Music Box | Britney Spears

Mike Newmark Columnist

Britney Spears
Blackout
[Jive]

A tabloid basically serves two functions: one, to give people something to gawk at while they’re in line at the supermarket, and two, to highlight and amplify everything negative about the celebrities du jour until they seem almost sub-human. Certainly, the tabloids have not been kind to Britney Spears, though she’s been serving as her own tabloid since breaking up with Justin Timberlake in 2002. Spears’ life is an overwhelming mix of unfathomable superstardom and personal nuclear meltdowns that play right into the National Enquirer’s unapologetic hands.

Yet it’s difficult to judge whether her actions are, in fact, reactions to continual tabloid bombardment or are due to something else for which she should be held more personally responsible. In the video of her umbrella attack on a paparazzi SUV, there is an ever-so-brief moment when the cameras assault her and you can see the agony on her face as she sits in the car, head shaved, and takes it. It takes a moment like that to realize what separates Britney Spears from Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake and every single Backstreet Boy: She’s breakable.

Now that her personal life is hitting record lows (drug rehabilitation, losing custody of her children, a hit-and-run with a possible jail sentence), it’s as good a time as any to release Blackout, a “comeback album” of sorts that aims to combat all of the negative attention she’s received in the last couple of years. But perhaps to avoid sleeping with the enemy, it didn’t arrive with the media blitz that typically accompanies a Britney Spears record. No major promotions, no interviews, no performances save for her stumbling through a lip-synched rendition of lead single “Gimme More” at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards: Blackout just sort of appeared, garish cover and all. The space usually reserved for a “thank you” section in the CD booklet is replaced with an image of crumpled tabloid articles lying on the floor. Blackout’s second track, “Piece of Me,” is essentially one long threat to the press, with its verse of “I’m Mrs. ‘You Want a Piece of Me?’ / Trying and pissing me off / Well get in line with the paparazzi who’s flipping me off / Hoping I’ll resort to starting havoc / And end up settling in court / Now are you sure you want a piece of me?” It’s a remarkably cold-blooded affair.

A fun game played by tabloids this year was “Who Can Make Britney Spears Look the Most Unattractive?” in which they would play up her shaved head, her new motherhood and the weight she gained. Spears (or whoever was really behind the controls) attempts to squash this by conceiving most of Blackout as a batch of sex jams that pits her as a titillating club goddess sent down to Earth to show a man how it’s done. You don’t have to look too far for double-entendres. Check “Freakshow,” where Spears suggests that she and her partner “Make it a freakshow, freakshow / We can give ’em a peepshow, peepshow,” or “Hot as Ice,” with its boasts of “I’m just a girl with the ability to drive a man crazy / Make him call me mama / Make him my new baby.” She’s not Shakespeare; she rhymes “tingle” with “mingle” and doesn’t rise above genre clichés into the realm of, say, clever puns or wicked put-downs. But nobody ever said that Britney wasn’t stupid.

As sex jams go, though, they’re of surprisingly high quality, bathing Spears in the kind of calculated raunch that Timbaland and The Neptunes popularized in the 2000s. The beats slam, dart and thump; the synth melodies are grimy and buzzy like they’re being squeezed through a giant perforated sheet with powerful force. (The aforementioned line in “Freakshow” would not have worked without that fat bass bulging at the very bottom of the track.)

What makes Blackout an enjoyable listen is the production; at times, it seems as though the smattering of producers made a better album than Britney deserves or is capable of delivering on her own merits. “Gimme More,” produced by Timbaland protégé Danja (who also helmed Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” last year), is flat-out addictive. During the chorus, Britney does her best M.I.A. impression while Danja screws with her voice to the point of unrecognizability, and something inexplicable is making you say “gimme more” as she’s saying it to you. “Radar” sports that unmistakable shuffling beat from Kompakt “schaffel” techno that sets it immediately apart, in a wonderful way.

Through it all, Spears herself is curiously missing in action—a robot to be tinkered with at a given producer’s will. The album’s credits read like a list of ingredients in a Little Debbie snack cake: recorded and mixed at a dozen different locations and featuring more guests than I care to count, without a Britney anywhere. Most of what we hear of her is nicely manipulated for maximum sexual effect, but her voice is still thin and reedy when it’s unimpeded, which ironically causes the music to sound better by contrast. Blackout is exponentially richer than 2003’s limp In the Zone, yet it succeeds on the basis of wise studio decisions that Spears in all likelihood had nothing to do with. And that’s ultimately what keeps it from being the triumphant comeback it sets out to be: This isn’t Britney’s album, but everyone else’s. For Spears to prove to us that she’s transcended the ugly milieu that still hovers around her, she’ll have to release something that she can truly call her own.