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!”
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Remembering the Golden Era of Britney, Brian and Josh
Amidst all the excitement and controversy over Dr Luke’s work with Britney on “Femme Fatale”, Max Martin’s massive contribution to her career, Bloodshy & Avant’s career-saving success with “Toxic” and their continuing innovation, and the nostalgic appreciation for Danja’s high-quality contributions to “Blackout” and “Circus”, it’s easy to neglect some of her past collaborators.
With the fuzziness of 12 years of hindsight, we may tend to forget that most of Britney’s first album was written and produced by Eric Foster White, not by Max Martin. We have possibly forgotten that famous people rushed to work with her. “When your eyes say it” was written specially for Britney by the doyenne of adult-oriented songwriters, Diane Warren. “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” was penned for her by Dido and reclusive country megastar Shania Twain wrote “Don’t let me be the last to know”.
At the other end of the fame scale, “One Kiss From You” was written and produced by her then A&R manager, Steve Lunt, a much more hands-on studio animal than his successor, Teresa LaBarbera Whites. He was also the producer on “You got it all” and “Heart”, and co-arranged “Me Against The Music”, “Showdown”, “Toxic”, and “The Hook Up”.
It’s interesting, with the benefit of hindsight, to note the huge importance of Steve Lunt’s realisation that he needed to move Britney’s recorded repertoire away from her earlier teenage-angst-laden “MOR” territory to the spacy, saucy electro-pop of “In The Zone”, effectively creating (as Dr Luke recently pointed out) Britney’s own genre.
When the original tapes for “In The Zone” were reworked to create a Super Audio CD, the engineer responsible commented that Steve had an exceptional understanding of Britney’s voice. There was nothing robotic, whiny or nasal about her vocals on HIS watch. In the credits for “In The Zone”, Britney thanks “Steve Lunt - the greatest A&R guy in the world! Thanks for having my back and being on the same page.” Yet to many fans he remains a shadowy, almost unknown and definitely unacknowledged influence on her career.
Also from the obscure end of the spectrum of those who have played a major part in Britney’s career are two remarkable but greatly underestimated writer-producers brought in by Steve Lunt to work with her. Their names are Josh Schwartz and Brian Kierulf, and the tracks they made together represent the high-watermark of Britney’s personal involvement in her own music. She co-wrote songs with them, saying (in the credits on “Britney”) “Thanx for making me feel so comfy writing with you guys” and was deeply involved in bringing each track to completion, always singing her own backing tracks.
And look at the quality of the songs Schwartz and Kierulf brought to the table! Some of these are among the finest and most beloved in her repertoire -
Lonely
Anticipating
Let me be
That’s where you take me
Brave New Girl
Don’t Hang Up
My Only Wish This Year
I Run Away
When I Say So
In contrast to these days of repetitious, two-note tunes, all of those songs are fully-formed and properly constructed, with intriguing verse melodies and memorable choruses. Each seems perfectly adapted to illustrate the many attractive qualities in Britney’s personality, and each draws from her a strong, characteristic vocal treatment.
Brian and Josh also provided vocal production for Britney, and it would be true to say that her vocals have never been better recorded. They didn’t use the current fashion for splitting the lead vocal in a narrow “V” between left and right channels, blurring the boundaries with the backing vocals. And (with the exception of “Brave New Girl”) they didn’t put her voice through a vocoder, or overlay it with the kind of electronic “fuzz” we find on tracks like “Piece of Me”. On Brian and Josh’s tracks, Britney’s lead vocal is crystal clear and placed centrally, and is given its space and separation from her backing vocals which are placed widely in the stereo mix at left and right. Her diction, often criticized, is perfect on every one of their songs.
They didn’t shy away from using real musical instruments either, preferring a proper drum kit and a proper bass melody played on a bass guitar to the ill-defined, ear-numbing, one-note electronic thumping we get these days. On “Anticipating” they add a whole new, unexpected dimension of poignancy by using a real acoustic string section.
They show a mastery of the stereo soundstage too (as perceived by the listener wearing good quality headphones) - and that’s something you won’t find on any of Britney’s albums from “Blackout” onwards. Listen, for example, to how Britney’s little-girlish “la la la la” on “That’s Where You Take Me” appears at about 90 degrees from center on the right-hand channel and is then echoed on the left-hand channel. Or check out the amazing three-dimensional mix on “Don’t Hang Up” where (again on good headphones) Britney’s words “Dont hang up!” seem to come from an actual phone located somewhere behind your left ear.
And consider the range of Brian’s and Josh’s work - from the vigorous, assertive dance beats of “Lonely” and “Let Me Be” through the majestic melodies of “I Run Away” and “Anticipating” to the gentle, wispy, ethereal dreaminess of “That’s Where You Take Me” and “Don’t Hang Up”. And let us not forget that “My Only Wish This Year” is one of the best Christmas pop songs ever made.
I think that with Dr Luke we’re in an age of corporate, rather mechanically created music now. Britney sounds less like a person, less like a featured star with a complex, adorable character, and more like one electronic effect among many. The mix is busy and the elements lack space. Everything is muddled and huddled together and it’s all one big bang-bang wall of sound. Britney doesn’t bother with vocal subtlety any more and her shimmering vibrato only makes an appearance on Rodney Jerkins’ “He About To Lose Me”.
I’d love to see Schwartz and Kierulf make a reappearance on Britney’s next album. I’d love to see her writing with them again. I’d love to hear her rather touching voice properly framed and displayed again. It’s not as if they’re yesterday’s men and no longer relevant - Lady Gaga used them on “The Fame”. I guess they were forgotten in the post-Steve Lunt era but I say “Bring ‘em back!”
With the fuzziness of 12 years of hindsight, we may tend to forget that most of Britney’s first album was written and produced by Eric Foster White, not by Max Martin. We have possibly forgotten that famous people rushed to work with her. “When your eyes say it” was written specially for Britney by the doyenne of adult-oriented songwriters, Diane Warren. “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” was penned for her by Dido and reclusive country megastar Shania Twain wrote “Don’t let me be the last to know”.
At the other end of the fame scale, “One Kiss From You” was written and produced by her then A&R manager, Steve Lunt, a much more hands-on studio animal than his successor, Teresa LaBarbera Whites. He was also the producer on “You got it all” and “Heart”, and co-arranged “Me Against The Music”, “Showdown”, “Toxic”, and “The Hook Up”.
It’s interesting, with the benefit of hindsight, to note the huge importance of Steve Lunt’s realisation that he needed to move Britney’s recorded repertoire away from her earlier teenage-angst-laden “MOR” territory to the spacy, saucy electro-pop of “In The Zone”, effectively creating (as Dr Luke recently pointed out) Britney’s own genre.
When the original tapes for “In The Zone” were reworked to create a Super Audio CD, the engineer responsible commented that Steve had an exceptional understanding of Britney’s voice. There was nothing robotic, whiny or nasal about her vocals on HIS watch. In the credits for “In The Zone”, Britney thanks “Steve Lunt - the greatest A&R guy in the world! Thanks for having my back and being on the same page.” Yet to many fans he remains a shadowy, almost unknown and definitely unacknowledged influence on her career.
Also from the obscure end of the spectrum of those who have played a major part in Britney’s career are two remarkable but greatly underestimated writer-producers brought in by Steve Lunt to work with her. Their names are Josh Schwartz and Brian Kierulf, and the tracks they made together represent the high-watermark of Britney’s personal involvement in her own music. She co-wrote songs with them, saying (in the credits on “Britney”) “Thanx for making me feel so comfy writing with you guys” and was deeply involved in bringing each track to completion, always singing her own backing tracks.
And look at the quality of the songs Schwartz and Kierulf brought to the table! Some of these are among the finest and most beloved in her repertoire -
Lonely
Anticipating
Let me be
That’s where you take me
Brave New Girl
Don’t Hang Up
My Only Wish This Year
I Run Away
When I Say So
In contrast to these days of repetitious, two-note tunes, all of those songs are fully-formed and properly constructed, with intriguing verse melodies and memorable choruses. Each seems perfectly adapted to illustrate the many attractive qualities in Britney’s personality, and each draws from her a strong, characteristic vocal treatment.
Brian and Josh also provided vocal production for Britney, and it would be true to say that her vocals have never been better recorded. They didn’t use the current fashion for splitting the lead vocal in a narrow “V” between left and right channels, blurring the boundaries with the backing vocals. And (with the exception of “Brave New Girl”) they didn’t put her voice through a vocoder, or overlay it with the kind of electronic “fuzz” we find on tracks like “Piece of Me”. On Brian and Josh’s tracks, Britney’s lead vocal is crystal clear and placed centrally, and is given its space and separation from her backing vocals which are placed widely in the stereo mix at left and right. Her diction, often criticized, is perfect on every one of their songs.
They didn’t shy away from using real musical instruments either, preferring a proper drum kit and a proper bass melody played on a bass guitar to the ill-defined, ear-numbing, one-note electronic thumping we get these days. On “Anticipating” they add a whole new, unexpected dimension of poignancy by using a real acoustic string section.
They show a mastery of the stereo soundstage too (as perceived by the listener wearing good quality headphones) - and that’s something you won’t find on any of Britney’s albums from “Blackout” onwards. Listen, for example, to how Britney’s little-girlish “la la la la” on “That’s Where You Take Me” appears at about 90 degrees from center on the right-hand channel and is then echoed on the left-hand channel. Or check out the amazing three-dimensional mix on “Don’t Hang Up” where (again on good headphones) Britney’s words “Dont hang up!” seem to come from an actual phone located somewhere behind your left ear.
And consider the range of Brian’s and Josh’s work - from the vigorous, assertive dance beats of “Lonely” and “Let Me Be” through the majestic melodies of “I Run Away” and “Anticipating” to the gentle, wispy, ethereal dreaminess of “That’s Where You Take Me” and “Don’t Hang Up”. And let us not forget that “My Only Wish This Year” is one of the best Christmas pop songs ever made.
I think that with Dr Luke we’re in an age of corporate, rather mechanically created music now. Britney sounds less like a person, less like a featured star with a complex, adorable character, and more like one electronic effect among many. The mix is busy and the elements lack space. Everything is muddled and huddled together and it’s all one big bang-bang wall of sound. Britney doesn’t bother with vocal subtlety any more and her shimmering vibrato only makes an appearance on Rodney Jerkins’ “He About To Lose Me”.
I’d love to see Schwartz and Kierulf make a reappearance on Britney’s next album. I’d love to see her writing with them again. I’d love to hear her rather touching voice properly framed and displayed again. It’s not as if they’re yesterday’s men and no longer relevant - Lady Gaga used them on “The Fame”. I guess they were forgotten in the post-Steve Lunt era but I say “Bring ‘em back!”
Friday, April 29, 2011
"Do you feel it too? Close your eyes..."
While doing my homework for an article I’m writing about the changes in Britney’s singing technique down the years, I quickly realised that I couldn't rely on my memory - I would have to go back and revisit her early albums, and her ballads in particular, because it's in ballads that she has space to show her technique. And going back to those songs is something I usually try to avoid. Shocking, yes? But, to be honest, listening to Britney’s early music makes me tearful.
Then, in the middle of doing this, I happened to catch a TV documentary called “Queens of Heartache”, which described the tormented lives of a number of great female stars - Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin... all of them destroyed by men, by drink, by drugs or whatever. All of them died prematurely. And it started me to wondering if Britney was somewhere on this same sad trajectory.
It’s not so very long since fans and media commentators alike were saying that they woke up each morning wondering if Britney was still alive. I think a lot of us had that horrible feeling of impending doom that we also had in the weeks before Princess Diana died. We knew it was going to happen. The sense that everything was spiralling out of control was almost tangible. Almost miraculously, Britney survived. But ever since, there has been that aura around her of fragility, uncertainty, infinite vulnerability. As fans we watch her every move closely and anxiously, hoping for signs of strength and independence of action, while fearing that she’s only being kept going by artificial means. I guess the recent fan neurosis over her dancing is a sign of worrying, fretting, loving and caring too much, and letting it all out in anger and frustration.
Princess Diana’s tragedy was not just a personal one. It was an iconic death - a classic grim reality check on a classic fairy tale. The wave of national mourning was not just for Diana but for the death of a dream. It was a universal tragedy that poured blackness, bleakness, despair and pessimism into millions of hearts. Britney’s early career as a star was a classic fairy tale too - the American Dream, some say. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some of the blackness has already arrived.
So is this why I suffer such sadness when I listen to Britney’s early ballads? Is it because I know what happened next? The break-up with Justin Timberlake that she seems never to have gotten over? Her failed marriages to Jason Alexander and Kevin Federline? The desperately damaging custody battle that she lost? The destruction of her good name and reputation? Accusations of substance abuse? Unspecified mental illnesses? A permanent conservatorship?
Obviously, it’s hard to listen to her early music without being affected by the knowledge that all of this was just around the corner. Is it the sound of optimism about to be crushed? The snuffing out of this young girl’s happiness could not have been more starkly dramatized than by the fact that magazines with covers showing Britney’s smiling face and headlines about her marriage plans with Justin T. were still on the stands for weeks after the break-up had been announced.
But there’s more to it than that. Maybe it’s because the repertoire chosen for her was so different in her earlier years, but her voice back then, as it plays in my head, is haunting, poignant, touching, affecting. And, unlike her present-day musical persona of empowered sexual predator, her early ballads told a tale of the endless search for a boy to love and to love her that seems much closer to her real life.
Such songs portray her emotional vulnerability so perfectly because there is no irony, no knowing sonic winks to the audience, and certainly not the sense you find in most professional singers of running through a bunch of lyrics like they’re a shopping list. Britney’s voice back then sounded almost unbearably young, inexperienced, naive and innocent. At times it was as if, through her music, she was living the childhood she’d never had. It sounded totally heartfelt and genuine.
She had plenty of technique (which I will talk about in another article) but it was unobtrusive and steered away from the habits and mannerisms that place a barrier between singer and listener. With many singers, you admire and you’re impressed, and you may be spellbound by their power, confidence and technical excellence. Britney was the exact opposite. Above all, you felt close to her, intimate with her. You identified with her troubles and her heartaches. You could not observe with detachment. She sounded as if she was confiding in YOU, as if YOU were her BFF.
No wonder so many of her audience began to feel such emotional attachment to her, an attachment that mystifies non-fans but for fans is something that never goes away. A few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for fans to say that, if Britney died, they would kill themselves too. I remember sitting in my car, praying for her, praying that she’d be OK and that things would go well for her. Those old songs take me back to that place. It was still happening as late as the “In The Zone” album. The innocence hadn't died. That was before the true horror began. I was listening to “Don’t Hang Up” (for goodness sake!) but when Britney whispered “Do you feel it too?” I broke down in tears.
Then, in the middle of doing this, I happened to catch a TV documentary called “Queens of Heartache”, which described the tormented lives of a number of great female stars - Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin... all of them destroyed by men, by drink, by drugs or whatever. All of them died prematurely. And it started me to wondering if Britney was somewhere on this same sad trajectory.
It’s not so very long since fans and media commentators alike were saying that they woke up each morning wondering if Britney was still alive. I think a lot of us had that horrible feeling of impending doom that we also had in the weeks before Princess Diana died. We knew it was going to happen. The sense that everything was spiralling out of control was almost tangible. Almost miraculously, Britney survived. But ever since, there has been that aura around her of fragility, uncertainty, infinite vulnerability. As fans we watch her every move closely and anxiously, hoping for signs of strength and independence of action, while fearing that she’s only being kept going by artificial means. I guess the recent fan neurosis over her dancing is a sign of worrying, fretting, loving and caring too much, and letting it all out in anger and frustration.
Princess Diana’s tragedy was not just a personal one. It was an iconic death - a classic grim reality check on a classic fairy tale. The wave of national mourning was not just for Diana but for the death of a dream. It was a universal tragedy that poured blackness, bleakness, despair and pessimism into millions of hearts. Britney’s early career as a star was a classic fairy tale too - the American Dream, some say. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some of the blackness has already arrived.
So is this why I suffer such sadness when I listen to Britney’s early ballads? Is it because I know what happened next? The break-up with Justin Timberlake that she seems never to have gotten over? Her failed marriages to Jason Alexander and Kevin Federline? The desperately damaging custody battle that she lost? The destruction of her good name and reputation? Accusations of substance abuse? Unspecified mental illnesses? A permanent conservatorship?
Obviously, it’s hard to listen to her early music without being affected by the knowledge that all of this was just around the corner. Is it the sound of optimism about to be crushed? The snuffing out of this young girl’s happiness could not have been more starkly dramatized than by the fact that magazines with covers showing Britney’s smiling face and headlines about her marriage plans with Justin T. were still on the stands for weeks after the break-up had been announced.
But there’s more to it than that. Maybe it’s because the repertoire chosen for her was so different in her earlier years, but her voice back then, as it plays in my head, is haunting, poignant, touching, affecting. And, unlike her present-day musical persona of empowered sexual predator, her early ballads told a tale of the endless search for a boy to love and to love her that seems much closer to her real life.
Such songs portray her emotional vulnerability so perfectly because there is no irony, no knowing sonic winks to the audience, and certainly not the sense you find in most professional singers of running through a bunch of lyrics like they’re a shopping list. Britney’s voice back then sounded almost unbearably young, inexperienced, naive and innocent. At times it was as if, through her music, she was living the childhood she’d never had. It sounded totally heartfelt and genuine.
She had plenty of technique (which I will talk about in another article) but it was unobtrusive and steered away from the habits and mannerisms that place a barrier between singer and listener. With many singers, you admire and you’re impressed, and you may be spellbound by their power, confidence and technical excellence. Britney was the exact opposite. Above all, you felt close to her, intimate with her. You identified with her troubles and her heartaches. You could not observe with detachment. She sounded as if she was confiding in YOU, as if YOU were her BFF.
No wonder so many of her audience began to feel such emotional attachment to her, an attachment that mystifies non-fans but for fans is something that never goes away. A few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for fans to say that, if Britney died, they would kill themselves too. I remember sitting in my car, praying for her, praying that she’d be OK and that things would go well for her. Those old songs take me back to that place. It was still happening as late as the “In The Zone” album. The innocence hadn't died. That was before the true horror began. I was listening to “Don’t Hang Up” (for goodness sake!) but when Britney whispered “Do you feel it too?” I broke down in tears.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Britney's Dancing Crisis - A Way Forward
I still can't get over this damn furore about Britney’s dancing and everything that people are reading into it. I just want to say this: isn't it a little bit crazy to theorize that she’s running some kind of outlandishly extended protest against the Conservatorship? If everything is being done under protest, against her will... if she’s fighting the Conservators and really wants to quit showbiz, why wouldn’t she simply blurt out the horrible truth to interviewers, stick a middle finger up to the Conservators, sabotage her career, and get the whole thing over with? Or she could easily tell the paparazzi "I'm a prisoner! Get me out of here!"
However, for the sake of argument, let us accept that Britney’s dancing on the “Circus” tour and in recent videos and promo has indeed been sluggish compared to the good old days. PB and I have both pointed out that even in slow motion, Britney dances more than most artists, but the comeback to that is obviously “We’d accept it as just about OK if she was singing live at the same time - but she isn’t.”
In this article I want to suggest that it may be easier to solve Britney’s alleged performance problems in both the dancing AND singing departments than a lot of people think! We’ll come to that in a little while. But first, let’s make sure we’ve taken a look at every aspect of the alleged problems. It seems to me that there are some that haven’t received much attention.
The first thing to which I’d like to direct your attention is Britney’s comment that nowadays she's thinking of the bigger picture in planning her shows, rather than worrying about “Is this hard enough?” Unsurprisingly, the cynics were climbing all over this in seconds, shouting “Excuses! Excuses! More excuses!!!” But let’s calm ourselves down for a few seconds and take a closer look.
A UK-based neutral music website recently described the “Circus” show as “frantic”. This was a comment on the non-stop nature of the show, not on Britney’s role in it. I’ve been asking around, and everyone seems to agree that the show was endless action, apart from a few minutes when Britney sang “Everytime”. This is the bigger picture. You could, perhaps, compare it to one of Kylie Minogue’s shows, where extravagant sets and ambitious choreography whirl impressively around the totally non-dancing star.
But this approach is unusual. Most shows contain a number of “resting” sequences, whether obvious or well-concealed. For example, Pink’s energetic show that I saw a couple of years ago had a lengthy acoustic segment where she sat and sang with her backing singers. Shakira’s show allowed her to spend time in front of each section of the audience and also included slow, balletic and “writhing” dance moves.
Rihanna, Pink, Shakira and just about everybody else that I’ve seen live in concert has spent much of the show “strutting and posing”, as dancers put it. Each one of them made sure they had a really long catwalk so there was endless scope to do it. Shakira and Rihanna did a lot of the booty-shaking that made Beyonce famous, but so do the girls on TV sex-chat shows such as “Babestation”, and they don’t call it dancing.
Typical pop stage shows usually do include proper, choreographed dance sequences, but they are only SECTIONS of the show. They only crop up as special highlights and are separated from the live singing parts of the show. The problem comes when a show is totally choreographed - even if the actual choreography is simple, there’s still an awful lot for one central person to remember. Don't forget, he or she has to maintain 100% concentration throughout, and - as well as remembering dance moves - always has to be in exactly the right position in relation to stage layout and furniture, props, and other dancers.
I get the impression that a lot of fans think that (a) doing a choreographed show is easy, and (b) it mostly consists of dancing. Wrong!!!! I bet a lot of them would have watched Brian Friedman’s work on the last series of “The X Factor” and thought to themslves “Where was the choreography he talked about??!!” Yet it took days for the contestants to learn and rehearse a couple of simple sequences of movements that, in many cases, didn’t look like dancing at all. But that was the most they could manage while singing live.
Back in the dear dead days of ITZ, one well-known Britney site posted the full written-down choreography for one song, “Toxic”. It ran to the length of about 5 pages of A4 paper. Imagine trying to remember two hours of minutely detailed choreography. And reflect on this - even Britney’s much-derided X Factor appearance was fully choreographed, down to every arm movement and turn of the head. That was probably 5 pages of instructions too.
Britney is facing the consequence of trying to satisfy the fans’ apparent hunger for all-action shows and dance videos. The whiners and whingers seem to have forgotten that most of Britney’s best videos have been STORY videos like Toxic, Everytime and Womanizer and that’s what they should be crying out for. They also seem to have forgotten that Britney’s early shows weren’t entirely made up of non-stop hard-dancing choreographed action. Go back and take another look if you don’t believe me!
I’m conscious of voices offstage muttering “Excuses!” once more, so to keep them happy I’ll pick a fault with Britney. For WHATEVER reason, and I refuse to speculate, I think she finds it almost impossible to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and indeed, often finds it hard enough even to concentrate on one thing. So, the more elaborately her shows and videos are choreographed, the more her brain will be fully occupied in trying to remember what the hell she’s supposed to do next. Hence the over-cautious look to her dancing. Hence too her not being able to sing live because she can’t concentrate on remembering pages of choreography and pages of song words at the same time.
There’s another problem with choreography, and that problem is INSURANCE. As a star, you have to have it. The dangers involved in uninsured losses can run into tens of millions of dollars, and are too great. But choreography has the effect of pre-designating risk, and trying to obtain insurance is an attempt at mitigating it. Proposing two hours of fast and furious choreography is on a par with making a statement of a pre-existing medical condition: it becomes a prisoner of insurance. And, to make matters worse, Britney HAS a pre-existing medical condition that has already been the subject of a disputed insurance claim in 2004.
If you don’t recall the incident, Britney’s insurers refused to pay out following her knee injury on the set of the video for “Outrageous”. They argued that she had had knee problems since the “Sometimes” video, and pointed out that she had already had a knee problem that caused the cancellation of some shows earlier in the Onyx Hotel tour. It was, her insurers argued, therefore a pre-existing medical condition and not covered by accident insurance. Britney’s lawyers argued that doctors had given her the all-clear after the Onyx Tour injury.
However, an accidental injury that could not be readily foreseen, obtained in the course of spontaneous, normal, typical human movement, would normally be covered. If a singer on a stage was to bob and jig and run around informally, move to the music as and when circumstances allow or dictate, improvise and freestyle it a little... that would be normal, typical human movement for someone who was generally fit and healthy.
So this is my suggestion: If Britney were to give up the 100% choreographed “spectacular” shows - or do like Kylie and let the dancers do that stuff and stay out of it herself - wouldn’t her natural athleticism and rhythm take over? I think she could freestyle, improvise and move informally with the rhythm, and the result would be natural Britney dance - more convincing, carefree and enthusiastic than anything she currently seems to be able to do when all the dancing is choreographed. We know she can dance well in practise and in the dance studio. We also know that in her early shows and tours, the whole thing wasn’t choreographed and she had freedom to improvise.
And could it be that, freed from the burden of trying to remember something like 100 pages of detailed choreography and stage instructions, Britney could manage to remember some song words and sing live too? I have no doubts at all about her actual ability to SING, and we’ve been told that she recorded a recent hit in 15 minutes, so.... I, for one, think she could do it. And wouldn't this be a way forward that would please most of her fans?
However, for the sake of argument, let us accept that Britney’s dancing on the “Circus” tour and in recent videos and promo has indeed been sluggish compared to the good old days. PB and I have both pointed out that even in slow motion, Britney dances more than most artists, but the comeback to that is obviously “We’d accept it as just about OK if she was singing live at the same time - but she isn’t.”
In this article I want to suggest that it may be easier to solve Britney’s alleged performance problems in both the dancing AND singing departments than a lot of people think! We’ll come to that in a little while. But first, let’s make sure we’ve taken a look at every aspect of the alleged problems. It seems to me that there are some that haven’t received much attention.
The first thing to which I’d like to direct your attention is Britney’s comment that nowadays she's thinking of the bigger picture in planning her shows, rather than worrying about “Is this hard enough?” Unsurprisingly, the cynics were climbing all over this in seconds, shouting “Excuses! Excuses! More excuses!!!” But let’s calm ourselves down for a few seconds and take a closer look.
A UK-based neutral music website recently described the “Circus” show as “frantic”. This was a comment on the non-stop nature of the show, not on Britney’s role in it. I’ve been asking around, and everyone seems to agree that the show was endless action, apart from a few minutes when Britney sang “Everytime”. This is the bigger picture. You could, perhaps, compare it to one of Kylie Minogue’s shows, where extravagant sets and ambitious choreography whirl impressively around the totally non-dancing star.
But this approach is unusual. Most shows contain a number of “resting” sequences, whether obvious or well-concealed. For example, Pink’s energetic show that I saw a couple of years ago had a lengthy acoustic segment where she sat and sang with her backing singers. Shakira’s show allowed her to spend time in front of each section of the audience and also included slow, balletic and “writhing” dance moves.
Rihanna, Pink, Shakira and just about everybody else that I’ve seen live in concert has spent much of the show “strutting and posing”, as dancers put it. Each one of them made sure they had a really long catwalk so there was endless scope to do it. Shakira and Rihanna did a lot of the booty-shaking that made Beyonce famous, but so do the girls on TV sex-chat shows such as “Babestation”, and they don’t call it dancing.
Typical pop stage shows usually do include proper, choreographed dance sequences, but they are only SECTIONS of the show. They only crop up as special highlights and are separated from the live singing parts of the show. The problem comes when a show is totally choreographed - even if the actual choreography is simple, there’s still an awful lot for one central person to remember. Don't forget, he or she has to maintain 100% concentration throughout, and - as well as remembering dance moves - always has to be in exactly the right position in relation to stage layout and furniture, props, and other dancers.
I get the impression that a lot of fans think that (a) doing a choreographed show is easy, and (b) it mostly consists of dancing. Wrong!!!! I bet a lot of them would have watched Brian Friedman’s work on the last series of “The X Factor” and thought to themslves “Where was the choreography he talked about??!!” Yet it took days for the contestants to learn and rehearse a couple of simple sequences of movements that, in many cases, didn’t look like dancing at all. But that was the most they could manage while singing live.
Back in the dear dead days of ITZ, one well-known Britney site posted the full written-down choreography for one song, “Toxic”. It ran to the length of about 5 pages of A4 paper. Imagine trying to remember two hours of minutely detailed choreography. And reflect on this - even Britney’s much-derided X Factor appearance was fully choreographed, down to every arm movement and turn of the head. That was probably 5 pages of instructions too.
Britney is facing the consequence of trying to satisfy the fans’ apparent hunger for all-action shows and dance videos. The whiners and whingers seem to have forgotten that most of Britney’s best videos have been STORY videos like Toxic, Everytime and Womanizer and that’s what they should be crying out for. They also seem to have forgotten that Britney’s early shows weren’t entirely made up of non-stop hard-dancing choreographed action. Go back and take another look if you don’t believe me!
I’m conscious of voices offstage muttering “Excuses!” once more, so to keep them happy I’ll pick a fault with Britney. For WHATEVER reason, and I refuse to speculate, I think she finds it almost impossible to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and indeed, often finds it hard enough even to concentrate on one thing. So, the more elaborately her shows and videos are choreographed, the more her brain will be fully occupied in trying to remember what the hell she’s supposed to do next. Hence the over-cautious look to her dancing. Hence too her not being able to sing live because she can’t concentrate on remembering pages of choreography and pages of song words at the same time.
There’s another problem with choreography, and that problem is INSURANCE. As a star, you have to have it. The dangers involved in uninsured losses can run into tens of millions of dollars, and are too great. But choreography has the effect of pre-designating risk, and trying to obtain insurance is an attempt at mitigating it. Proposing two hours of fast and furious choreography is on a par with making a statement of a pre-existing medical condition: it becomes a prisoner of insurance. And, to make matters worse, Britney HAS a pre-existing medical condition that has already been the subject of a disputed insurance claim in 2004.
If you don’t recall the incident, Britney’s insurers refused to pay out following her knee injury on the set of the video for “Outrageous”. They argued that she had had knee problems since the “Sometimes” video, and pointed out that she had already had a knee problem that caused the cancellation of some shows earlier in the Onyx Hotel tour. It was, her insurers argued, therefore a pre-existing medical condition and not covered by accident insurance. Britney’s lawyers argued that doctors had given her the all-clear after the Onyx Tour injury.
However, an accidental injury that could not be readily foreseen, obtained in the course of spontaneous, normal, typical human movement, would normally be covered. If a singer on a stage was to bob and jig and run around informally, move to the music as and when circumstances allow or dictate, improvise and freestyle it a little... that would be normal, typical human movement for someone who was generally fit and healthy.
So this is my suggestion: If Britney were to give up the 100% choreographed “spectacular” shows - or do like Kylie and let the dancers do that stuff and stay out of it herself - wouldn’t her natural athleticism and rhythm take over? I think she could freestyle, improvise and move informally with the rhythm, and the result would be natural Britney dance - more convincing, carefree and enthusiastic than anything she currently seems to be able to do when all the dancing is choreographed. We know she can dance well in practise and in the dance studio. We also know that in her early shows and tours, the whole thing wasn’t choreographed and she had freedom to improvise.
And could it be that, freed from the burden of trying to remember something like 100 pages of detailed choreography and stage instructions, Britney could manage to remember some song words and sing live too? I have no doubts at all about her actual ability to SING, and we’ve been told that she recorded a recent hit in 15 minutes, so.... I, for one, think she could do it. And wouldn't this be a way forward that would please most of her fans?
Friday, April 8, 2011
So HAS Britney Spears left the room? Um........ no!
I was reading a long, LONG article about Britney on a girl-on-girl site called Autostraddle yesterday. First of all, I was surprised that that my sisters should
care - or pretend to care - about Britney at all. I’ve never clocked her as any kind of lesbian icon. Normally we cleave unto more powerful celebrity proxies, like inadequate little boys get themselves a big, angry-looking dog. Second of all, I was disappointed that, for people who should have a subtle understanding of girls, their Brit-analysis was so shallow.
“Despite her canned affirmations, void of any emotion, to questions about whether she still wants to be a pop artist, there’s an overt vapidity behind her eyes and in her speech that, a few years ago, came off as a lack of intelligence, but perhaps it’s more indicative of a lack of interest in this path that was chosen for her at such a young age.
Yeah, we could blame Britney’s disinterest on drugs or nerves or stupidity or just being spoiled, that’d be easy — or you could be ableists and blame her psychiatric meds (I promise, it’s totally possible to take Seroquel AND dance). But that’s not what’s going on here.
Britney Spears is over it.”
The article reads like a manifesto for the "Free Britney" movement. It rants on and on about Big Bad Jamie (a man, after all - horrors!) and the insidious, ruthless money-grab that is, in the writer’s opinion, the true nature of the Conservatorship. However, there is little fact and a LOT of speculation and assumption. Such as that Britney is "over it". It doesn't seem to matter how emphatically Britney talks about her music, or how positively producer after producer talks about the experience of working with her. Some people either can't take it in, or choose to ignore it when they write articles like this.
People who write about Britney's desire to leave showbusiness can end up looking foolish. For example, I was probably the first person to write an article (almost 7 years ago!- it was called "Britney Spears has left the room") claiming that she was fed up of being Britney Spears, wanted to retire and become a full-time mom and housewife etc. etc. Check it out!
“An eerie atmosphere has descended upon the career of Mrs Britney Federline. There's a strange sense that it's balancing on a knife edge right now.
Over the last few months, Britney the woman has been slowly but steadily detaching and distancing herself from Britney Spears, the crazy, outrageous, much-maligned, over-protected pop princess. She has grown tired of being controlled by an army of money-grubbing managers and of being carried along on an overwhelming but remorseless and suffocating tide of success.
In 2003 she decided to take a break from the business, saying she was sick of herself. But she soon recovered, and within days was in the studio making her fourth album. Now, as the end of 2004 approaches, the sickness has become terminal.
The signs have been there for a while now, but we didn't want to read them. When she briefed David LaChappelle about what she wanted for the "Everytime" video, there was one thing she made totally clear to him - she wanted to die in the video. And in the treatment which finally met with her approval, she was reborn, but her life-force was channelled into a new-born baby.
The reason she was not present at the Teen Choice Awards, or the VMAs, or the WMAs, and why she will not be present at any other awards shows or indeed any other media showcase events for the foreseeable future is that she is determined to escape from the past.
The public may buy My Prerogative and her Greatest Hits album, or they may not. She doesn't care. She has no intention of promoting them in any way. "Britney Spears", pop and celeb phenomenon, is dying and she has placed a "Do Not Resuscitate" notice on her bed.
She spent most of 2003 trashing her image as a squeaky clean, morally upright, loveable innocent . By the time the Onyx Hotel tour was cancelled following her serious knee injury in June 2004, it was as if she felt she hadn't gone far enough. Now her beauty, glamour and showbiz gloss had to be trashed as well.
And so she has rarely taken much trouble to evade the increasingly savage attentions of the piranha-shoal of paparazzi who swarm constantly around her, nor has she in any way attempted to counter the constant stream of lies and inventions peddled by the tabloid press. As their bloodlust has reached a frenzy, fuelled by a growing sense that at last, after nearly 6 years of improbable survival, she has been fatally wounded, Britney Spears has simply looked them in the eye and put on another message T-shirt.
And so we come to the recent events in her life. The paparazzi pics of the last few weeks have shown us, not the grumpy, depressed-looking Britney of June and July, but a girl who is rarely seen without a smile on her face. Her interview with Cojo, her first live appearance on TV for a very long time and probably her last, was almost euphoric.
But for her fans, what she said - and what she didn't say - was deeply disturbing. She "had been doing way too much" before. What she valued in Kevin Federline, as much as his love, was the stability and calm he had brought to her life. She said not a word about anything she planned to do in relation to her career - because she has no plans.
"Being a young mom", she said, was her dream. And this is the dream which has now replaced the dream of stardom for this highly motivated, powerfully focussed and deeply determined young lady. Kevin Federline never had a chance. Britney wants a child, and she is going to have one. Her pregnancy will be announced within the next few weeks.
For her wedding, her hairstyle was simple, brunette and very un-showbiz. In an act of pure symbolism, she had stripped away the last vestiges of the glamour and unreality of the blonde bombshell Britney Spears and was ready to start again on a new life. "It feels like a beginning", she said later. "Britney Federline - I like that."
She didn't want her wedding to be a showbiz event. She didn't want it to be glamorous. Indeed, by the time of the after-wedding shindig, she had even removed her make-up. For the paparazzi she knew would be waiting, she wanted to look ordinary.
Since then, she has said that she's becoming a woman and things need to be different. That means more attention to her life, and less to her career. She plans to be a mother in 2005, when she's 23. Everything about her is inward-looking now. It's all about what feels right, and real, and honest for her. The impulsive decision to bring her wedding date forward was just something she wanted to do.
She isn't deliberately or wantonly neglecting her fans. She has simply cleansed herself of all that it means to be a pop star. She isn't intending to make a new CD, or tour, or do any one-off concerts or TV spots. She has fulfilled her contractual obligations to Jive and to Elizabeth Arden. The horizon looks clear. Soon, she believes, the media will lose interest in her, and she can proceed to be a young mom without a care in the world.
Her dreams now are of tucking her baby in at night, of singing sweet lullabies, of pushing her buggy down the main street, of talking to other young moms at the nursery school gates... Britney does not see herself as a typical showbiz mom, hardly ever there. She will work as hard at being a mom as she did at being a star.
Will she ever come back? That's what's on the knife-edge. She was meant to be starting a new movie soon, but, unless contracts have been signed already, that will be put on hold. She will now go straight into her new life as a housewife and expectant mother."
Whaddya think? That was my very first Britney article. And all of that seemed so obvious to me at the time. Dammit, I actually met someone who looked very like Britney in the woods during an LSD-induced trip and came back to report that SHE TOLD ME. Yet here we are in 2011 and she's STILL spending more time in recording studios than almost anybody, still making No.1 albums, still touring... You know what? I think I may have been wrong.
If Britney had really wanted to get the hell out of the game, her alleged post-SP post-partum breakdown period was the greatest opportunity and greatest excuse, yet she laid down the tracks for "Blackout" while pregnant with JJ, and the tracks for "Circus" while apparently so out of it that she couldn't look after herself. Music is a HUGE thing in her life. It's the rock she clings to when she needs to cling on to SOMETHING. It's delusional to claim that she's "over it".
The Autostraddle writer makes me sad. From everything she says, she feels too old and too self-conscious to be a fan now, and is hoping to provoke some messages of sympathy and solidarity from others in the same age group. Maybe that sentiment IS out there. Maybe it IS growing as people get older. I'm 30 and probably not quite as capable of intense devotion as I once was. But Britney is still my celebrity boo. I love her voice and I’m addicted to HER. She’s still the most endlessly loveable and fascinating celebrity out there.
People like GaGa, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Ke$ha are clearly major figures in showbiz, but their narratives are pretty simple. We observe them at work with respect and measure of enjoyment, but we observe them with a cold eye. They perform and it’s OK. We expect it to be, because there isn’t anything else. There isn't the conflict and paradox, the mystery and wondering, the mythical status that comes from having more fiction than fact attached to a name, as it is to Britney's. If I wrote one article about each of them, that would be enough.
care - or pretend to care - about Britney at all. I’ve never clocked her as any kind of lesbian icon. Normally we cleave unto more powerful celebrity proxies, like inadequate little boys get themselves a big, angry-looking dog. Second of all, I was disappointed that, for people who should have a subtle understanding of girls, their Brit-analysis was so shallow.
“Despite her canned affirmations, void of any emotion, to questions about whether she still wants to be a pop artist, there’s an overt vapidity behind her eyes and in her speech that, a few years ago, came off as a lack of intelligence, but perhaps it’s more indicative of a lack of interest in this path that was chosen for her at such a young age.
Yeah, we could blame Britney’s disinterest on drugs or nerves or stupidity or just being spoiled, that’d be easy — or you could be ableists and blame her psychiatric meds (I promise, it’s totally possible to take Seroquel AND dance). But that’s not what’s going on here.
Britney Spears is over it.”
The article reads like a manifesto for the "Free Britney" movement. It rants on and on about Big Bad Jamie (a man, after all - horrors!) and the insidious, ruthless money-grab that is, in the writer’s opinion, the true nature of the Conservatorship. However, there is little fact and a LOT of speculation and assumption. Such as that Britney is "over it". It doesn't seem to matter how emphatically Britney talks about her music, or how positively producer after producer talks about the experience of working with her. Some people either can't take it in, or choose to ignore it when they write articles like this.
People who write about Britney's desire to leave showbusiness can end up looking foolish. For example, I was probably the first person to write an article (almost 7 years ago!- it was called "Britney Spears has left the room") claiming that she was fed up of being Britney Spears, wanted to retire and become a full-time mom and housewife etc. etc. Check it out!
“An eerie atmosphere has descended upon the career of Mrs Britney Federline. There's a strange sense that it's balancing on a knife edge right now.
Over the last few months, Britney the woman has been slowly but steadily detaching and distancing herself from Britney Spears, the crazy, outrageous, much-maligned, over-protected pop princess. She has grown tired of being controlled by an army of money-grubbing managers and of being carried along on an overwhelming but remorseless and suffocating tide of success.
In 2003 she decided to take a break from the business, saying she was sick of herself. But she soon recovered, and within days was in the studio making her fourth album. Now, as the end of 2004 approaches, the sickness has become terminal.
The signs have been there for a while now, but we didn't want to read them. When she briefed David LaChappelle about what she wanted for the "Everytime" video, there was one thing she made totally clear to him - she wanted to die in the video. And in the treatment which finally met with her approval, she was reborn, but her life-force was channelled into a new-born baby.
The reason she was not present at the Teen Choice Awards, or the VMAs, or the WMAs, and why she will not be present at any other awards shows or indeed any other media showcase events for the foreseeable future is that she is determined to escape from the past.
The public may buy My Prerogative and her Greatest Hits album, or they may not. She doesn't care. She has no intention of promoting them in any way. "Britney Spears", pop and celeb phenomenon, is dying and she has placed a "Do Not Resuscitate" notice on her bed.
She spent most of 2003 trashing her image as a squeaky clean, morally upright, loveable innocent . By the time the Onyx Hotel tour was cancelled following her serious knee injury in June 2004, it was as if she felt she hadn't gone far enough. Now her beauty, glamour and showbiz gloss had to be trashed as well.
And so she has rarely taken much trouble to evade the increasingly savage attentions of the piranha-shoal of paparazzi who swarm constantly around her, nor has she in any way attempted to counter the constant stream of lies and inventions peddled by the tabloid press. As their bloodlust has reached a frenzy, fuelled by a growing sense that at last, after nearly 6 years of improbable survival, she has been fatally wounded, Britney Spears has simply looked them in the eye and put on another message T-shirt.
And so we come to the recent events in her life. The paparazzi pics of the last few weeks have shown us, not the grumpy, depressed-looking Britney of June and July, but a girl who is rarely seen without a smile on her face. Her interview with Cojo, her first live appearance on TV for a very long time and probably her last, was almost euphoric.
But for her fans, what she said - and what she didn't say - was deeply disturbing. She "had been doing way too much" before. What she valued in Kevin Federline, as much as his love, was the stability and calm he had brought to her life. She said not a word about anything she planned to do in relation to her career - because she has no plans.
"Being a young mom", she said, was her dream. And this is the dream which has now replaced the dream of stardom for this highly motivated, powerfully focussed and deeply determined young lady. Kevin Federline never had a chance. Britney wants a child, and she is going to have one. Her pregnancy will be announced within the next few weeks.
For her wedding, her hairstyle was simple, brunette and very un-showbiz. In an act of pure symbolism, she had stripped away the last vestiges of the glamour and unreality of the blonde bombshell Britney Spears and was ready to start again on a new life. "It feels like a beginning", she said later. "Britney Federline - I like that."
She didn't want her wedding to be a showbiz event. She didn't want it to be glamorous. Indeed, by the time of the after-wedding shindig, she had even removed her make-up. For the paparazzi she knew would be waiting, she wanted to look ordinary.
Since then, she has said that she's becoming a woman and things need to be different. That means more attention to her life, and less to her career. She plans to be a mother in 2005, when she's 23. Everything about her is inward-looking now. It's all about what feels right, and real, and honest for her. The impulsive decision to bring her wedding date forward was just something she wanted to do.
She isn't deliberately or wantonly neglecting her fans. She has simply cleansed herself of all that it means to be a pop star. She isn't intending to make a new CD, or tour, or do any one-off concerts or TV spots. She has fulfilled her contractual obligations to Jive and to Elizabeth Arden. The horizon looks clear. Soon, she believes, the media will lose interest in her, and she can proceed to be a young mom without a care in the world.
Her dreams now are of tucking her baby in at night, of singing sweet lullabies, of pushing her buggy down the main street, of talking to other young moms at the nursery school gates... Britney does not see herself as a typical showbiz mom, hardly ever there. She will work as hard at being a mom as she did at being a star.
Will she ever come back? That's what's on the knife-edge. She was meant to be starting a new movie soon, but, unless contracts have been signed already, that will be put on hold. She will now go straight into her new life as a housewife and expectant mother."
Whaddya think? That was my very first Britney article. And all of that seemed so obvious to me at the time. Dammit, I actually met someone who looked very like Britney in the woods during an LSD-induced trip and came back to report that SHE TOLD ME. Yet here we are in 2011 and she's STILL spending more time in recording studios than almost anybody, still making No.1 albums, still touring... You know what? I think I may have been wrong.
If Britney had really wanted to get the hell out of the game, her alleged post-SP post-partum breakdown period was the greatest opportunity and greatest excuse, yet she laid down the tracks for "Blackout" while pregnant with JJ, and the tracks for "Circus" while apparently so out of it that she couldn't look after herself. Music is a HUGE thing in her life. It's the rock she clings to when she needs to cling on to SOMETHING. It's delusional to claim that she's "over it".
The Autostraddle writer makes me sad. From everything she says, she feels too old and too self-conscious to be a fan now, and is hoping to provoke some messages of sympathy and solidarity from others in the same age group. Maybe that sentiment IS out there. Maybe it IS growing as people get older. I'm 30 and probably not quite as capable of intense devotion as I once was. But Britney is still my celebrity boo. I love her voice and I’m addicted to HER. She’s still the most endlessly loveable and fascinating celebrity out there.
People like GaGa, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Ke$ha are clearly major figures in showbiz, but their narratives are pretty simple. We observe them at work with respect and measure of enjoyment, but we observe them with a cold eye. They perform and it’s OK. We expect it to be, because there isn’t anything else. There isn't the conflict and paradox, the mystery and wondering, the mythical status that comes from having more fiction than fact attached to a name, as it is to Britney's. If I wrote one article about each of them, that would be enough.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The Britneyology "Femme Fatale" Review
My best friend was talking about “Femme Fatale” the other day. “Each song, individually, is FANTASTIC,” she said. “Overall they're all REALLY great. I do have a problem with the album though... it may be a small problem but... " We will return to that “but” later.
One thing is very obvious about Britney Spears’ new album “Femme Fatale” - its creators were obsessed by uniformity. Maybe they took careful note of the praise retrospectively heaped upon “Blackout” for being a genuine “album” rather than a bagful of assorted goodies like “Circus”.
Consistency here is achieved in various ways - one is the simple device of making no room whatsoever for ballads. Every track is for dancing. Another is to have a control freak knob-twiddler doubling as Executive Producer so nothing can interfere with his vision. And a third is to give every track - bar one - the same characteristic SOUND. And this turns out to be surprisingly important.
Where “Circus” employed 8 different mix engineers and “Blackout” employed 4, “Femme Fatale” uses the same one on 15 of the 16 tracks on the deluxe edition. Unsurprisingly, Will.He.Is had to do it his own way, but elsewhere, Romanian-born hit-assister Serban Ghenea reigns supreme. He’s Dr Luke’s regular mixer, but on “Femme Fatale” the tracks by other producers are also mixed by him.
Ghenea comments: "I love to blend the elements of different musical styles that may not normally exist together in order to create a new sound for the artist and make it their own. 'Artist A' shouldn't sound like 'Artist C' just because a producer or mixer has their own signature sound.” In other words, he’s aware of the danger that Britney, Katy and Ke$ha could end up as soundalikes. And, true to his word, blending of styles does take place, and the consistent approach he adopts makes some fairly disparate songs slot together quite seamlessly.
Whether Dr Luke was working by instinct or by some grand strategic plan, his vision for Britney seems to have been to configure her as an old-school artist working in a contemporary environment. The outworking of this is an album with all the up-to-date dance credentials and pop electronica in the world, but illuminated by nostalgic Euro-disco sounds and chord sequences, nods and tributes to half-remembered hits from the past, and lots of deja-vu moments. Many listeners may even hear echoes of earlier Britney songs and vocal treatments. And Ghenea holds it all together.
This isn’t a bad direction to take. For one thing, it means that “Femme Fatale” has a familiar, cuddly, embraceable charm that first engages you, then forever welcomes you back like an old and trusted friend. It also means songs with old-style melodic hooks instead of cheap gimmicks. Hooks like these can rescue a situation. For example, when “Seal It With A Kiss” begins, it seems like yawnworthy generic filler until you get to “...and seal it with a kiss, ooo ooo eee ooo!” and suddenly it’s elevated. Nostalgia uberfreaks will be pleased to know that a song called “Sealed With A Kiss” was a hit for Brian Hyland in 1962.
The thing that has annoyed me most about the other reviews I’ve read is that nobody wants to give any credit to Britney herself. It’s almost as if the ghastly realisation that she lip-synchs her live shows has mutated in the minds of some critics into “She can’t sing at all, even in the studio”. And this nonsense has rendered them completely deaf to something that’s really very clear - her vocals on this album are among her best on record, and are perfectly strong and assertive in their own right, as good as those of her peers, with no need for excuses. These aren’t the kinds of song that lend themselves to a Loletta Holloway-style gore-fest, so I don’t know what her critics were expecting.
As ever, Britney uses a different approach to singing each song, and it’s a fascinating study. Purring, snarling, laughing, wheedling, demanding, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes strong... she shows anyone with mature critical faculties that singing isn’t all about hollering out a song at the top of your lungs. Granted, though, there are a couple of occasions on which she resorts - perhaps unnecessarily, given the context - to her robotic voice, and that seems to be the only thing the bashers are able to hear.
The running order of the 12 main tracks is well-chosen to give relief when it’s most required from Ghenea’s rather insistent bass-drum thumping on the many 4-4 stompers, but you wouldn’t want to be without at least some of the bonus tracks. As on “Circus”, they include some egregious, fascinating, standalone delights - yet even the bonus tracks fall within the embrace of the album’s signature sound.
And that brings us back to the “but” that my friend mentioned. Here it comes: “But even though each song is awesome... as a WHOLE, the album feels a bit... hmm... repetitive? Even a little boring, and I never thought I’d say that about Britney”. I can see her point. A few too many songs with monotonous or duotonous beginnings? I wouldn’t go as far as "boring" myself. Most of the tracks are now my little friends, y’see.
What we did agree on was this: “Women of sophisticated aesthetic tastes such as us would always want some light-and-shade, and with Britney you usually get it.” We didn’t get it this time, which is a shame. “Femme Fatale” contains just about as much variety as anyone could imagine, given its self-imposed constraints. I prefer the warmth, friendliness and fun of “Femme Fatale” to the bleakness of “Blackout”. But ballads are the windows into Britney’s soul, and I miss them.
Turning now to the individual tracks:
Till The World Ends
Co-written by Ke$ha, this uplifting, energising 80’s-style Euro-disco anthem has a repetitive verse but a soaring, melodic chorus with a chant that could be a cross between the Crazy Frog and a football chant, and gallops along to a thundering finale. Britney sings like a woman who has just rediscovered an appetite for life: “I can’t take it take it take it take NO MORRRRRE!!!” The production is competent, but somehow lacks impulsion at key moments. So it may be that the song doesn’t quite maximise its potential impact.
Hold It Against Me
This, the dramatically successful lead single from the album, also has a repetitive verse, and again the melodic chorus elevates it to a higher plane. Britney’s voice is somewhat more constricted than on “TTWE” but strong nonetheless, and the track is driven along by a pounding, grinding, heavy bassline. There’s a much-discussed dubstep instrumental break that may not have been 100% authentic but at least introduced dubstep to a wider audience.
Inside Out
One of the outstanding songs on the album, musically and lyrically, and one of closest to being a ballad. My best friend says she’s going to borrow from this text for her next break up! An extremely imaginative bassline dips and soars, wobbles, pulsates and goes almost subsonic. The production has great authority, clarity and space, and Britney’s vocal is distinct, open-throated and assertive: “So come on!!!” I would love for this track to become a single some day.
I Wanna Go
The fourth track sounds a little weak at first, after the brilliance of the third, but this is one of those songs where the hook keeps everything alive: “Shame on me-eee! [whistling]” At “I wanna go all the way” the chorus takes flight and somehow the second rendering of the verse seems more melodic than the first. Britney’s vocal is best-described as “coquettish” and the production amounts to little more than some standard-issue thumping.
How I Roll
An inspired piece of musical lunacy from Bloodshy and his Swedish pals provides a sharp contrast to the pop-rock beats that precede it, and is instantly memorable. The uncredited male duettist on the choruses could be better, especially at ending his words. Britney, her voice gentle and melodic, sings “You can be my thug tonight” and hostile critics accuse her of singing “fuck”. The track is an odd compilation of short segments, and the part that begins “shimmy shimmy” seems to come out of nowhere. But, amazingly, it fits. The instrumental tracks are predominantly piano, bass and percussion, and the production is sparse yet expansive, and very laid-back.
(Drop Dead) Beautiful
A hammer-heavy rhythmic thump-fest with a minimal melody that sneaks up on you with an ectoplasmic lack of substance. Britney, perhaps revealing some difficulty in engaging with such a slight piece of writing, slips into her most robotic mode so that, when Sabi takes her place to rap about vegetables, the substitution goes unnoticed by many critics. Highlights are the peal of girlish laughter and electronic “uh-oh!”
Seal It With A Kiss
The melody-averse verse seems worryingly similar to much that has gone before, perhaps leading to my friend’s allegation of repetitiveness. But then the hook comes along and changes everything, as explained above. The vaguely organ-tinged instrumental break is so minimal as to be surreal, but brings a strange sense of eerie calm to the center of the song. Britney is kittenish, staying just on the right side of robotic.
Big Fat Bass
Another eccentric moment, this time from Will.I.Am. The bass isn’t particularly deep, and it doesn’t seem any bigger when we’re assured that it is, but it’s still pretty big, and bombastic, and domineering. The highly melodic verse section beginning “You see me down on the floor” sounds like something stolen from a 70s hit by Earth Wind and Fire, right down to the harmonies. For some reason, Britney appears at first to be singing “I can be your trouble” but later it’s definitely “treble”. There’s a weird tap-dance while the kick-drum is awaited, then finally the bass does go deep and many elements come together in a rollicking conclusion.
Trouble For Me
Big nostalgia. This track sets off sounding exactly like an out-take from a much, much earlier Age of Britney, perhaps around 1999. Her vocal sound is even more of a throwback. The song itself is great, with a tune that the milkman could be whistling after one hearing, but the production undersells it, feeling uninspired and dragged down further by the brutalist thumping rhythm sound.
Trip To Your Heart
Forget anything you may have heard about certain tracks on “Blackout”, this is a real Giorgio Moroder-inspired disco number, with a beautiful, flowing, old-school melody. It would have been a smash in 1977. The electro-thump is more muted and muffled here, and instead the song is poked and prodded along by stabbing, jagging synth figures to left and right, while Britney’s soft, sweet, tuneful vocal sits serenely in the middle. For me, this is one of the highlights of the album and - unsurprisingly - it’s down to Bloodshy and his chums again.
Gasoline
Another great melody, with intelligent lyrics full of gasoline metaphors like “My heart only runs on Supreme” - I wonder how many young pop kids know what that means! The tune demands a wide vocal range from Britney, and her high register “you’re setting me on fire” is gripping. Her “hey yeah” punctuations are a real deja-vu moment but it’s hard to say exactly where we heard it before.
Criminal
Dare I utter the word “Gaga-esque”? I can imagine her singing it. But what that sounds like in my head is very different with Britney’s voice. She sings it both beautifully and convincingly, with much yearning, vulnerability and anxious emotion. That is her outstanding gift among her peers. “Criminal” is an extremely well-written and structured song; it’s one of the slowest on the album and - not by coincidence where Britney’s involved - one of the best.
Up ‘n’ Down
Back to a bygone age again, this track is built around one of the most familiar and heavily-used chord sequences in all of the history of dance music. And, of course, there’s that nostalgic charm again - but blended with modern programmed studio electronica. The rhythm is springy and subtler than it seems, and highly danceable.
He About To Lose Me
Rodney Jerkins contributes a beautiful song that brings out the best in Britney. She seems, amazingly, to revert to her pre-Jive voice - natural, unaffected, sweet of tone, open-voiced, with lovely vibrato applied to selected lines. Again it’s one of the slower, more thoughtful songs, and one of the most emotional moments on the album. Wonderful!
Selfish
I don’t know how this one sneaked under the wire and got into such high-quality company. Despite its “boom boom baby” hook, it really isn’t much good. It drives along with an athletic muscularity, a heavily percussive kick drum and some nice electric guitar, but that’s all.
Don’t Keep Me Waiting
Rodney Jerkins again, with another one of the album’s great moments - this time, real traditional rock with a backbeat instead of the all-pervasive pogoing rhythm we’ve been cursed with since the Stones released “Satisfaction”. “What the HELL?? I’m standing outside...” Britney gets into the mood, and “hell” sounds such a funny word in her mouth. Towards the end, her “don’t keep me waiting” sounds as if it’s accompanied by a hound-dog barking (OK, I know it isn’t but a girl can dream...)! And the whole thing thunders unstoppably towards the end of the album. A fitting finale, and one that shouldn’t have been relegated to the bonus tracks!
One thing is very obvious about Britney Spears’ new album “Femme Fatale” - its creators were obsessed by uniformity. Maybe they took careful note of the praise retrospectively heaped upon “Blackout” for being a genuine “album” rather than a bagful of assorted goodies like “Circus”.
Consistency here is achieved in various ways - one is the simple device of making no room whatsoever for ballads. Every track is for dancing. Another is to have a control freak knob-twiddler doubling as Executive Producer so nothing can interfere with his vision. And a third is to give every track - bar one - the same characteristic SOUND. And this turns out to be surprisingly important.
Where “Circus” employed 8 different mix engineers and “Blackout” employed 4, “Femme Fatale” uses the same one on 15 of the 16 tracks on the deluxe edition. Unsurprisingly, Will.He.Is had to do it his own way, but elsewhere, Romanian-born hit-assister Serban Ghenea reigns supreme. He’s Dr Luke’s regular mixer, but on “Femme Fatale” the tracks by other producers are also mixed by him.
Ghenea comments: "I love to blend the elements of different musical styles that may not normally exist together in order to create a new sound for the artist and make it their own. 'Artist A' shouldn't sound like 'Artist C' just because a producer or mixer has their own signature sound.” In other words, he’s aware of the danger that Britney, Katy and Ke$ha could end up as soundalikes. And, true to his word, blending of styles does take place, and the consistent approach he adopts makes some fairly disparate songs slot together quite seamlessly.
Whether Dr Luke was working by instinct or by some grand strategic plan, his vision for Britney seems to have been to configure her as an old-school artist working in a contemporary environment. The outworking of this is an album with all the up-to-date dance credentials and pop electronica in the world, but illuminated by nostalgic Euro-disco sounds and chord sequences, nods and tributes to half-remembered hits from the past, and lots of deja-vu moments. Many listeners may even hear echoes of earlier Britney songs and vocal treatments. And Ghenea holds it all together.
This isn’t a bad direction to take. For one thing, it means that “Femme Fatale” has a familiar, cuddly, embraceable charm that first engages you, then forever welcomes you back like an old and trusted friend. It also means songs with old-style melodic hooks instead of cheap gimmicks. Hooks like these can rescue a situation. For example, when “Seal It With A Kiss” begins, it seems like yawnworthy generic filler until you get to “...and seal it with a kiss, ooo ooo eee ooo!” and suddenly it’s elevated. Nostalgia uberfreaks will be pleased to know that a song called “Sealed With A Kiss” was a hit for Brian Hyland in 1962.
The thing that has annoyed me most about the other reviews I’ve read is that nobody wants to give any credit to Britney herself. It’s almost as if the ghastly realisation that she lip-synchs her live shows has mutated in the minds of some critics into “She can’t sing at all, even in the studio”. And this nonsense has rendered them completely deaf to something that’s really very clear - her vocals on this album are among her best on record, and are perfectly strong and assertive in their own right, as good as those of her peers, with no need for excuses. These aren’t the kinds of song that lend themselves to a Loletta Holloway-style gore-fest, so I don’t know what her critics were expecting.
As ever, Britney uses a different approach to singing each song, and it’s a fascinating study. Purring, snarling, laughing, wheedling, demanding, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes strong... she shows anyone with mature critical faculties that singing isn’t all about hollering out a song at the top of your lungs. Granted, though, there are a couple of occasions on which she resorts - perhaps unnecessarily, given the context - to her robotic voice, and that seems to be the only thing the bashers are able to hear.
The running order of the 12 main tracks is well-chosen to give relief when it’s most required from Ghenea’s rather insistent bass-drum thumping on the many 4-4 stompers, but you wouldn’t want to be without at least some of the bonus tracks. As on “Circus”, they include some egregious, fascinating, standalone delights - yet even the bonus tracks fall within the embrace of the album’s signature sound.
And that brings us back to the “but” that my friend mentioned. Here it comes: “But even though each song is awesome... as a WHOLE, the album feels a bit... hmm... repetitive? Even a little boring, and I never thought I’d say that about Britney”. I can see her point. A few too many songs with monotonous or duotonous beginnings? I wouldn’t go as far as "boring" myself. Most of the tracks are now my little friends, y’see.
What we did agree on was this: “Women of sophisticated aesthetic tastes such as us would always want some light-and-shade, and with Britney you usually get it.” We didn’t get it this time, which is a shame. “Femme Fatale” contains just about as much variety as anyone could imagine, given its self-imposed constraints. I prefer the warmth, friendliness and fun of “Femme Fatale” to the bleakness of “Blackout”. But ballads are the windows into Britney’s soul, and I miss them.
Turning now to the individual tracks:
Till The World Ends
Co-written by Ke$ha, this uplifting, energising 80’s-style Euro-disco anthem has a repetitive verse but a soaring, melodic chorus with a chant that could be a cross between the Crazy Frog and a football chant, and gallops along to a thundering finale. Britney sings like a woman who has just rediscovered an appetite for life: “I can’t take it take it take it take NO MORRRRRE!!!” The production is competent, but somehow lacks impulsion at key moments. So it may be that the song doesn’t quite maximise its potential impact.
Hold It Against Me
This, the dramatically successful lead single from the album, also has a repetitive verse, and again the melodic chorus elevates it to a higher plane. Britney’s voice is somewhat more constricted than on “TTWE” but strong nonetheless, and the track is driven along by a pounding, grinding, heavy bassline. There’s a much-discussed dubstep instrumental break that may not have been 100% authentic but at least introduced dubstep to a wider audience.
Inside Out
One of the outstanding songs on the album, musically and lyrically, and one of closest to being a ballad. My best friend says she’s going to borrow from this text for her next break up! An extremely imaginative bassline dips and soars, wobbles, pulsates and goes almost subsonic. The production has great authority, clarity and space, and Britney’s vocal is distinct, open-throated and assertive: “So come on!!!” I would love for this track to become a single some day.
I Wanna Go
The fourth track sounds a little weak at first, after the brilliance of the third, but this is one of those songs where the hook keeps everything alive: “Shame on me-eee! [whistling]” At “I wanna go all the way” the chorus takes flight and somehow the second rendering of the verse seems more melodic than the first. Britney’s vocal is best-described as “coquettish” and the production amounts to little more than some standard-issue thumping.
How I Roll
An inspired piece of musical lunacy from Bloodshy and his Swedish pals provides a sharp contrast to the pop-rock beats that precede it, and is instantly memorable. The uncredited male duettist on the choruses could be better, especially at ending his words. Britney, her voice gentle and melodic, sings “You can be my thug tonight” and hostile critics accuse her of singing “fuck”. The track is an odd compilation of short segments, and the part that begins “shimmy shimmy” seems to come out of nowhere. But, amazingly, it fits. The instrumental tracks are predominantly piano, bass and percussion, and the production is sparse yet expansive, and very laid-back.
(Drop Dead) Beautiful
A hammer-heavy rhythmic thump-fest with a minimal melody that sneaks up on you with an ectoplasmic lack of substance. Britney, perhaps revealing some difficulty in engaging with such a slight piece of writing, slips into her most robotic mode so that, when Sabi takes her place to rap about vegetables, the substitution goes unnoticed by many critics. Highlights are the peal of girlish laughter and electronic “uh-oh!”
Seal It With A Kiss
The melody-averse verse seems worryingly similar to much that has gone before, perhaps leading to my friend’s allegation of repetitiveness. But then the hook comes along and changes everything, as explained above. The vaguely organ-tinged instrumental break is so minimal as to be surreal, but brings a strange sense of eerie calm to the center of the song. Britney is kittenish, staying just on the right side of robotic.
Big Fat Bass
Another eccentric moment, this time from Will.I.Am. The bass isn’t particularly deep, and it doesn’t seem any bigger when we’re assured that it is, but it’s still pretty big, and bombastic, and domineering. The highly melodic verse section beginning “You see me down on the floor” sounds like something stolen from a 70s hit by Earth Wind and Fire, right down to the harmonies. For some reason, Britney appears at first to be singing “I can be your trouble” but later it’s definitely “treble”. There’s a weird tap-dance while the kick-drum is awaited, then finally the bass does go deep and many elements come together in a rollicking conclusion.
Trouble For Me
Big nostalgia. This track sets off sounding exactly like an out-take from a much, much earlier Age of Britney, perhaps around 1999. Her vocal sound is even more of a throwback. The song itself is great, with a tune that the milkman could be whistling after one hearing, but the production undersells it, feeling uninspired and dragged down further by the brutalist thumping rhythm sound.
Trip To Your Heart
Forget anything you may have heard about certain tracks on “Blackout”, this is a real Giorgio Moroder-inspired disco number, with a beautiful, flowing, old-school melody. It would have been a smash in 1977. The electro-thump is more muted and muffled here, and instead the song is poked and prodded along by stabbing, jagging synth figures to left and right, while Britney’s soft, sweet, tuneful vocal sits serenely in the middle. For me, this is one of the highlights of the album and - unsurprisingly - it’s down to Bloodshy and his chums again.
Gasoline
Another great melody, with intelligent lyrics full of gasoline metaphors like “My heart only runs on Supreme” - I wonder how many young pop kids know what that means! The tune demands a wide vocal range from Britney, and her high register “you’re setting me on fire” is gripping. Her “hey yeah” punctuations are a real deja-vu moment but it’s hard to say exactly where we heard it before.
Criminal
Dare I utter the word “Gaga-esque”? I can imagine her singing it. But what that sounds like in my head is very different with Britney’s voice. She sings it both beautifully and convincingly, with much yearning, vulnerability and anxious emotion. That is her outstanding gift among her peers. “Criminal” is an extremely well-written and structured song; it’s one of the slowest on the album and - not by coincidence where Britney’s involved - one of the best.
Up ‘n’ Down
Back to a bygone age again, this track is built around one of the most familiar and heavily-used chord sequences in all of the history of dance music. And, of course, there’s that nostalgic charm again - but blended with modern programmed studio electronica. The rhythm is springy and subtler than it seems, and highly danceable.
He About To Lose Me
Rodney Jerkins contributes a beautiful song that brings out the best in Britney. She seems, amazingly, to revert to her pre-Jive voice - natural, unaffected, sweet of tone, open-voiced, with lovely vibrato applied to selected lines. Again it’s one of the slower, more thoughtful songs, and one of the most emotional moments on the album. Wonderful!
Selfish
I don’t know how this one sneaked under the wire and got into such high-quality company. Despite its “boom boom baby” hook, it really isn’t much good. It drives along with an athletic muscularity, a heavily percussive kick drum and some nice electric guitar, but that’s all.
Don’t Keep Me Waiting
Rodney Jerkins again, with another one of the album’s great moments - this time, real traditional rock with a backbeat instead of the all-pervasive pogoing rhythm we’ve been cursed with since the Stones released “Satisfaction”. “What the HELL?? I’m standing outside...” Britney gets into the mood, and “hell” sounds such a funny word in her mouth. Towards the end, her “don’t keep me waiting” sounds as if it’s accompanied by a hound-dog barking (OK, I know it isn’t but a girl can dream...)! And the whole thing thunders unstoppably towards the end of the album. A fitting finale, and one that shouldn’t have been relegated to the bonus tracks!
Sunday, March 27, 2011
An era of bad good reviews....
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.
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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