"Blackout was a dead end!" Debate!

Everybody's talking all this stuff about me
Why don't they just let me live?
I don't need permission, make my own decisions
That's my prerogative!

It was late 2004 and Britney Spears was entering the rebellious phase of her career. Back then she wasn’t the puppet people thought she was, and she decided to take control. She married Kevin Federline and sacked most of the other people in her life, including cool-headed manager Larry Rudolph. And she released “My Prerogative” as her mission statement. It was the first step on a musical path that led to the release of her celebrated album “Blackout”.

This was her “protest” era, when her music often hit out at the media, with their malign interpretations of harmless events in her life, and extreme reactions to her decisions. The UK tabloids - led by the now defunct News Of The World - had been going to town on her since 2002, and from 2004 the US media joined in as well. The fast-rising celeb-bashing photo agencies were making more money out of her than she was making herself.

After 3 years of this treatment, Britney launched “Blackout”. On her only outing as Executive Producer, she carefully and deliberately excised all softness from the album. Beautiful leaked tracks such as fan favorites “Sugarfall”, “State of Grace” and “Let Go” remain unreleased. Some people like to be skeptical about the extent of Britney’s involvement with the planning of the album, but Jive’s then A&R chief Teresa LaBarbera Whites confirmed that she was very much involved, and discussed it on the phone with her several times a day.

So Britney wanted this album to express toughness and control. It would be wrong to characterize it as all about anger and rebellion, but tracks like “Piece of Me”, “Freakshow”, “Toy Soldier”, “Gimme More” and “Why Should I Be Sad” do skew it somewhat in that direction, and there is an overall attitude that shows in her vocal style. It’s a “love it or loathe it” album. The New Musical Express loathed it but The Times loved it and placed it in the top 5 of their “Hundred Best Pop Albums of the Noughties”.

Now here’s the thing. Dr Luke commented that Britney is her own genre, but is “Blackout” her genre? Sure, it’s a great album, but the fanbase seems to be cooling on the question of Britney’s media fixation. One humorist satirised the tracklisting of her albums as:

Song about the media
Song about sex
Song about the media
Song about sex
Song about the media....

...and so on. I noticed too that in our recent PoorBritney.com debate, people were saying that we’d had enough of the media-bashing.

That debate asked if it was time for Britney to find a new musical direction. And this is the problem. “Blackout” was all very well and good, but it didn’t lead anywhere. Since then it feels like she’s treading water. The next album, “Circus” was a candy store full of goodies but had no particular direction or character. “Femme Fatale” is more cohesive but that’s down to Dr Luke’s control-freakery rather than any new visions or increased involvement on Britney’s part.

After “Blackout”, we were hoping for more musical revelations, more intensity, more complexity. We were hoping that the bar for the ultimate quality in pop would be raised even higher by Britney. But it’s like “Blackout” wasn’t so much a summit of achievement as a musical dead end. She can’t go forward from it, she can only go backwards. DISCUSS!

Britney on Headphones! Part 3

In this series of articles, I’ve been discussing how listening with good headphones (preferably with a good CD player) enables us to separate Britney’s voice from the surrounding complexities of production and subject it to a less prejudiced yet more detailed scrutiny. With many singers, listening on headphones doesn’t tell you anything you don’t know from listening on speakers or in-ear phones. Why is it important to listen to Britney so carefully? Well, to appreciate her subtle skills. And to become aware of how persistently and how unfairly she has been misrepresented.

We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be brainwashed into the Pop Idol or X Factor mindset of thinking that only loud, declamatory, bombastic belting can be considered a good and credible form of singing. Headphone listening enables you to enjoy what is good about the softer, gentler kinds of singing and appreciate them for what they are instead of lambasting them for what they are not. In this final instalment of the Britney On Headphones series, I will concentrate on the positive rather than defending against the negative.

Our Britney Headphone Tour has arrived at “In The Zone”. By 2003, Britney had been the biggest thing in pop for 5 years and many critics wanted her time to be up. Throughout 2003, hoping for wish fulfilment, they had written article after article predicting the imminent end of her career. They claimed she was too old for her teenybopper clientele now. The teenyboppers had moved on to new teeny idols.

By the time ITZ was launched, these critics had already put themselves in a sneering, dismissive mindset. Pundits were openly discussing how her career in music was over, at the very moment that the album was No.1 in America. As a result, few reviewers took ITZ seriously enough to give it a thorough listen and try to figure out what it was all about, and why. She seemed to have a soft, whispery voice - but what the hell, she was only a teeny-pleaser, and nobody expects them to be talented singers.

What they didn’t seem to grasp was that, while their backs were turned, Britney had transitioned into an adult artist and, rather than try to appeal to a new bunch of 12-year-olds, had brought her existing audience with her. And they were now young adults. A market survey discovered that her typical demographic was 16-26. This is an age range that finds people in the full flowering of their sexual awareness, and Britney expressed her own adulthood by giving them a thoroughly sexual album.

It would be fair to say that most of the songs on ITZ are the sound of sex and seduction in one form or another. When we listen to ITZ we enter a special, precious little world where lives an artist so engrossed in her art that her interpretations differentiate songs OF seduction from songs ABOUT seduction. And she differentiates all of those from songs that are simply about... well.... sex. The voices she chooses are not loud and in-your-face. Superficially it may seem that all of them are similar, but some are firmer, some are dreamier, some are sweeter... Listening on headphones helps you to detect fine distinctions in softness and attack.

And quite apart from analysing her technique, listening to ITZ on headphones is a rewarding experience because Britney Spears does this kind of thing better than anyone in the history of pop. On ITZ there are songs that you really can’t imagine being sung convincingly by anyone else.

Towards the end of the album there are three songs that express a great deal of emotion in an extremely understated way. No shrieking melodrama here. “Everytime” is sung in a very controlled way. Listen to the care with which she sings the ENDS of words like “here” and “clear”. Yet here and there are sad, broken-hearted little sighs. The Scumfrog remix picks up on these and fashions a devastating drama from them.

“The Answer” contains vocals of wonderful tenderness and love. By the way, you can’t give the credit for this to a backing singer because Britney did all the vocals herself. The chorus is as smooth, liquid and soft as you can imagine, and near the end, at 3:05, she begins to sing, simultaneously with the chorus, “Who can hold me.... wipe the tears away... who can give me love....?” and I doubt that any words have ever been sung to a lover more sweetly than here.

And finally, “Don’t Hang Up”. The song is simply about phone sex, but the yearning and empathy she conveys bring some of us to tears. I’ve never seen anyone give her credit for the astonishing way in which she sustains notes invested with all the softness, warmth and sweetness in the world while barely breathing them. (Try it yourself if you think it’s easy. Yet everyone takes it for granted.) And there’s my favorite Britney moment of all time: “Tell me, tell me what you see....feel me, feel me underneath” The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as her words drift out of the headphones like the voice of an angel. Oh.my.God.

Now “Blackout”. This has to be a case of everyone hearing what they expected to hear, which was a basket case, heavily medicated and probably either bald-headed or with a pink wig, being propped up in a studio for as long as it took to get some phrases that could be stitched together into a few vocal fragments. These were then skillfully interwoven with the voices of backing singers to create studio fabrications with a Britney Spears flavor. Nobody seemed to notice that the album was recorded entirely BEFORE her breakdown problems, or that she was Executive Producer!

How carefully were people listening to Britney at that time? Well, one critic wrote about her notorious 2007 VMA performance “the song appeared to consist entirely of the words ‘gimme gimme’” - thus turning the meaning of the song through 180 degrees. It would be fair to say that even a proportion of fans simpy accepted that her singing on “Blackout” was minimal and weak. Yet a listen on headphones shows that this is not so. Not on ANY track.
On “Gimme More” her lead vocal BURSTS forth, full of edge and attitude. There’s nothing whispery about “Piece of Me” and nothing weak about her work on the choruses of “Radar” and “Perfect Lover”. On “Ooh Ooh Baby” her voice fills your ears, and on “Why should I be sad?” you can hear the resilience in her tone.

If we decide to be charitable to the lazy, ignorant listeners who sympathised with the NME in its decision to make “Blackout” their Worst Album of the Year (a decision that is looking increasingly perverse and discreditable with the benefit of hindsight) we might say that the album contained so many spectacularly brilliant productions that people were dazzled by the wall of sound and forgot to listen to Britney. Given the spurious “back story” about her mental state during the time of the recording sessions, they then decided that this must have been because she was scarcely present.

When we enter the “Circus” era, the atmosphere is very different, because this was her supposed “comeback” - not from her previous album, which had been released only a year earlier, but from her personal, apparently mental problems that had seen her hospitalized. It was good that the critics were disposed to hear better singing from her this time around, which meant that they at least listened with a vaguely optimistic mindset.

If we listen to “Circus” on good headphones, it feels as if a window opens and we can hear with great clarity. And what we hear is that the character of her singing has undergone a change. Here, the edginess and attitude in her voice that characterized “Blackout” have gone, and she seems more at peace with herself, more relaxed and confident. There is nothing breathy or whispery at all, she sings mostly in her mid-register and her vocal technique seems smooth and effortless. Check out her confident work on “Blur” and “Lace and Leather”.

Even in “Unusual You”, where previously she would have used her high, breathy voice, she’s mid-range and solid. Where she uses falsetto, as in “Out From Under” and “Mannequin” for example, it’s perfectly integrated and the transition is seamless. And it’s interesting to hear the teasing sex-kitten voice, used widely on “Femme Fatale”, get some early exercise in the verses of “If U Seek Amy” and “Mmm Papi” (she never uses it in choruses). “My Baby” is sung extremely sweetly, in a high register, but without a hint of breathiness.

“My Baby”, incidentally, is a track that, heard on good headphones, sounds much more engaging than you would ever have imagined, BECAUSE the qualities you can hear in Britney’s voice make it sound so sincere. On speakers, it tends to sound sugary and twee. Some other tracks that gain stature on headphones are “Shattered Glass” with its odd bass bumps and subsonic rumbling, “Circus” with its crystal-clear vocal production at center and striking double-tracked fill-ins from Britney at left and right, and “Phonography” which comes over as much more subtle and complex. For a real oddity, listen to Britney’s opening lines in “Mannequin”. What do you hear?

And finally (did someone say “Thank God”?!) we get to “Femme Fatale”. What you discover on headphones here is that you don’t feel as “close” to Britney’s vocals. They seem more impersonal. The electronic effects that make the album sound so exciting have the effect of seeming to distance Britney from us and occasionally you may wish you could simply hear HER. On this outing, she’s different again. Not breathy as on ITZ, not attitudinal as on “Blackout” and not smooth and effortless as on “Circus”, this time she sings a little higher and a lot more forcefully, and on headphones you can appreciate how much her vocals dominate every mix - something that isn’t nearly as obvious on speakers.

Things to listen for on your headphones: On “Till The World Ends”, a much more detailed and focused “wall of sound” reveals itself. “Hold It Against Me” is an overwhelming experience, a real aural assault, recorded very loud and with Britney’s insistent vocals coming at you from all directions. On “How I Roll”, at the start of the verse, it sounds like two different takes of Britney’s lead vocal competing with each other. On “Big Fat Bass”, note the very particular qualities of the bass track as each incident arrives (including the famous kick-drum).

“Criminal” is particularly interesting. The mix leaves a very audible gap at the beginning, just to left of center, which is filled at 0:34 by a guitar. And it’s fascinating to analyse exactly how the intensity is built from 2:28 to the end. It’s a lovely mix. On “Up and Down”, at 1:18, listen to the very subtle harmonies from the backing singers. And on “He About To Lose Me”, notice how Britney’s vocals in the chorus start wide and double-tracked but gradually narrow until they’re a solo at center.

And that’s it! We’re done!

Britney on Headphones! Part 2

I sometimes think I need to update my database of Britney Spears vocal conspiracy theories like Symantec updates its antivirus protection. Something new arrives every day. The latest was mentioned in the comments on my last article, and was an allegation that Britney doesn’t sing the chorus on “He about to lose me”. All I want to say about that is.... if people listened to music using CDs and good headphones, these theories would never arise, and if they did, nobody would believe in them.

My Sennheiser HD580 headphones and Sony XA20ES audiophile CD player make all the details transparent, and I am happy to confirm that there’s no reason to believe that Britney doesn’t sing the chorus. Throughout most of the song, the chorus is divided into a stereo pair of Britneys as is customary these days, but at the beginning of the final repeats, it shifts to the center “channel” for about 10 seconds, and during that brief period you can hear a deeper voice, also in the center, behind Britney’s. If that’s of any interest to you! The "three dimensional" capabilities of headphones allow the elements of a recording to be isolated and identified much more easily.

When CDs are converted to compressed media such as MP3, much of the detail in the sound is stripped out to save on storage space, but the detail removed can make fine distinctions hard to detect. And once the detail has been removed, the remaining sounds are packed together and large areas of similar sounds are “averaged” to compress and reduce file size even further, resulting in even more sound loss. The biggest loss is in harmonic frequencies, which are essential in giving a sound, such as a human voice, its unique and identifiable character. To listen to this degraded standard of sound on the usual little in-ear phones is to degrade the listening experience even further. As one specialist audio blogger puts it, “most people aren’t enjoying their music at its best, and don’t know what they’re missing out on.”

There are distinctions between backing vocals, background vocals and “additional background vocals”, which are all terms you will find in the credits on Britney’s albums. Once you’re in a position - using your good-quality headphones - to identify the different “threads” in a mix, you will often find that Britney is singing most of her own backing vocals, even when she’s not credited - but it may be difficult in a complex mix to separate them from a multi-tracked lead vocal. The “background” or “additional background” vocals lie even deeper in the layers of what you’re normally hearing. On Britney’s recordings they are often extremely subtle in effect.

In case you may ever think that you’re getting confused and imagining her voice in places where it isn’t actually present, there are some “control” experiments available. On the “Oops I Did It Again” album, there are several tracks (such as “Satisfaction” and “What U See Is What U Get”) where Britney’s voice only appears on the center “channel” and all vocals to right and left of center are clearly not hers. On some tracks there are “fanchoirs” in addition to the backing vocals, and you can easily tell their sound apart from Britney’s. Once your ears become accustomed to the harmonics of different voices, you can always keep track of hers.

Aside from the truth about conspiracy theories, what else do we discover as we roam around Britneyland with our headphones? Something I find fascinating is the different ways her voice has been presented since the beginning of her career. On the “Baby One More Time” album, it seemed like a straightforward feature showcase for a new, young, talented singer. On every track, her voice was planted at center, right in front of the listener, in plenty of space, in a natural acoustic. She sang in a middle register that seemed natural for her. There wasn’t a synthesized or vocoderized “effect” in sight. But you can detect an effort to give her voice an added physical impact in “Deep in my heart” by placing a percussive bass guitar apparently right in front of her, and in “The Beat Goes On” her voice has extra reverb to blend with the initial retro-style context. It’s interesting to hear how, even at that early age, she adapts to different songs. In “E-mail my heart” you can hear a greater warmth, tenderness and smoothness than you ever detect on speakers, and on “I will be there” a much harder edge.

Another reason to listen on headphones is to pick up some of the subtleties of production, and there are plenty of them here. For example, the blend of elements makes “Baby One More Time” seem pretty funky - almost gritty - on speakers, but on headphones you discover a surprising degree of refinement and a much cleaner mix than you might have suspected. You can also strand out the different layers of sound, and isolate some strange little details, like the panting sound to right of center at the start of Verse 1 that changes to a keyboard chord in Verse 2, or the very deep bass notes at 1:55. Note how Max Martin was doing the same thing with choruses in 1998 as Darkchild was doing in 2010.

“Soda Pop” turns out to be surprisingly interesting, although most people don’t rate it as a song. Britney has three quite separate vocal lines, at left, right and center, and there’s also a voice that chimes in JUST off-center at left and right at 1:45. But, although her voice is present in all directions, she isn’t involved in any of the harmonies. Eric Foster White was the producer, and he uses exactly the same techniques in “I will still love you”.

Moving on to the “Oops I Did It Again” album, you can hear that the overall A&R and production philosophy hasn’t changed much. It’s still a showcase for a featured artist, but this time there is greater disparity in the styles of the productions. Some are more expensive and elaborate, with real string sections featuring on “When your eyes say it”, “Dear Diary”, “Heart” and “Girl in the mirror”. “Don’t go knocking on my door” has an identical acoustic to most of the BOMT album - a much smaller, more intimate setting than Max Martin’s “Oops I Did It Again” (the song) which is sonically fuller, with an over-arching synth and big chords and a more reverberating, less intimate ambiance that also encompasses Britney’s voice.

Max still makes tracks to this formula, but it has never been something he’s stuck with. For example, on “Where are you now” the production is simple, acoustic, with all the necessary stillness and calm, and the elements placed carefully to leave space for a fine vocal performance. This album finds Britney extending the scope of her vocal performance from the straightforward strength and power of “You got it all” and “Girl in the mirror” through to the high, sweet, girlish voice of “Dear Diary” and the soft, breathy, sweet, affectionate treatment of “When your eyes say it”. If Britney had a serious talent deficit, it would have been exposed on “Where are you now?”, but her vocal is simply beautiful - smoother and better integrated than anything on her first album.

Any odd details to be observed in passing on our headphone tour? Once you’ve noticed them on headphones you can often hear them on speakers too. For instance, in “Stronger” did you notice what sounds like a very deep synthesized male voice going “oh-oh-oh” in the first few bars of the verse? It sounds even more like that in the second verse. There’s a lot more reverb than usual around Britney’s voice, and almost subsonic sounds like distant thunder here and there. On “One kiss from you” there’s a strange metallic noise that stands out sharply at left and right during the verse, and an extremely spatially focused bassline. On “When your eyes say it” the string and choral sounds swell impressively across the virtual “soundstage”.

And now, the “Britney” album before our tour takes a break. There’s a long and dishonorable tradition of making disparaging remarks about Britney’s singing, and much of it dates back to this era. The novelty of “Britney Spears the pop phenomenon” was wearing off and the media decided it was time to take her down a peg or two. It was all too easy to take cheap shots based on ignorance and prejudice and it’s sad to reflect on how many people, even within her fanbase, accepted the generic criticisms without question. She sang a couple of songs in an innocent, childlike voice so that meant her voice wasn’t what it had been; was weak, whispery or whatever. No matter that she sang other songs with plenty of power and edge.

It was an unhappy coincidence that this was the era when Britney, with typical modesty about her own status and enthusiasm for the talents of others, began to make the song the star, instead of herself. While just about every other singer was adapting songs to fit the characteristics of their voices, Britney was doing the exact opposite. On “Britney” she delivers her interpretations of the needs of each individual song, using a wider and more diverse range of styles than on any of her other albums. With a good sound source and good headphones you can get involved in her characterizations, enjoy her variety and subtlety, and come to a better understanding of what she’s trying to do.

You hear her conscious use of a higher register and a more urgent timbre to her voice in some of the songs, deploying more enhancements, sounding less warm, comfortable and natural than before, and you may wonder if Britney, or her A&R team, had decided that the time for showcasing her as a new teenage sweetheart, with material to match, was over and it was time to appeal to a maturing fanbase with tougher material and more imaginative mixes. You may observe that, on some tracks, the double-tracked stereo pair to left and right are louder than the center channel, and her voice appears to be more a flavor in the mix than the center of attention. But it’s not like that all over the album, and with headphones you can appreciate those songs where an unobtrusive acoustic is giving her voice its rightful place, and space to shine.

Finally, this album is famous for its “noises offstage”, random sound effects, overlapping lyrics, whispered asides, giggling and laughter, and with good headphones you can hear all of this far more clearly, and in three dimensions. It’s like being transported into the middle of a small group of people listening to music, getting in the groove and having a lot of fun. It’s something I would hate to miss out on!

Next time: ITZ, Blackout, Circus and Femme Fatale.

Listening to Britney on Headphones! Part 1.

Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for the last 7 years will know that I constantly bang on about listening to Britney with good quality headphones. A reference to them is an essential part of every “In-Depth” review at NewBritneyology.com. I know some people think this is hilarious, but I can’t legislate for those who are determined to embrace their own ignorance. My enthusiasm for headphones isn’t some kind of weird, perverted fetish - you really do miss a lot if you never use them.

Obviously I don’t expect people to go rushing around on buses, trains and bicycles with massive “cans” clamped to their heads. Perhaps I should clarify that by “headphones” I mean the things that surround your ears rather than going inside them. For listening on the move, there’s no realistic alternative to those horrible little in-ear things known as earphones. But if you want to pass judgment on Britney’s singing ability (and let’s face it, who doesn’t ?) you should be prepared to take the trouble to be properly informed, and to get some proper headphones for home use.

I’m not saying you should get rid of your speakers. Goodness knows, I’d be the worst hypocrite if I said that - my home set-up involves a 300-watt amplifier and 150-watt subwoofer. A good thing my nearest neigbor lives 150 yards away. But speakers give you a very different listening experience to headphones. Music fills the room and the big fat bass (or maybe the kick drum) makes the windows rattle. But it’s not an analytical approach. It's a wall of sound. I would never write a review of a Britney album based on hearing it on speakers.

But why headphones? Aren’t earphones pretty much the same thing and just as good? The simple answer is - no, they’re not. I’m not going to bore you with a lot of technical stuff, but the way the sound waves communicate with your ears is totally different, and with earphones there are too many factors that compromise what you’re hearing. You may think you’re hearing everything that’s on the record, but you aren’t.

In my Britney reviews I always talk about the virtual “soundstage” inside your head, and where the various components of the track are located. With earphones, you get a more constricted, compressed “soundstage” and it can be difficult to separate the components. As someone recently told me, “With earphones the music plays "inside" your head rather than coming at you from the outside, to left and right.” In my experience earphones also fail to give you any sense of depth to front and back. On headphones, when you listen to “The Answer”, P. Diddy’s words “Talk to me” seem to come from behind your left shoulder. So do Britney’s words “Don’t hang up” in the eponymous song. On earphones, everything is placed in a 45-degree “V” around front-center.

Earphones fail to reveal many subtleties. For example, on “Shadow”, the swirling atmospherics can’t be “placed” at all whereas with good headphones you can detect their circular motion between the center and right “channels”. Headphones also reveal that, during the chorus, the effect has been created of Britney standing front center, with a group of backing singers arranged in a semi-circle behind her. In the last 2 lines of each verse and during the middle-eight, three Britneys sing in harmony, one left, one right, one center. But with earphones, as with speakers, these individual elements simply merge together.

On “Piece of Me”, the majority of people are convinced that Britney’s voice has been electronically altered. Wikipedia, for example, comments “Spears's voice is heavily synthesized”, But this is untrue. With the benefit of good-quality headphones you can distinguish the vocals from the effects and it turns out that a few words, and ONLY a few words, in the song are overlaid with a kind of muted electronic fuzz. It’s like seeing something behind net curtains. But with earphones this effect cannot be isolated from an overall impression of fuzz.

Reviewing “Blackout”, Kelefa Sanneh says “Even when not buried in electronics, her distinctive singing voice sounds unusually vague, and sometimes it’s hard to be sure it’s hers. It isn’t always. On this album, unlike on previous ones, Ms. Spears isn’t credited with doing any of her own backing vocals.” From those remarks it’s clear that Sanneh wasn’t listening with a decent set of headphones, because if you do, you’re never in any doubt that it’s Britney, AND that she’s singing almost all of the vocals herself.

It’s almost universally accepted that Britney hardly sings a natural note on “Femme Fatale”. The mind-numbing cliche is that her voice is “heavily autotuned”. She herself remarked in an interview that she’d decided to use more electronics this time. But with good headphones, what do you actually hear? In fact, her lead vocal is natural on about 90 percent of the album! There are maybe two or three songs where her voice is electronically altered in the verse, here and there a few words are blatantly synthesized for dramatic effect, and one track a synthesizer is mixed in with her vocal on the center channel, but that’s all! I won’t spoil your fun by saying where these things happen - you’ll have to buy some headphones...

But which headphones? They don’t have to be crazily expensive. One of my dad’s friends had Stax electrostatic ‘phones that were too pricey for us, even though we all were mightily impressed by hearing Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower” seemingly circling our heads like an angry hornet. My own headphones are Sennheiser HD580s, which were five-star rated and said to be studio quality in their day but are no longer available. I would recommend that you buy something in the same category. Don’t spend less than about $200. If that seems a lot, consider that custom-fitted in-ear phones can cost over $500!

Finally, I should say that the analytical quality of your ‘phones will be somewhat nullified if the music source is a compressed sound file like an MP3 or an AAC, which will have a high level of distortion, and severely limited frequency and dynamic ranges. It would be best to listen to Britney on CD. Yes, in physical form!! And if you do.... I can guarantee a revelation! It will be like hearing these albums again for the first time, but in high-definition and 3D! You’ll be amazed at how good they are, and probably surprised to find that most of the shade thrown at Britney’s voice is based on misinformation and prejudice.

In Part Two of this article, next week, I’ll take you on a guided headphone tour of Britney’s albums.

Britney's voice / singing down the years - deteriorating?

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!”

A look at "Bellamy Brothers vs Britney Spears"

“Where there’s a hit there’s a writ” is a well-known showbiz phrase that neatly encapsulates a desire to piggy-back on someone else’s success. In the case of the Bellamy Brothers, their lawyer is trying to paint a picture of two nice, kind, benign, wealthy old guys who don’t need anybody else’s money and wouldn’t be involved in a shakedown. The mood music is that they’re feeling a sense of vague unease that something has been stolen from them and something ought to be done about it.

But what HAS been stolen, if anything? According to Wikipedia, "If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?" was an old Groucho Marx quote. “Songwriter David Bellamy told country music journalist Tom Roland that he regularly watched Marx's show, You Bet Your Life, where Marx sometimes used the quote while interviewing an attractive female contestant, then shake his cigar and raise his eyebrows to elicit a reaction. The comment stuck in Bellamy's head as a possible hook line for a song.”

So Dr Luke couldn’t be said to have stolen the exclusive property of David Bellamy, as it wasn’t his in the first place. And incidentally, I wonder if he’s feeling any guilt at having stolen it from Groucho Marx, or a powerful urge to pay royalties to Groucho’s estate? If not, then presumably he’d be happy to give a nod of comradely, songwriterly approval to Dr Luke if he claimed to have obtained it from the same source.

It seems, then, that the pursuit of damages for plagiarism of the title or inclusion of the words in themselves is unlikely to succeed. The Bellamy Brothers’ lawyer seems to have accepted this, and is now exploring the possibility that the precise USE of the phrase “hold it against me” in Britney’s song is an infringement of the Brothers’ copyright.

The first avenue of investigation is to ask if the musical setting of the phrase is obviously identical, substantially similar, broadly similar, similiar in some particulars and so on. If the Brothers’ musicologist says any of these apply, it would then be up to their lawyer, or the expert on copyright whom they’re intending to approach, to determine the most fruitful course of action.

You may think “But Britney’s song is nothing like the Bellamy Brothers’ one.” You’d be right, in a commonsense way. And that’s the first hurdle for the Brothers. There is no obvious resemblance, and that’s why they need a musicologist. So far, their lawyer has suggested that if you double the speed of their song, the similarity to Britney’s becomes more obvious. But who is going to do that? A recording is presented at a certain speed, and that is the product. It could be said that if you’re going to change speeds, change time signatures, maybe add or subtract a note or two, anything can be made to sound like anything.

But the plaintiffs will not be content with that. They will allege that precise use of the phrase in their song was the clear derivative source for the use of the phrase in the defendant’s song, or that it was a clear inspiration, even if the defendant had to alter and distort it to get that inspiration. Here the defendant will use the services of a different musicologist, who will say that there is no clear path of derivation from one song to the other, and that, in any case, there will always be coincidental similarities between musical phrases that have no common origin, especially given the constraints of having to set to music a phrase with a fixed number of words and only one way of saying them.

There’s a huge number of cases like this going through the system at any moment. So many that it takes many years for them to be heard, and it has to be said that very few are successful. The cases of Men At Work vs Marion Sinclair, Chandos Records vs The Beloved, and The Verve vs Allen Klein were clear and obvious cases of unauthorised use of copyright material - you could call them simple theft - but even these required protracted legal action by the plaintiffs. You can imagine how difficult is the road to be traveled by someone alleging a theft when nobody can agree that anything has been stolen at all, never mind how deliberately or culpably. But court actions often have outcomes that are counter-intuitive in the extreme.

The Bellamy Brothers’ lawyer’s statement sounds like a “Gone fishin’” message. The impression it conveys is that he has no idea if any wrong has been done to his clients, but he intends to get them some money anyway, by hook or by crook. He may believe that the very possibility of wasting a lot of time in court will scare Dr Luke, Jive and Britney’s management into a cash offer to make him go away. But he needs to be careful in how he phrases his allegations that Dr Luke has a track record for unauthorised borrowings. If Dr Luke has never, or hardly ever, been found guilty of infringments, to make such allegations in public could open the Bellamy Brothers’ lawyer up to a possible writ for libel.

The Debatable Beauty of Britney Spears

I remember being quite shocked when I first saw Britney Spears on TV. There was an incredible media buzz about her, but she wasn’t my idea of a teen idol at all. She was certainly very far from the American Beauty stereotype. She wasn’t a tall, skinny blonde with chiselled cheekbones, big boobs and no ass, like Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton – girls who seem to come with an automatic pass into the photo agencies’ roll of merit. She was brunette, with soft features and big brown eyes. She was small and stocky, with a curvaceous bottom.

It was fairly obvious that Britney’s handlers had the same reservations about her physical image. All the videos from the BOMT era focused attention on the soulful, empathetic qualities of her face and on the warm and lovable vibes of her personality. She looked like a sweet little neighbor, a girl to fall in love with and to marry, not an Amazonian Hollywood princess or sex goddess.

Yet at the same time the somewhat unexpected Lolita controversy created by her first video indicated a sexual direction that could not realistically be ignored. And so, while a wholesome looking Britney paraded before us on MTV, a parallel universe came into being in which a hot, curvy little babe with come-to-bed eyes disported herself on the cover of Rolling Stone and in many men’s magazines shortly thereafter.

In fact, for quite some time the men’s magazines and websites weren’t quite sure what to make of her. She was clearly a phenomenon, and seemed to be exerting a strange power over people. Yes, she was pretty. Yes, she was young and nubile. But was she really beautiful? There was a lot of doubt. One writer said her eyes were too dark and inscrutable for that.

The Spears campaign train setting out on its journey to world domination could have run into an unfortunate siding at that point, with Britney categorised as “interesting” but incapable of sustaining the attention of the celeb industry for very much longer. And so we entered an era of image reconstruction. Starting with the Oops-era videos and most definitely throughout the “Britney” period, we saw the girl-next-door from rural Louisiana gradually get as close as is humanly possible to becoming a tall (or tall-looking) skinny blonde herself. And it was on the back of that image that she became the world’s favorite cover-girl for most of the period from 2001 to 2003.

But she was able to add her own special elements to that image. For a start, although careful wardrobe and photography made her legs look longer and her boobs bigger, she still seemed a little fuller of figure than the standard Playboy centrefold. But at this point in the history of female beauty, that was no longer the disadvantage it had once been. Jennifer Lopez had already blazed a trail along which curvy, big-bottomed girls like Shakira, Beyonce and Britney could now progress to the highest levels of male admiration.

And Britney had another secret advantage over most of her peers and competitors. Psychologists tell us that most people are programmed to respond with nurturing and protective instincts to a face with eyes set wide apart, because that’s the way a baby looks. That’s why everyone loved ET the Extraterrestrial. And Britney’s eyes are very wide apart. Perhaps that one simple thing is the reason why her fans are so extremely loyal and defensive. Complain though she may about her “big nose”, it’s a fact that she has always possessed a special loveability factor that has guaranteed her a huge share, not just of fascination, but of care, empathy and genuine concern.

But whatever about her loveability, her beauty was, at the peak of its reputation, in the celebrity world’s Premier League. In his book about successful seduction techniques “The Game”, Neil Strauss observes that Britney was “one of the most desired women in the world”. For years there was constant speculation that she would pose nude in “Playboy”, and in fact, it’s been reported that millions of dollars were on offer if she agreed to do so. And it would have been money well spent - it was reckoned that if she had appeared in Playboy, the world would have come to a temporary halt on the day that issue hit the newsstands.

Does that seem an exaggerated assessment of her sexual power? Consider this. quote from a famous photographer, Marcus Klinko, who has portrayed many of the world’s most beautiful and famous women: “Britney would be the hottest woman I have ever photographed, she was super sexy. At the time, she was just unbelievable,” he said, referring to a large-scale, garden-themed shoot with the pop princess at the beginning of 2004.

So the campaign to present Britney as an outstanding beauty was working... beautifully. The early doubts had been dispelled and her impact upon male consciousness was now unambiguous. In the introduction to his interview with her in GQ Magazine in November 2003, Dylan Jones remarked “I wouldn’t imagine that many of the men in my gym are dedicated consumers of Britney Spears’ CDs, but to them she is as famous as Madonna, and about 20 times sexier. Britney is a proper post-modern sexual icon.... a libidinous deity... sex incarnate.”

In 2004, she was crowned FHM’s “Sexiest Woman In The World”, the magazine commenting “It was inevitable. In the last twelve months no woman has touched Britney Spears for unadulterated sex appeal.” But sadly, we were about to see an astonishing and totally unexpected playing-out of the dictum that the higher you climb the harder you fall. In 2005’s FHM poll of Sexiest Women In The World she didn’t even make the top 100.

Obviously every celebrity has his or her haters and everyone who observes and comments on celebrities has his or her preferences. Thus, it would be ridiculous to claim that up to a certain point in time EVERYONE thought Britney was a beautiful woman. A contrary view comes with the territory. But there had always been a distinctive and unusual undercurrent of female opposition to the perception of Britney Spears as beautiful. On any occasion that a women’s magazine had put together a top 20 of “natural beauties” her name had always been conspicuously absent.

This seems particularly odd when you consider that Jenny Eliscu (Observer 2001) remarked of Britney that “she has a natural beauty that even the best photographs of her don't reveal. “ W Magazine agreed in 2003: “Britney Spears is... almost frighteningly perfect looking (more so in person than on TV), with blooming skin and big, sparkling eyes...” Sean Smith, in his biography of Justin Timberlake, comments on how stunned Justin’s friends back home were by Britney’s beauty when they met her in person. And classic Male Chauvinist website Askmen.com rated her 80% for natural beauty.

But clearly there were always those who had a problem with her, and it had something to do with naturalness. So what was the problem? Well clearly she’s not a natural blonde, and most of the time the hair on her head isn’t actually hers, but I don’t think that’s what the magazines were thinking about. There’s been controversy about the provenance of Britney’s “assets” almost from the start of her career. Her boobs looked strangely and untypically large on the notorious Kids’ Choice Awards and suddenly everyone was on the “Boob job! Boob job!!!” bandwagon. A pity they didn’t wait till the following day and take another look just to confirm what they thought they’d seen. But the damage was done, and the skepticism that attached to her then has never left her since.

Oddly though, this one incident is pretty much the only day in her life when Britney’s boobs didn’t look natural. An amusing video has been around for years, showing that her boobs appear to become larger and smaller on an almost daily basis, causing one fan to speculate that she can inflate them when she wants to, using a hidden pump. Thing is though - they never have a siliconed look. If she HAS had a boob job, she should demand her money back. In my opinion, her breasts aren’t all that big in the sense of protruding a long way, but they do have fullness, which allows them to be squashed into many different shapes and that’s why they look different from one day to another.

One mean-minded observer at the opening of the ill-fated NYLA New York restaurant venture commented that up close, her boobs actually looked slightly droopy. I guess what this tells us is precisely what UK singer Alesha Dixon discovered while making a documentary about female beauty and unrealistic expectations - namely that the “silicone” sticky-out, pointy look is now so common that many guys think it’s both normal and natural. When UK band “Steps” supported Britney on tour, a journalist asked for their verdict on the vexing subject of the reality of her boobs and they said “We couldn’t really ask her to show us, but they looked natural to us!”

There have been doubts about other things too. It’s beyond dispute that she’s had her teeth fixed. They weren’t very even to begin with, but they’re perfect now. But what about her nose? Some people swear she’s had a nose job. I used to have some bitter online arguments about it, because the so-called “evidence” was always two photographs taken from different angles, in different light, with different make-up and with a different expression on her face. But if she HAS had a nose job, her mother and sister must have had exactly the same nose job since their noses are identical to Britney’s.

However - anyone whose opinion on Britney’s beauty was leaning towards the negative were to find, in late 2004, that the lady herself was ready and willing to help them make up their minds once and for all. Unlike most stars, who are basically in love with themselves, Britney has always been (in the words of Neil Strauss) “an LSE girl” - she has low self-esteem. She doesn’t think much of herself, and thus does not appear to place any value on the need to guard and protect her image. She told OK Magazine in April 2004 “I see so many women who are so sexy because they’re confident and I try to do that. But I don’t find myself sexy, not at all!” She added that she could walk down the street and go shopping or to a restaurant. “I just put my hat on and go out. Half the time nobody recognises me. When I get my make-up off I’m just like a regular girl.”

But if Britney really thought there was still some chance of strolling around the shops unrecognized, looking like a regular girl, she couldn’t have been more wrong. Maybe she didn’t realise it, but Los Angeles was just beginning to feel the full blast of a perfect storm involving the photo agencies and a new breed of ruthless paparazzi on a feeding frenzy. Following a legal ruling in the UK that protected the privacy of individuals, many British paps took off for America, where no such protection existed and it was open season on celebrities.

The celebrity photo agencies, hungry and ultra-competitive, didn’t take long to realise that they were in the business of selling news, not just images. And a picture of a beautiful pop star looking beautiful wasn’t news. It was old. However, a picture of a supposedly beautiful pop star looking flawed or even downright ugly was gold dust. The photo agencies began compiling files of celebrities looking bad. And an unholy host of customers was ready and droolingly eager to buy them. So-called celebrity blogs and bloggers sprang up like weeds. Gossip columns were staffed by oh-so-ironic, oh-so-bitchy smart-little-girls-with-no-heart.

For a hundred years sages and scholars had been telling us that “the camera does not lie” , but it no longer told the truth as we knew it. Paparazzi no longer took single snaps or even half a dozen with a motor wind like in the old days. Now we were in the era of the digital “burst”. Burst mode, also known as continuous shooting mode, is where you take multiple photos in extremely quick succession, in some cases as many as 60 per second. It has respectable uses in analysing someone’s golf swing or pole-vaulting technique, but that’s not how celebrity photo agencies began to use it.

They noticed that, if a celebrity pulled her head back in surprise, there was a nanosecond where it looked like she had a double chin. If she coughed or sneezed, there was a nanosecond where she seemed to be weeping from puffy, half-closed eyes. If she was wearing a bikini and straightened her leg, there was a nanosecond where the contraction of her gluteal muscles looked somewhat like cellulite. She could be made to look angry, outraged, drugged-up, crazy or insane if you broke her everyday familiar actions down into nanoseconds. The determination to find these nanoseconds was beyond sickening and well into pure evil. And Britney was their most regular victim.

The photo agencies had also realised that “news” means “stories”, not just random pictures. In other words, they had to guide the public to read meaning or significance (and preferably evidence of moral fallibility) into the pictures. To achieve this, they began to provide ready-made captions that tied the nanoseconds to a sneery, snarky ongoing commenatary or “script”. And the erstwhile babe of babes Britney Spears was about to provide them with a script they could never have envisioned in their wildest dreams. Soon the girl who once told an interviewer “Yes, I am a Southern Belle” was to morph into someone who was EXACTLY what the “continuous shooting mode” was intended to destroy.

When Britney busted her knee on the set of the misguided “Outrageous” video and was gifted a welcome opportunity to cancel the remainder of her arduous and (to her) unwanted Onyx Hotel tour, she gave an almost audible sigh of relief and decided to slob out for a while. In her own subsequent words, she “let herself go”. But not in private. Every day the tabloids contained pictures of an increasingly fat, greasy-haired, coarse featured, spotty, cigarette-wielding young lady who seemed the perfect embodiment of the words “trailer trash”, which promptly became her media identity. She never lived on a trailer park, she went to good schools and was a teacher’s daughter, but she managed to mess up her appearance so much that everyone was ready to believe it. In Celeb Land you always judge a book by its cover. Even if it’s the cover off a different book.

It’s hard to realise it now, with hindsight’s distorted view, but the “fat, spotty” nightmare didn’t actually last that long. What soon followed was much better in some ways but worse in others. Towards the end of 2004, Britney began to take a little more care of her appearance. The acne on her chin and the skin irritation around her cheekbones that had been bothering her since late 2003 began to disappear. She became slim again. Her hair, often unkempt and pinned “up”, could still be a horror show but often she looked pretty damn good. She looked nothing less than fabulous in the photos from her wedding to Kevin Federline. Most days she was still dressing down, but on her athletic body the combination of jeans or shorts and T-shirt was perfect. The T-shirt usually bore an ironic message, but one was particularly troubling: “MILF in training”.

And so it came to pass. Our formerly perfect, pristine pop princess with the formerly perfect, pristine body was pregnant throughout most of 2005, giving birth to Sean Preston Federline in September. Yes, she glowed as pregnant women do. Her boobs became enormous. Her skin improved still further and has been spot-free ever since. For a pregnant woman she looked great. But with an enormous belly, added weight and proud-mommy expression increasingly visible on her face, she didn’t look like a girl anymore, nor even in between a girl and a woman. Then we heard that her baby was delivered by elective Caesarian, so she had a big scar too. There would be a lot to hide if she ever DID decide to do “Playboy”...

And the nightmare was by no means over. In 2006 it happened all over again. But by this time the shock of our babygirl becoming a mommy had worn off and we were better able to appreciate how serene and beautiful she often looked. She decided to do the now-traditional celebrity “naked-ish and pregnant” photoshoot, which was published in Harpers Bazaar in August. The pictures were truly gorgeous, and for once I could see how appealing a plump and contented Britney could look. There were many, many surprised and delighted responses and much favorable editorial in the women’s magazines. But at this time, in other places, Britney’s “script” was still “ugly girl” and many of the comments in online blogs reflected this hard-to-shake perception. Some even claimed that she was so ugly in real life that the Harpers pictures had to be fake. “Pregnant and desperate!” “Trashy trailer girl goes nude!” “No longer at her physical peak!” “Now lean into the bucket and release!” “Hideous!”

Then came the “divorcing Kevin, party girl, fraternising with Paris Hilton and showing her vag” era. In objective terms, Britney had turned the corner and was far from the fat, spotty girl who provided such justification for the “ugly” script. But it was 2007, and the nightmare of all nightmares was about to begin. While she was actually partying with Paris, she looked great. Her boobs were still enlarged as a legacy of her recent childbirth and looked wonderful. But when she stopped partying with her new girlfriends every night, her weight began to go up and down.

Under Sam Lutfi’s guidance, she began to party with the paparazzi instead, and they seized their many opportunities to make her look worse than ever, even going to such lengths as lying on the ground to get pictures up her skirt. They struck gold again. Pictures purportedly showing that she had failed to shave her anal area provoked further snarky comment from predictable sources. Hardly anybody in the media bothered to protest that she was not expecting to be photographed from below and had no reason to prepare for it, nor that taking photographs like that, in that way, really is a gross invasion of privacy and goes far beyond legitimate reportage or reasonable decency.

Despite these continuing and increasingly desperate and ruthless attacks, she still looked sporadically beautiful. However, her appearance at the 2007 VMAs served to confirm to many shocked-but-not-really-surprised observers that she wasn’t the sex object she once had been. As fans, we held our heads in our hands and rocked slowly back and forth, if not “shaking and crying” then certainly groaning with dismay.

However, it is one of God’s mercies that celebrities are not allowed to have more than one major “script” at any one time. “Bad mommy” began to replace “Beautiful girl turned ugly” almost the second after Sean Preston was born, and the unholy alliance of paparazzi and photo agencies were in heaven once more. But “bad mommy Britney” was no more than a ripple compared to what was to take place in late 2007 and early 2008. The notorious “head shaving” incident should perhaps have been a line in the sand for the media, but they gleefully got to work on another script for Britney that at first appeared bizarre and amusing, but soon became tinged with genuine shock, sympathy and sadness. “Crazy Britney” was born, and hardly anyone bothered to jeer at the presumed ugliness of her bald head.

Strangely though, even at this disturbing point, perceptions of Britney were far from clear-cut. I shall call “rewind!” and transport you to a parallel universe whose Big Bang of creation took place in 2004. It seems self-evident that the point of celebrity endorsements is to allow ordinary people to bathe vicariously in the stardust, glamor and desirability of the Beautiful People. One does not anticipate buying Marilyn Manson branded couture dresses or Meatloaf branded underwear. So what are we to make of the stunning success of Britney’s perfumes? Do girls who buy them not know or care about her alleged ugliness, or do they perhaps not see her as ugly at all? May we even think the unthinkable - that they actually see her as beautiful and glamorous?

Wikipedia tells us that “Spears endorsed her first Elizabeth Arden fragrance "Curious" in 2004, and earned $100 million in sales in the five weeks after its 2004 release. In September 2005, Spears released the fragrance "Fantasy" with Elizabeth Arden, which also saw great success. Curious was named the best selling perfume of 2004, and one of the best selling perfumes ever. To date (October 2008), Curious has sold over 650 million bottles. Following the success of "Curious", Spears released her next Elizabeth Arden fragrance, "Fantasy", in September 2005. 2006 saw the release of yet another perfume: "Midnight Fantasy". September 24, 2007 marked the release date of a new fragrance collection "Believe". She released "Curious Heart" in January 2008. It has so far sold over 35 million bottles. Spears has grossed over US1 billion from perfume sales, and has sold over 850 million bottles of perfume Worldwide. Britney has the number 1 selling celebrity fragrance line on the market. Her Elizabeth Arden scents make up 34% of total celebrity fragrance sales...”

The same thing is happening with her Candies endorsement. She has now completed three seasons for the brand, which is apparently unusual in itself. And recently Reuters reported: “When pop icon Britney Spears tweeted a sneak-peak picture of a new outfit from her line for the Candie's brand, the fashions swiftly became a top seller at department store Kohl's Corp.” "When she Twitters, it actually sells thousands of products within 24 hours," added Neil Cole, chief executive of Candie's owner Iconix Brand Group Inc. As Cliff Watts, photographer for Britney’s self-designed limited edition, noted “She’s a beautiful girl.... every picture has a little ‘wow’ factor to it.” He said that in 2010.

We are in the “Conservatorship” era. Britney herself may seem more distant from us than ever, but - whether by choice or by coercion - her appearance has been on a plateau of fairly consistent excellence for some time now. The skin of her face has attained a kind of pale luminosity and her features seem, at times, even finer than they did in the golden years of 2000-2003. Her weight has remained stable, pretty much constantly since the 2007 VMAs. Even some of the fan forum begrudgers have been known to admit that she’s looking good again. When they’re not emphasizing her craziness, the press have begun to refer to her again as “the pop babe”, “the pop beauty” or “the beautiful singer”, so that seems to be the default zone for her public image.

Two babies, several years of tear-stained craziness and a lot of “letting herself go” later, and despite years of brutal paparazzi activity apparently focused on showing her in the worst possible light, she’s still winning polls. After many delicious pap shots of Britney in a series of very skimpy bikinis, she was OK Mag’s Best Body of 2009. “She has the ideal body,” they commented. She’s Billboard’s “Sexiest Woman In Music”, 2010. And, after dropping off the Top 100 completely a few years ago, she’s back at No.4 on the FHM US list of the World’s Sexiest Women.

A quick gallop around the internet uncovers countless admirers of Britney’s beauty and physique. A visit to just one site, the wonderful PoorBritney.com, harvested all of the following from one day in 2010: “She looks fabulous!” “She looks pouty and yummy, I just want to spank her hot little ass!” “Her face is just unbelievable. Look at those features. She literally IS DOLLface. Those huge eyes, tiny perfect nose and those perfect lips. What a beautiful woman.” “Woww she looks sooo pretty!”

The snarkery hasn’t gone away. She still has plenty of mean-minded, sneery-mouthed, vindictive haters ready to comment nastily on her every appearance on celebrity blogs, gossip sites and message boards. Their sad little mission in life is to inform anyone who may be interested that she’s a “fugly bitch whore”,”she’s fat”, “she probably smells”, “her body is stumpy and thick like a man’s”, “my granny has better tits” and “if she was laying there naked in front of me I’d walk away”.

But I think that after all of these years of ups and downs and the eventual level of approval and admiration by those whose opinions are more trustworthy, we can discount that kind of bitterness as reflecting more upon the mentality of the commentators than upon Britney herself. I know she DOES frustrate her genuine admirers as much as she delights us, but I think the truth of the matter is simply this: Britney Spears is the girl of 1000 looks. With different lighting, different hairdo, different make-up and different photographers, she can go from one extreme to the other. Sure, she can look rough at times but so can anybody. Why should we think that an unkempt look is the real Britney any more than it would be the real Beyonce or real Rihanna if they ever for a second let their guard down? The point is that - cleaned up, hair did and with light but sympathetic make-up - most women look good. But Britney Spears has the very, very rare capacity to look absolutely AMAZING.