Britney Spears

Put simply, this album is fantastic. Stripped of context and circumstance, Blackout delivers what should be a career-defining collection for Britney: a futuristic fusion of Euro dance beats and heavy hip-hop synths, expertly blended to thrill not only on first listen, but with every repeat play. There are songs for humming, songs for strutting and songs that demand nothing less than a dirty dancefloor grind, but all of them are world-class constructions.

From the opening low swoop of "Gimme More" to the closing slow-jam lament in "Why Should I Be Sad?" the album is a writing/production master class, corralling contributions from Bloodshy, Pharrell, Kara DioGuardi and Danja into a vividly coherent aural vision. The jagged marching drumbeat of "Toy Soldiers" may be a world away from the slow electro swoon of "Heaven on Earth," but the texture of each song is built to the same, full conclusion—a rarity for pop albums that are so often simply the sum of several different singles.

For those who want their records to be a statement of artistry—an authentic expression from the name on the label—Blackout will clearly disappoint. Britney herself is largely superfluous to the greatness of this album: a thin, vo-coded contributor who can deliver syrup-sweetness and a lustful growl, but is easily outshone on the tabloid-fodder "Piece of Me" by an uncredited, attitude-packed backing vocal from Swedish maverick Robyn.

The performance package that gave us feisty schoolgirl Britney, or snake-loving "Slave 4 U" Britney has clearly come unraveled, but whether this detracts from Blackout is a matter of personal taste. Her 15-year old self was hardly any more active in the process than she is now, but casting off the persona of stage-managed perfection and showing the clear irrelevance of the individual singer to the pop machine, this may be Britney's most honest album yet.

—Abby McDonald
11.09.07

Public image is vital to pop stars, but few stars have been so inextricably tied to their image as Britney Spears. Think back to "...Baby One More Time" -- it has an indelible hook but what leaps to mind is not the sound of the single, but how Britney looked in the video as she pouted and preened in a schoolgirls' uniform, an image as iconic as Madonna's exposed navel. Every one of Britney's hits had an accompanying image, as she relied on her carefully sculpted sexpot-next-door persona as much as she did on her records, but what happens when the image turns sour, as it certainly did for Britney in the years following the release of In the Zone? When that album hit the stores in 2003, Britney had yet to marry, had yet to give birth, had yet to even meet professional layabout Kevin Federline -- she had yet to trash her girl-next-door fantasy by turning into white trash. Some blamed Federline for her rapid downward spiral, but she continued to descend after splitting with K-Fed in the fall of 2006, as each month brought a new tabloid sensation from Britney, a situation that became all the more alarming when contrasted to how tightly controlled her public image used to be. The shift in her persona came into sharp relief at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, as she sleepwalked through a disastrous lip-synch of her comeback single "Gimme More," a disaster by any measure, but when it was compared to such previous meticulously staged VMA appearances as her make-out with Madonna in 2003, it made Britney seem like a lost cause and fallen star.

All this toil and turmoil set the stage for her 2007 comeback Blackout to be a flat-out train wreck, which it decidedly is not -- but that doesn't mean it's a triumph, either. Blackout is an easy album to overpraise based on the lowered expectations Britney's behavior has set for her audience, as none of her antics suggested that she'd be able to deliver something coherent and entertaining, two things that Blackout is. As an album, it holds together better than any of her other records, echoing the sleek club-centric feel of In the Zone but it's heavier on hedonism than its predecessor, stripped of any ballads or sensitivity, and just reveling in dirty good times. So Blackout acts as a soundtrack for Britney's hazy, drunken days, reflecting the excess that's splashed all over the tabloids, but it has a coherence that the public Britney lacks. This may initially seem like an odd dissociation but, in a way, it makes sense: how responsible is Britney for her music, anyway? At the peak of her popularity, she never seemed to be dictating the direction of her music, so it only stands to reason that when her personal life has gotten too hectic, she's simply decided to let the professional producers create their tracks and then she'll just drop in the vocals at her convenience. Even the one song that plays like autobiography -- "Piece of Me," where she calls herself "Miss American dream since I was 17" and "I'm miss bad media karma/another day another drama," complaining "they stick all the pictures of my derriere in the magazines," as if she wasn't posing provocatively for Rolling Stone as soon as "Baby" broke big -- was outsourced to "Toxic" producer/writers Bloodshy & Avant, who try desperately to craft a defiant anthem for this tabloid fixture, as she couldn't be bothered to write one on her own. Instead, she busies herself with writing the album's two strip-club anthems, "Freakshow" and the brilliantly titled "Get Naked (I Got a Plan)" (surely the successor to such trash-classics as Soundmaster T's "2 Much Booty (In Da Pants)" and Samantha Fox's timeless pair of "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)" and "(Hurt Me! Hurt Me!) But the Pants Stay On"). Every piece of gossip in the four years separating In the Zone and Blackout suggests that her head is in the clubs, yet it's still a bit disarming to realize that this is all that she has to say.

Britney may not have much on her mind but at least s