Member Since: 8/18/2013
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NY Times: Spears Promises Pleasure, but Offers Nothing
Quote:
Britney Spears strives mightily to be one-dimensional on “Glory,” her ninth studio album. But Ms. Spears has plenty of back story; she’s a 34-year-old working mother, the headliner in her own Las Vegas spectacle and a performer who has weathered teenage fame, backlash, public meltdowns and wave after wave of tabloid headlines. “Glory,” her first album since 2013, is her latest attempt to reclaim her place on the pop charts, which are now crowded with younger performers who have studied her the way Ms. Spears studied Madonna. Her latest strategy is relentless and unambiguous: Stick to sexy.
Ms. Spears’s albums in the 2000s, like “Blackout” and “Femme Fatale,” showed that she and her advisers know something about the dynamics of celebrity and media, as she toyed with provocation and selective revelation. Hits like “I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Toxic” teased at the power dynamics of lust and romance. But “Glory” has shallower aims; it’s all come-ons and promises of pleasure, as if the only intimacies that matter are physical ones. “To know each other better/Put your love all over me,” she coos in “Invitation,” the breathy, Janet Jackson-meets-Philip Glass enticement that opens the album.
For songwriting and production, Ms. Spears drew from the talent pool that also supplies material for her pop peers and rivals, among them Selena Gomez, Nick Jonas, Fifth Harmony, Demi Lovato and, yes, Madonna. Her vocal producer, Mischke, has a résumé stretching from Michael Jackson and the Spice Girls to Gwen Stefani.
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