No Rock And Roll Fun

THE KISS-OFF: So, while we were desperately poking in identical boxes looking for USB cables and the alarm clock, there was the MTV awards and the Britney-Christina-Madonna "lesbian kissing." It was covered expertly in this week's Rocking Vicar mailout:

Parishioner Mary Ingoldby: "Madonna's kiss-up with Britney Spears on the MTV Video Awards the other night told me three things: 1) How far down the dumper must both participants be that snogging each other on television is the only way of getting their sagging careers back on track? 2) TV is so unspontaneous that they clearly had to rehearse this little caper with the director first; you even got a "reaction shot" from a camera in the audience kneeling beside former Spears paramour Justin Timberlake (his reaction: slightly bored as it happens. He'd probably been at the run-through) And 3) this kind of thing is considerably more exciting to the male members of your household - in fact my eldest son and husband referred to it all night as "hot girl-on-girl action" rather than "tragic old biffers in desperate attention bid"

While we agree on point two - we suspect that, rather like with the budget in days gone by, there was an MTV official with a big pile of press releases, peeling them off as the kisses happened - and sort of agree on point three; although we'd have to add the words "slightly sheltered" before male, we're not so sure about point one. It seems to us that Christina would take any opportunity to get on the front pages, career to save or not; and Britney's post-snog interview with Entertainment Tonight made it seem like she was fulfilling a fantasy. It's Madonna's motivation that looks the shabbiest - the lesbian kiss to try and re-invigorate a fading entertainment franchise is well known in TV (Roseanne, late period Ellen, Emmerdale, and Friends, where it was a two-for-one shot at perking up the sitcom and Winona Ryder's career in one snog) but coming at the same time as Madonna's attempts to out-prance Missy Elliot in the Gap Ads, the MTV display makes it clearer than ever that Madonna has morphed into the real life Les-from-Creme-Brule; desperately trying to prove that she's with the kids, but also clinging to the back catalogue and shamelessly whoring it out. What she's done to Get In The Groove is basically taking out a mortgage on her past classics in the hope it'll make her somehow relevant in the twenty-first century; it's not recouped and so the only effect has been to make a Great Song somehow shabbier. It's only fit for an Atomic Kitten cover now. An old woman kissing young girls? A sideshow, but one that's made unsettling by the wrapping of another greatest hit around it. She's trying to say "This is what I am", all she has to offer is "this is what I was." The granny who wants us to think she's still got it. A shame.