Britney Spears tells her life story in Piece of Me, one of the cuts in her new album Blackout. She recalls that she was “Miss American Dream since I was 17” but she is now “….Mrs. Bad Media Karma, another day, another drama,” with “….pictures of my derriere in the magazines.” I would say we see derriere and more and more of her every day. It is a fact that less than a decade since she hit it big with Baby One More Time and became the leading pop princess, Spears has become the prime example of celebrity on the skids.
Her present predicament reads like a thrashy tabloid serial. At 25, the former Mouseketeer and ex of ex N’ Sync Justin Timberlake, has already been married twice. Her first one was for a day or two to a guy whom nobody remembers now and her second to Kevin Federline who is the father of her two sons but from whom she is now divorced. She is now in the middle of a bitter custody battle for her boys, an ugly process she has been spending for, that means support for K-Fed including his lawyers’ fees, because Spears always seems to be guilty of some misdemeanor that requires court intervention.
The reason for these is probably because in between hearings, the supervised visits with the kids and work, Spears also went party-mad everywhere. She shopped and shopped at the malls. She shaved her head and showed off her lack of panties to the paparazzi. She got herself arrested, was packed off into rehab and even gave an unthinkably bad, lip-synched, leaden-feet performance of her latest single Gimme More to an international TV audience at the MTV Video Music Awards last September in Las Vegas. Can things get any worse for Britney? Given her batting average, there is always that possibility. But then as the old adage goes, there is nowhere to go but up when you are so down.
However, I think that Britney has found the way up. And it is Blackout. She needed a saving grace and her music came to the rescue. No great shakes as a singer Spears is the creation of clever music production and astute marketing. Public perception about her youth and of how cute and sweet and sexy she was, was the key to her initial success. She is not cute or sweet anymore. If we are to judge by the way she looked when she let all her excess pounds hang out at the MTV VMAs, then she is also not sexy anymore. Besides it has already been four years since her last album In the Zone.
Now, long before I got my copy of Blackout, I had already made up my mind to judge it as objectively as possible and not to let all that I see on ET affect what I’d think. That was not easy. Britney news was everywhere and I actually marveled that she dared release the album at a time when her image is at an all time low. I now know why she did. Blackout works. Surprises of surprises, Spears has managed to produce a good album. Blackout is a well put-together album that gets listeners out on the floor. It is dance and makes no bones about its intentions.
Not one token ballad is included and there are no attempts to present Spears, who will never win in American Idol, as a singer. Her voice has been warped, distorted, layered, covered, etc. or in one case, dispensed with altogether. You may think the process strange but it actually works in dance albums with hints of techno, hip-hop and electronica. Best bets for the charts are Gimme More, Radar, Break the Ice and Hot as Ice.
It is now a fact that Britney music is still hot and if it continues to sell well then she might just be able to retrieve some glories from the past. If not then I, too, will start thinking that Blackout is good because she has this excellent production team behind her who couldn’t care less if she makes an ass of herself or only because I expected something really bad from the pits of paparazzidom.