Britney Spears has been a professional singer, on and off, since she was recruited into the All New Mickey Mouse Club in 1993. We’ve seen videos of her performing like a real little trouper on Star Search when she was only 10 years old. You would think, wouldn’t you, that she would know quite a lot about singing? I certainly expect her to, and I think she does.
In fact, despite a hundred thousand sneery websites assuring us - or trying to reassure themselves - that “she can’t sing”, Britney’s recordings show a great deal of professionalism and skillful technique. It’s there IF you know what you’re looking for and are ready to look beyond power and Lea-Michele-style wig-out climaxes. If the sound of innocent little songs being bludgeoned to death by mindless excess is what floats your boat, you probably won’t be open to anything that I’m about to say.
The unobservant, such as hostile critics, try to put Britney in a box, saying she “has” this kind of voice or that kind of voice. “She has a nasal voice.” “She has a thin voice.” “She has a breathy voice.” “She has a robotic voice.” “She has a babyish voice.” And so on. Actually she has all of those voices and a lot more. A better way of expressing it would be to say that she possesses and USES those voices and isn’t limited to any of them.
Britney is an actress in song, you see. Consciously or unconsciously, the voices she applies to particular songs are her artistic choices. We may not especially like it, but the whiny, brattish voice she uses for parts of songs like “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” is supposed to create the image of a saucy, scheming little sex-vixen. But she’s not stuck with that voice. She only uses it in the verse and changes it for the chorus.
The voice she used in “Piece of Me” was also a little whiny, but it was very different from her sex-vixen voice. She sounded metallic and robotic - and did it so successfully that many unobservant critics thought her voice had been Vocoderized. If only people would listen through a decent set of headphones before they pass judgment.....
I guess it’s too much to expect from busy reviewers that they would take the time and trouble to pick up the subtle differences in the ways in which Britney treats each and every song on “Femme Fatale”. It’s a lot easier (and lazier) just to dismiss her and say “Her contribution to the project isn’t clear”. But if you’re interested in vocal craftsmanship, you will pride yourself on spotting the fact that her vocals on “Trouble” and “Big Fat Bass” are very different from “(Drop Dead) Beautiful”. If you can’t see that difference, you shouldn’t be writing about vocalists.
Another faulty approach in talking about Britney’s singing is to categorize her voice by eras and say she was better at this time or that time. One popular theory is that her voice has gradually deteriorated over the years since her first album. The explanations given are that she doesn’t practise enough and that she smokes. This, it is said, is why her voice became more whispery and breathy by the time of “In The Zone”.
But this theory ignores the fact that each era has contained its own anomalies and departures from a consistent timeline. For example, her high, whispery voice makes its first recorded appearance on “When your eyes say it” on the “Oops...” album. But that didn’t mean she had no other choices. On the “Britney” album that followed a year later, she chose to use a whole range of different voices, including the whispery one - but it only made an appearance on one track, “That’s where you take me”.
By the time of “In The Zone” in 2003, the “gradually getting worse because of the smoking” theorists were pretty sure she’d lost all strength and assertiveness from her voice for ever, and sang in a breathy style because she no longer had any alternative. But this album was Britney’s “Erotica” and it was appropriate that she delivered softer, sweeter, sexier vocals on most of the tracks. But there is a continuum of breathiness that stretches from “Showdown” and “Breathe on me” at one extreme, through tracks such as “I got that boom boom” and “The Hook Up” right through to “Brave New Girl”, which is sung with straightforward strength and isn’t breathy at all. Once again, the supposed timeline of steady deterioration looks extremely shaky.
Next we arrive at “Blackout”, and the consensual but completely delusional theory that, by this hopeless and helpless stage in her career, she had to be propped up in the recording booth while she croaked a few phrases into a Magic Autotune machine which then produced the vocals. Hence the flat, disengaged, metallic sound of “Piece of me”. But... ummm.... although that’s what people EXPECTED to hear, “Piece of Me” is the ONLY track where she uses that approach. Every other track, even including “Freakshow”, is totally different. This was the album where she first began to explore her full vocal range, with many songs beginning in a low register then moving into an extremely high one. “Toy Soldier” gives her sex-vixen voice an early airing, and the breathy style is also represented, e.g. on “Heaven on Earth”. But the outtakes are the clearest indication of the vast range of styles she had at her command - think about “Let Go” and “State of Grace”.
And what about “Circus”? According to the theory of Britney’s steady vocal deterioration, an album that emerged a full 5 years after “In The Zone” should show her in a state of total vocal collapse, yet it contains some of the liveliest, most varied singing of her career and very little whisperiness. Again there are songs where she switches from low to high register for the chorus, and here her high voice is stronger and better integrated than previously. “Womanizer” and “If U Seek Amy” reveal her bratty sex-vixen, but only in the verses, while “Lace and Leather” shows us a non-bratty vixen. In “Kill the lights” and “Mmm Papi” she’s mid-register fierce. “Shattered glass” is assertive enough, but with a softer edge. “Unusual you” and “Blur” aren’t breathy, yet somehow they’re still dreamy and poignant. Even the ballads, “Out from under” and “My baby”, while sweet and affectionate, are sung in a stronger, more open-throated voice than (for example) “Everytime” and in “My baby” she also displays uncharacteristically sustained notes and a more obvious vibrato.
And finally “Femme Fatale”. Britney got a bashing from many critics for sounding unnatural and electronic, but that’s a product of lazy listening, as I said at the start. Her approach on this album is basically to put the songs out there as vigorously as possible and with relatively little of her usual ornamentation. Yet there are still differences in the ways in which she sings each track. And there is much unobtrusive professionalism. On “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” she repeats the line “You’re beautiful” many times, and every time is identical to the one before. That isn’t an easy thing to achieve. On “Don’t keep me waiting” she belts the song out as aggressively as anybody, and shows that even at full power she can hold a note AND repeat it perfectly again and again - which is something the haters said she couldn’t do.
Now, you may want to turn all of this against her and argue that this recourse to basic pop techniques is in itself a sign of diminishing vocal skills and loss of finesse. And indeed, only one track on the entire album contains any vibrato at all. But that is “He about to lose me” where all of her great qualities are shown to be intact in one song, and available for use any time she requires them. It’s almost as if she gave us this one little, anomalous track to tell us in her usual modest way “Hey, I can still do this y’know!”
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