Member Since: 11/17/2011
Posts: 52,363
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Quote:
Katherine St Asaph: Here is a complete list of features from Britney Spears’ nearly 20-year career: “Me Against the Music” with Madonna, “I Got That (Boom Boom)” with the Ying Yang Twins (bet you forgot that one, huh?); “Drop Dead Beautiful” with Sabi, “Big Fat Bass” with will.i.am, various remixes with Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and Ke$ha, “It Should Be Easy” with will again, “Tik Tik Boom” with T.I.; “Chillin’ With You” with Jamie Lynn; this. If you put them on a graph, there’d be one mini-cluster around In the Zone, which came out after a commercial disappointment, that breakup, the first of those tabloids, a restaurant failure, a hiatus, a career Crossroads; then a lot more clusters post-conservatorship, post-lifeless blankness. A reasonably good indication of how far artists are from their imperial phase is how much ******** their releases are packed with, such as gimmicky music-tech tie-ins (like the bubblegum cross-promotional ads and email street-teaming on …Baby One More Time, or or this nonsense here: “On May 3, 2015, Spears announced she had teamed up with mobile-app-based transportation network company Uber to give fans an early listen of the song. For six hours between 3pm-9pm PDT on that day, requesters in Los Angeles were able to ride select Britney-themed vehicles called Bees while listening to the song and have a chance to win surprise gifts and tickets to her show, Britney: Piece of Me in Las Vegas.”), or superfluous features designed to goose viewcounts or boost careers. It’s hard not to feel bad for Britney being used like a railroad switch to stop the derailing of Iggy, even if the song is ass. Weirdly, the instrumental is GREAT, the Invisible Men transcending their “Fancy” hackwork by adding more synth cowbell and chorus twinkles; it harkens back to the unnecessarily, gloriously elaborate pop playgrounds of David Frank, or for that matter Blackout and Femme Fatale. And buried on the verses is some pretty ace girl-group call and response, which makes sense when you consider this was written by and probably for Little Mix. But to get to either you’ve got to pick through tuneless harmonies, shoehorned Australia callouts, disastrous lyrics (“they’re buzzing around me like flies”?) and overly au courant pop-misandry, the most chemistry-free big-up from rapper to singer in recent memory, and Iggy Azalea slipping out of accent at the beginning of her verse and hiding it beneath production fog. In 2013 no one on Britney’s team had any idea what her career should be, and now in 2015 they have even less; forget Rolling Stone, the true tragedy of Britney Spears is that the once-unarguable pop princess has become the goose girl.
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