Breaking the Video: Til the World Ends

Modern music videos are as artistic and complex now as they were back in the day when Olivia Newton John used the cinematic experience of Let's Get Physical to explore gender norms of the 1980s. From Lady Gaga’s 7-minute epics to Katy Perry’s exploding firework nipples, it can be quite difficult to tease out the story of many modern videos from beneath the many layers of meaningful imagery draped atop one another. But don’t despair, I’m here to help. Let’s take a look at the magnificent storytelling at work in Britney Spears’s latest masterwork, Til the World Ends.

Setting is very important. The opening to Til the World Ends is designed to let us know that these events take place in the future. And that in the future there will be lens flare.

And shoes. In the future there will also be shoes.

Shoes belonging to Britney Spears! But what hip and happening venue is the reknowned party-girl and trend-setter cavorting in on this fine December evening in the space-year 2012?

Heavens!... It's a sewer! What on Earth is Britney Spears doing in the cavernous underground resting place of mankind's post-dinner leavings?

Ah! The answer lies in the heavens themselves. A gigantic asteroid, the size of Texas is breaking up in Earth’s atmosphere, and has driven the ethnically diverse population of this city underground. Aside from the fat or ugly ones, obviously, as there is no sign of any such people in the doomed world depicted in this video. Perhaps Britney convinced her followers to sacrifice the unattractive in a bid to placate the great asteroid God.

With the end of the world at hand, Britney is partaking in a sex orgy with those who weren’t eligible for her failed attempted at preventing the doom of the Earth through ritual genocide of the ugly. No doubt forgoing the use of condoms as one last fuck-you to the cruel fate of this world, Britney presumably chose the filth and disease-riddled sewers for her sex party to extend the middle finger even further to the cruel and uncaring God who has cast his people aside.

Further evidence of Britney's anger at God can be seen when she leads her followers in crossing their arms, as if to say "No, God. I will not pray to you. I will not ask for divine intervention. I will not ask for mercy. I will fuck in the sewers instead. You cunt."

A sad Britney and some man-friends take a break from the shagging to despair at the fact that they will all die with such terrible hairstyles.

The sexcapades are interrupted as a sudden burst of light floods the subterranean chamber...


...from the window. Yes. This must be one of those famous sewer-windows.


Ah! The asteroid has passed harmlessly by. What a pity for all those ugly people Britney massacred.


An agape Britney momentarily regrets taking refuge in an underground network of shite-encrusted tunnels, home to millions of disease-carrying rats and birthplace of her ex-husband Keven Federline.

But she feels much better when she emerges from the manhole to a bright new day in a world where her record company and parents no longer exist, giving her the choice to experience what life is like for those who aren’t hyper-medicated puppets of record labels, forced to listlessly shuffle about on stage miming tracks fed to them by a a heartless machine determined to extract profit regardless of the toll taken on an already frail mental state.

Full of hope and joy, Britney wonders where she can take her newfound love of emerging from holes in unexpected places...