, more sympathetic/analytical in the sociological sense and infinitely better written than prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter,” “The Family” will keep you up at night not because you fear being creepy-crawled by a gang of grungy, sex-crazed hippies, but because you’ll realize what a fine line separates superficial suburban sanity and the twisted vision of someone like ol’ Chuck. I opened it again after Columbine, and it never seemed more relevant.