The Femme Fatale era is looking like uncharted territory for Britney, and not just because her new album has a fresh and dramatic new sound . This is the first time one of her albums has received so many positive reviews. Some of them have even addressed themselves to the music, and given a track-by-track account. Yet I’m seething with anger and frustration because none of these reviews has had anything good to say about Britney herself. It’s as if Femme Fatale is nothing more than a project, or product, that magically and mysteriously attaches to her name. So, in a sense, while these reviews are “good”, they are also more destructive than ever.
As examples of what I’m talking about, we have this from Rolling Stone: “On nearly every track, Britney's voice is twisted, shredded, processed, roboticized. Maybe this is because she doesn't have much of a voice...” ; and this from EW: “These days, we don’t ask a whole lot from Britney Spears as an entertainer. She can bungle her dancing, muss her weave, and sleepwalk through a video... and we’ll still send her straight up the charts simply because she’s Britney. She’s an American institution, as deeply sacred and messed up as pro wrestling...”
Meanwhile, in an astonishingly incompetent and ill-informed review, the Guardian pronounces the album “a success... despite rather than because of the woman whose name is on its cover”, calls Britney “a manufactured pop star” and remarks, “it was a bit tricky to work out what the singer actually brought to the party, beyond a nasal voice so emotionally unengaged it made even Kylie's approach to vocals sound like Janis Joplin...” , adding “if the pop personality stakes have been raised, no one seems to have told Britney Spears. On Femme Fatale, her voice is as anonymous as ever...” One of the most rcognisable and distinctive voices in pop is “anonymous”? Right..... And they actually let these people write reviews?
If she brings nothing of value to the party, what I want to know is this: how in the world does it keep on happening, year after year, album after album, when the music industry is notorious for its “out with the old, in with the new” philosophy, and when you consider that Britney - uniquely among her generation - has given her industry a shedload of opportunities to get rid of her and recruit someone with a lot fewer problems and - presumably - a loud, wailing voice. Heaven knows, there are plenty of them around. Wouldn’t any record company prefer to be rid of someone whose brand was sullied almost beyond redemption, if that person was also talentless?
And isn’t this kind of dismissal of Britney as an artist of value ALSO a dismissal of the tastes, preferences and musical sensibilities of the millions of people who adore Britney’s voice and buy her albums purely because she is on them? The idea of some kind of mass delusion is attractive to many cynics, but if the entire career of Britney Spears is a scam, wouldn’t everyone have “seen the light” by now and done their best to deny that they’d ever been fooled by it? Don’t we have those sad little scumbags who spend hours of every night of their lives hopping from website to website in their endless quest to help us share their insight into the truth about Britney? Yet she has some of the most faithful fans of any artist.
As if we needed to show that would-be critics are flailing around for something engaging to say, rather than reporting actual insights, the reviewer at sputnikmusic.com, as far from the Guardian’s opinion as it’s possible to be, decided that Britney is ALL about personality, and says “Calling Britney a pop singer is doing the term a disservice... Perhaps it’s easier to just say that Britney is Britney and nothing more – someone who is more a distinctive sound and a driving force of sex nowadays than a genuine musical talent. “
My contempt for critics isn’t new. When Britney’s “Blackout” album was released, I found most of the reviews so wrong-headed, perverse and shallow that, when I wrote my own review, I called it “Karen’s Super Music-Oriented Review”. Many people must have thought “But aren’t they all...?” However, my friends had a quiet chuckle because they knew exactly what I was getting at.
My complaint was that the reviewers were, with very few exceptions, reviewing Britney’s life and career over the previous couple of years, rather than the album itself. Presumably this is the outworking of the critical theory that the values and significances of an artist’s works can only be appreciated by studying the historical context of their creation. It might help to explain why her albums get enthusiastic reviews but only 3 stars.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if these writers had known enough about their subject to bring the historical context up to date, but usually it appeared that they were living in some kind of time-warp. In fact, they were building their critical appraisals upon a kind of tabloid consensus, upon the last thing they vaguely thought they’d heard about Britney Spears. Not, one might think, the firmest of foundations.
And so, most reviews of “In The Zone” took the approach of ridiculing Britney as a time-expired teeny-pop puppet, instead of listening with open minds to some pretty amazing music that most of us agree was well ahead of its time and inspired much of what was to follow in pop in the years ahead. Similarly, most reviews of “Circus” tended to remark upon how much more confident she sounded, and how much less processed her vocals were, compared to the “Blackout” era - which was a complete fantasy, based entirely on the notion that this was her “comeback” album. In fact, it appeared only a year after “Blackout” - which was REALLY her comeback from the longest break in her career to date.
That idiotic Guardian reviewer hangs his entire premise on something that is factually inaccurate: “Britney Spears made her best album when she was at her worst. It wasn't merely that the various producers of 2007's Blackout – its recording somehow slotted into a pressing schedule of visits to rehab, head-shaving and being carried out of her own home strapped to a gurney while the world's media circled overheard in helicopters – took her apparently imminent demise as an excuse to try anything they fancied.” But “Blackout” wasn’t recorded during her breakdown era, and she herself was the Executive Producer.
I guess you could say that what makes an artist iconic is the amount of myth that surrounds them, but a little accuracy would do no harm. Nor would a little objectivity. In my “Blackout” review I wrote, in obvious frustration: “I’ve long since passed the point of being impressed by loud voiced, “listen to meee” bellowing and meretricious arpeggiating. What I want to hear is an interesting voice. It doesn’t have to be soaked in booze and breakdown so long as it’s delicately nuanced, with grace, style, humor, variety and an ability to create magical, felicitous moments that live on in the mind every time you think of a song. Britney’s voice is all of that, and on this album we hear her making further developments to her stylings.”
I believe Britney has explored further-flung vocal territories on “Femme Fatale”, and, judging by her Rolling Stone interview, she did this intentionally and with full awareness of the use of electronic processing. But the reviewers are working from an entirely different script. Again, it’s a teacher’s report on how well she’s doing in her career. And the key point that is making them so deaf to something so obvious is that she lip-synched on her “Circus” tour and therefore officially “can’t sing”.
This can’t be an unprejudiced observation based on her vocals on FF, because, when you think about it rationally, IF you’re going to complain on the one hand that her voice on FF is so processed and synthesized that it’s pretty much a vocal body-double, you can’t on the other hand whinge about its acoustic qualities and about its being weak. Why would it be? The studio geeks can make it as loud and tough as they want to. In fact, her vocals on FF are not only among her strongest, they are as robust and muscular as any other pop singer’s - and that’s setting aside the fact that they’re full of the sly, teasing, kittenish, expressive Britneyness that only a hardcore of golden-eared fans fully understand and appreciate.
But the critics are not particularly interested in listening with a mind that’s even slightly ajar, never mind open. They begin with a theory and spend the rest of the time trying to prove it. And in 2011, with Britney firmly tied down under a conservatorship and with little immediate drama in her life to draw upon than in the past, they have taken to pondering why Britney is here at all, and this therefore has become the critical environment for FF. I wish someone in authority in the media would order that all reviewing should take place in a darkened room with the identity of the artist unknown.
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