Britney Spears is the spectre that haunts the future of Miley Cyrus. Child star turned sexy pop ingénue, the full force of 21st century global stardom brought Spears paparazzi invasions, romantic disasters, stints in rehab, mental health concerns and endless comebacks. Miley, be warned: this is where twerking could lead.
The publicity pitch for 31-year-old Spears’s eighth album, Britney Jean, is that it is her “most personal” to date. The use of her middle name in the title implies familial intimacy, the private self behind the public icon. It would presumably be asking too much to detect either irony or satire in the decision to launch this campaign with a highly effective, stripped-down electro club banger called Work Bitch, in which young women are commanded (in a peculiar fake English accent) to put some serious effort in if they want to “sip Martinis” in “a hot bikini”. Credits reveal that this prostitution anthem involved contributions from six writers, four of whom are male.
The opening tracks are polished until they gleam, dazzling with the flash of high-end digital pop. They encompass the sci-fi techno of (Madonna producer) William Orbit and the fizzy, melodic electropop of the ubiquitous will.i.am, while dinky retro synths can be found on the charming Perfume. Even in adulthood, Spears’s voice remains that of a pouty child, though it is often hard to detect any human personality beneath the layers of Auto-Tune. The lyrics are banal to the point of indifference, and with the tracks sequenced (as mainstream pop collections usually are) to put big hitters first, there is a sense of declining returns as events progress.
This album continues the striptease of Britney’s career. But behind each discarded veil there is just another veil, an insubstantial gauze masking teams of (presumably unphotogenic) producers, writers, stylists and sloganeers. Britney is their glitterball, endlessly spinning in a hall of mirrors. Her only function is to keep spinning, but it only works if the audience is dazzled enough to spin with her.
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