The sweet young Britney Spears you used to love is dead.

With her ongoing erratic behavior, suspected drug use, custody battle and recent hospitalization, former Mickey Mouse Club star Spears has effectively committed suicide in her career as a popstar, but that doesn’t mean her career is over. Nothing attracts interest like controversy, and Spears is the queen at the moment.

If she can take a cue from some of these other notable musical trouble-makers, she just might be able to reinvent herself and come out on top of the music world once more.

So, who was raising hell before Britney came along?

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It was only a few short years ago that the media’s favorite bleach-blonde disaster was Courtney Love. Conspiracy theorists are quick to claim that Love was involved in the death of husband/Nirvana bandleader Kurt Cobain, while music snobs insist that Cobain wrote the songs for Love’s band, Hole, on its breakthrough album, Live Through This.

Giving Britney some competition for the Bad Mother award, rumors persist that Love was using heroin during her pregnancy with her daughter, Francis Bean. Regardless of the negative publicity, Love got a clean-cut makeover and continued her music career as well as a surprisingly successful acting career, including a critically acclaimed role in The People vs Larry Flint. She hasn’t been doing so well lately, but odds are she’ll be back.

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Controversy always follows pop queen Madonna. Unfortunately, most of her naughty behavior seems as contrived and calculated as her fake British accent (um, she’s from Michigan). Still, with her controversial sex book and pseudo-blasphemous “Like a Prayer” video, she’s managed to parlay her headline-making antics into an inexplicably enduring pop music career. Of course, the same cannot be said of her infamously awful acting turns.

Then again, maybe they’re even since Britney starred in her own awful karaoke-filled teen girl buddy flick, Crossroads.

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Rock’n’roll’s original bad boys, the Rolling Stones have been stirring up trouble ever since they first hit the airwaves with suggestive numbers like, “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Of course, the ensuing decades of sex, drugs and, occasionally, rock’n’roll have made them legends. And while band has seen some hard times (including the mysterious, possibly drug-influenced, death of guitarist Brian Jones in 1969), they’ve ultimately managed to cling to the top of the rock’n’roll mountain.

Coincidentally, in 2000 Brit recorded a version of the Stones’ classic “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” but due to her then-pristine image, she traded the original lyric “He can’t be a man, because he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me,” for the more positive, “she can’t tell me who to be, because I’ve got my own identity.”

Nice try, Brit.

Of course, these are only a few examples of singers, musicians and other performers who have fallen on hard times. Many of them have managed to recover their careers, so maybe there’s hope for our trainwreck after all. Heck, for many bluesman and rappers, the hardest times provide the best musical fodder.

Her image as a cutesy popstar is dead. But, if Spears cleans herself up and waits a few months, then comes out with some sort of mature album/song triumphantly declaring that’s she’s been through hard times but now she’s back, she just might be bigger than ever.

Because, the only thing tabloids and consumers love more than watching a celebrity hit rock bottom, is watching them claw their way back up to the top.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Rock Music, Pop Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.