In relation to the Music, Is There Much more To Britney Spears Than Meets the Eye?Right after leaking on the internet a few days ago, reviews are starting to pour in for Britney Spears' most recent release, 'Femme Fatale,' and also the consensus appears to be that the pop star has delivered "another 'Blackout,'" which inside the parlance of Spears' fans means it is very good -- real good.
For a lot of critics and specially the singer's fans, 'Blackout,' the 2007 album released at the height of Spears' private struggles, stands as her greatest achievement as an artist. Positive, she's released bigger albums, ones free of charge of the torment that followed 'Blackout' wherever it went -- be it to that disastrous performance at the MTV Video Music Awards or the embarrassingly cheap-looking, trashy 'Gimme More' video. But with its dark undercurrent and heavy beats, no Spears record has ever felt a lot more authentically her.
Left to her own devices, free of charge of the handlers who took a pretty teenage girl, turned her into the biggest pop star inside the world, then forgot to care about the human becoming inside the machine when she buckled under the pressure of perfection, Spears unleashed her greatest work. Now, as critics compare her newest to 'Blackout,' it is tough for this specific mega-fan to not wonder if we've written off the artist behind the pop star just before she even got started.
Spears is probably breathing a sigh of relief this afternoon. She pushed two well-reviewed singles -- 'Hold It Against Me' (good) and 'Till The World Ends' (infinitely much better) -- out ahead of the album, a disconcerting move in relation to a pop record simply because they might be notoriously bogged down with filler. But the first reviews of 'Femme Fatale' have been impressive, with Rolling Stone handing the set four stars and Pop Justice proclaiming it "basically brilliant."
Based on Digital Spy, "Let's be honest, Britney's last album 'Circus' wasn't poor by your average artist's standards -- 'Womanizer', 'Shattered Glass' and 'Unusual You' anyone? -- but as a follow-up to the near-perfect 'Blackout,' we do not mind telling you that we had been left somewhat underwhelmed. ... It may well have taken four years to arrive, but 'Femme Fatale' ultimately feels like the post-'Blackout' comeback we had been waiting for."
Men and women snicker when anyone tries to evaluate Spears' legitimacy as a musical artist, and there will usually be those that shrug off pop music entirely. And that's fine. Mumford and Sons and Arctic Monkeys are wonderful bands, but you will in no way convince me that their skills on the guitar are any a lot more musically critical than Lady Gaga's capability to minimize an entire stadium to tears just by telling them they were born this way. We're just going to need to agree to disagree due to the fact it is all relative; no definitive answer on what constitutes excellent music exists.
It's just diverse strokes for distinct folks.
Now, back to Britney. She's pretty awesome. As a long-time Spears mega-fan, I've usually discovered it interesting that the album regarded as her best -- The Times of London named it the fifth greatest pop album of the last decade -- was produced at her lowest point, a time when she shrugged off the coterie of advisers, managers, producers, writers, agents and family that had guided her early career with a steel fist and went at it on her own terms. Or a minimum of that is how it appears she went at it -- given the depth and extent of private info we know about celebrities, remarkably little is really recognized about Spears during this time.
But some things are specific of her sessions for 'Blackout.' Without having her usual team pulling the strings, she still discovered her way into the studio with the producers behind her very best -- but not greatest (and this is critical) -- songs, namely Bloodshy & Avant, the Swedish team behind arguably her best song ever ('Toxic'), who produced four of 'Blackout's' tracks, including 'Piece of Me,' which NY Mag's Vulture calls "the best track on that record and a legitimately dark, twitchy number both lyrically and musically."
She also enlisted Nate "Danja" Hills, then much better recognized for his collaborations with Timbaland than his standalone production work, for the lead single 'Gimme More' and five other tracks, and corralled The Neptunes, the Pharrell Williams-led production outfit that had its first No. 1 worldwide hit in 2001 with Spears' 'I'm a Slave 4 You,' for the telling ballad 'Why Should I Be Sad.'
"The success of a Britney song rests almost entirely on the quality of other people's songwriting and production, and almost every track on 'Femme Fatale' succeeds or fails on that basis," SLANT magazine writes. Having already heard 'Femme Fatale' myself, I couldn't agree more, but that wasn't often the case -- well, a minimum of not entirely.
Prior to descending into what we can only assume (but again, not really know; we think we know what was up with Britney, but her troubles remain a mystery, lots of conjecture but no verified facts) was at the very least a temporary and total break from reality -- she was placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold at one point and remains under a conservatorship, following all -- Spears' involvement in her own albums was on the rise.
The singer is credited as the executive producer of 'Blackout' and co-wrote some tracks on the album -- she has no authorial voice whatsoever on 'Femme Fatale' -- which was itself a step in the opposite direction from where she seemed to be heading with her fourth studio album, 'In the Zone,' where she co-wrote eight of the album's 13 tracks. Of 'Zone,' About.com wrote, "None of her previous albums ever managed to produce any kind of sustained emotional response than the pleasure that comes from a great pop record. I miss Max Martin, for certain, but it feels like Ms. S. has been paying attention to La Ciccone [Madonna]. To put it yet another way, this is Britney's 'True Blue.'"
'True Blue' is the album on which Madonna stepped away from the still-chugging-along pop star model -- i.e. singing songs written and produced by others -- to take control of her career artistically. Madonna wrote and produced, with Patrick Leonard and/or Stephen Bray (both of whom would go on to be longtime collaborators), nearly every song on 'True Blue.'
Spears has often cited Madonna as her primary influence, most recently in the course of a candid interview with OUT Magazine. When asked whose career she has attempted to mold her own soon after, Spears pointedly responded, "Madonna. No question. She is an amazing entertainer."
Spears may well not have written 'Toxic,' but she did co-author two of 'In the Zone's' far better songs: the sparse and beautiful ballad 'Everytime' and also the sexy jam 'Early Mornin.'' The album felt like a confident very first step toward reforming her image and taking control of her career, a la 'True Blue'-era Madonna. Vibe called 'Zone' "a supremely confident dance record that also illustrates Spears's development as a songwriter," while NPR said of Spears at the time of 'Zone's' release, "a decade's history of impeccably crafted pop is written on her body of work."
All of this is to say that maybe Britney Spears really isn't the pop music "cipher with a wisp of a voice" that some (but clearly not all, as illustrated above) critics routinely dismiss her as. The very best of Britney seems to come out of the woodwork when Spears herself is calling the shots. The army of pop robots, money managers, PR individuals, tour personnel and hangers-on that capitalize on her fame would be well advised to not ignore what could be the finest asset at their disposal: Britney Spears herself, and not just the humanoid known as Britney Spears that can jiggle around in tune with the sonic blasts around her. I'm talking about her ability to create music that resonates with her fans since it actually comes from her.
When the greatest compliment critics can give her latest album is that it is "another 'Blackout,'" it makes us real fans curious what would happen if everyone would just let Spears really make another 'Blackout,' maybe one having a side of 'In the Zone.'
While I would of course be devastated to see Spears return to anywhere near the emotional condition she was in when she was at work on 'Blackout,' I do wonder what an in-control, present and at-peace Spears would bring to the table if only her handlers would let her. Give her a chance to call the shots and see what happens. Now that sounds like the recipe for a wonderful pop record to me
For a lot of critics and specially the singer's fans, 'Blackout,' the 2007 album released at the height of Spears' private struggles, stands as her greatest achievement as an artist. Positive, she's released bigger albums, ones free of charge of the torment that followed 'Blackout' wherever it went -- be it to that disastrous performance at the MTV Video Music Awards or the embarrassingly cheap-looking, trashy 'Gimme More' video. But with its dark undercurrent and heavy beats, no Spears record has ever felt a lot more authentically her.
Left to her own devices, free of charge of the handlers who took a pretty teenage girl, turned her into the biggest pop star inside the world, then forgot to care about the human becoming inside the machine when she buckled under the pressure of perfection, Spears unleashed her greatest work. Now, as critics compare her newest to 'Blackout,' it is tough for this specific mega-fan to not wonder if we've written off the artist behind the pop star just before she even got started.
Spears is probably breathing a sigh of relief this afternoon. She pushed two well-reviewed singles -- 'Hold It Against Me' (good) and 'Till The World Ends' (infinitely much better) -- out ahead of the album, a disconcerting move in relation to a pop record simply because they might be notoriously bogged down with filler. But the first reviews of 'Femme Fatale' have been impressive, with Rolling Stone handing the set four stars and Pop Justice proclaiming it "basically brilliant."
Based on Digital Spy, "Let's be honest, Britney's last album 'Circus' wasn't poor by your average artist's standards -- 'Womanizer', 'Shattered Glass' and 'Unusual You' anyone? -- but as a follow-up to the near-perfect 'Blackout,' we do not mind telling you that we had been left somewhat underwhelmed. ... It may well have taken four years to arrive, but 'Femme Fatale' ultimately feels like the post-'Blackout' comeback we had been waiting for."
Men and women snicker when anyone tries to evaluate Spears' legitimacy as a musical artist, and there will usually be those that shrug off pop music entirely. And that's fine. Mumford and Sons and Arctic Monkeys are wonderful bands, but you will in no way convince me that their skills on the guitar are any a lot more musically critical than Lady Gaga's capability to minimize an entire stadium to tears just by telling them they were born this way. We're just going to need to agree to disagree due to the fact it is all relative; no definitive answer on what constitutes excellent music exists.
It's just diverse strokes for distinct folks.
Now, back to Britney. She's pretty awesome. As a long-time Spears mega-fan, I've usually discovered it interesting that the album regarded as her best -- The Times of London named it the fifth greatest pop album of the last decade -- was produced at her lowest point, a time when she shrugged off the coterie of advisers, managers, producers, writers, agents and family that had guided her early career with a steel fist and went at it on her own terms. Or a minimum of that is how it appears she went at it -- given the depth and extent of private info we know about celebrities, remarkably little is really recognized about Spears during this time.
But some things are specific of her sessions for 'Blackout.' Without having her usual team pulling the strings, she still discovered her way into the studio with the producers behind her very best -- but not greatest (and this is critical) -- songs, namely Bloodshy & Avant, the Swedish team behind arguably her best song ever ('Toxic'), who produced four of 'Blackout's' tracks, including 'Piece of Me,' which NY Mag's Vulture calls "the best track on that record and a legitimately dark, twitchy number both lyrically and musically."
She also enlisted Nate "Danja" Hills, then much better recognized for his collaborations with Timbaland than his standalone production work, for the lead single 'Gimme More' and five other tracks, and corralled The Neptunes, the Pharrell Williams-led production outfit that had its first No. 1 worldwide hit in 2001 with Spears' 'I'm a Slave 4 You,' for the telling ballad 'Why Should I Be Sad.'
"The success of a Britney song rests almost entirely on the quality of other people's songwriting and production, and almost every track on 'Femme Fatale' succeeds or fails on that basis," SLANT magazine writes. Having already heard 'Femme Fatale' myself, I couldn't agree more, but that wasn't often the case -- well, a minimum of not entirely.
Prior to descending into what we can only assume (but again, not really know; we think we know what was up with Britney, but her troubles remain a mystery, lots of conjecture but no verified facts) was at the very least a temporary and total break from reality -- she was placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold at one point and remains under a conservatorship, following all -- Spears' involvement in her own albums was on the rise.
The singer is credited as the executive producer of 'Blackout' and co-wrote some tracks on the album -- she has no authorial voice whatsoever on 'Femme Fatale' -- which was itself a step in the opposite direction from where she seemed to be heading with her fourth studio album, 'In the Zone,' where she co-wrote eight of the album's 13 tracks. Of 'Zone,' About.com wrote, "None of her previous albums ever managed to produce any kind of sustained emotional response than the pleasure that comes from a great pop record. I miss Max Martin, for certain, but it feels like Ms. S. has been paying attention to La Ciccone [Madonna]. To put it yet another way, this is Britney's 'True Blue.'"
'True Blue' is the album on which Madonna stepped away from the still-chugging-along pop star model -- i.e. singing songs written and produced by others -- to take control of her career artistically. Madonna wrote and produced, with Patrick Leonard and/or Stephen Bray (both of whom would go on to be longtime collaborators), nearly every song on 'True Blue.'
Spears has often cited Madonna as her primary influence, most recently in the course of a candid interview with OUT Magazine. When asked whose career she has attempted to mold her own soon after, Spears pointedly responded, "Madonna. No question. She is an amazing entertainer."
Spears may well not have written 'Toxic,' but she did co-author two of 'In the Zone's' far better songs: the sparse and beautiful ballad 'Everytime' and also the sexy jam 'Early Mornin.'' The album felt like a confident very first step toward reforming her image and taking control of her career, a la 'True Blue'-era Madonna. Vibe called 'Zone' "a supremely confident dance record that also illustrates Spears's development as a songwriter," while NPR said of Spears at the time of 'Zone's' release, "a decade's history of impeccably crafted pop is written on her body of work."
All of this is to say that maybe Britney Spears really isn't the pop music "cipher with a wisp of a voice" that some (but clearly not all, as illustrated above) critics routinely dismiss her as. The very best of Britney seems to come out of the woodwork when Spears herself is calling the shots. The army of pop robots, money managers, PR individuals, tour personnel and hangers-on that capitalize on her fame would be well advised to not ignore what could be the finest asset at their disposal: Britney Spears herself, and not just the humanoid known as Britney Spears that can jiggle around in tune with the sonic blasts around her. I'm talking about her ability to create music that resonates with her fans since it actually comes from her.
When the greatest compliment critics can give her latest album is that it is "another 'Blackout,'" it makes us real fans curious what would happen if everyone would just let Spears really make another 'Blackout,' maybe one having a side of 'In the Zone.'
While I would of course be devastated to see Spears return to anywhere near the emotional condition she was in when she was at work on 'Blackout,' I do wonder what an in-control, present and at-peace Spears would bring to the table if only her handlers would let her. Give her a chance to call the shots and see what happens. Now that sounds like the recipe for a wonderful pop record to me
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