Member Since: 3/13/2011
Posts: 4,742
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I made my review of Femme Fatale if anyone wants to read. I know it's late but here it goes:
Quote:
Rolling Stone certainly got it right when they said Britney is pop music's stealth avant-gardist, the vision she has tells the barometer of where the trends in pop music are heading. She sees them and makes them a prominent part of her work. As Digital Spy said most of pop music's trends are written along her body of work and a lot of Britney's material is a precursor for what will be popular in the future.
One of the biggest fears with Dr. Luke producing the record was that we were going to end up with a Hard Candy/Teenage Dream situation where Madonna and Katy were drowned out by the overriding producers and we would see Britney become a lobotomized puppet for Luke and co. I can say firmly that this didn't happen even if it did yield work that is less than 100% Britney in the forms of Till The World Ends (Ke$ha) and Big Fat Bass (Black Eyed Peas).
The album is extremely effective at delivering 57 kinds of dance pop music and hits the vein of what every pop album should be. It's addictive and makes you want to listen to the album all the way through without skipping tracks and there are various elements that keep you wanting to listen through out as not to miss out on some trippy-sonic adventure.
As albums goes it's incredibly cohesive and there are no stiff drop offs in terms of quality. It's alarmingly consistent. There are the easy radio hits (I Wanna Go, Inside Out, Till The World Ends and Big Fat Bass), there are the quirky cute album tracks that belie fun, sex and love (How I Roll, Trip To Your Heart, Gasoline and Drop Dead Beautiful). Lastly there are the artistic statements that show Britney is deeper than the average pop starlet by smacking in odd influences into her productions (Hold It Against Me, Inside Out, Criminal and Seal It With A Kiss).
I would say the only thing that takes away from the album would be the lack of personal connection that could have helped sell the album as more Britney. But having her sing empty ballads that she doesn't feel would have only degraded the quality of the work.
Yes it seems Britney is more hit-machine than human these days and even the veneer of her being the quintessential girl next door type fades with each outing. That lovable girl may not be here anymore which means she is finally transitioning and taking off the vestiges of youth which was hinted with Zone and Blackout, regressed with in Circus and now finally seems to be thrown to the way side on Fatale.
The truth is we may never see the real Britney ever again. Or that part of her has changed forever and with that change we have a sheltered Britney no one really knows because she is so heavily guarded. Her sexy looks are no longer drenched in come hither promises but now show a more darker challenge. The idea that there may be more wisdom there than portrayed is both invigorating and quite troubling for the once sweetheart of America. The Britney figure is not in her music and it's not given to the public, this lack of personal connection creates an archetype that is eerily cooler than she ever has been before. The interesting tidbit is that she is entirely game for playing it up to the very hilt.
This coldness comes off as mechanical with Britney which helps/hurts (whichever you personally prefer) the album. The album's use of vocal modification help it as the flip side to Blackout, if Blackout was raw and chaotic this album is scientifically calculated and controlled. As if Britney and her cohorts went into a lab and concocted the perfect hits to fill out her parts and armor that have culminated in Britney 2011. In a way it seems as if they are completely relaunching Britney to set her up in this new decade and things need to change and need maintenance for longevity.
Even if you didn't like Blackout there was a sense that the music was channeling Britney's life at the time. The towering beats and deconstructive structures of the urban dance record linked heavily with Britney's distressed personal life and the resulting highs and more devastating lows. It gave the record a kind of artistic transcendence that is hard to emulate or fabricate thus it's largely seen as her magnum opus. Fatale isn't that emotionally based at all. Everything seems perfectly placed right down to Britney's euphemisms, puns and elocution. Everything is as prim and proper as a Van De Kamp setting on Desperate Housewives and everything is as it should be in it's natural place.
If Blackout's vocal processing was used to show Britney twisted, splintered and stretched to her breaking point it is now used to polish and wax over the production to give it a nice pearly sheen to make sure everything is perfect. There is no mess here. Even the grime in Hold It Against Me and Seal It With A Kiss, is solely used to highlight the sophistication of the production.
At the same time it's not as desperate nor is it as pandering as Circus was. With her sixth effort there were false pretenses and heavy handed attempts to recreate old Britney with the sugary ballads and kind of compilation of her latest hits and producers to say that the Britney of 2001 was back with some Blackout sparsely parceled out for those who liked it. With Fatale there is no "back to your regularly scheduled programming here". Instead this is a metamorphism of Britney in her fully realized dominatrix-cyborg self. She runs everything around her and your only going to get as close as she lets you. She is going to make you sweat in as many ways as possible but there will be no pillow talk. Get in, get off, get out. The aggressive commander is here to stay in all her robotic enhanced glory that was foreshadowed in Womanizer and Circus.
Conclusion: Femme Fatale works as a manifesto of everything Britney can and does offer to the pop world. All of her vocal tics are here. All of her character is here. All of her responses, vocal coloration are authentic enough to feign an interest. There are times when she even acts the part rather well. The bliss filled giggle in I Wanna Go is one of them. But there is also a mechanical overriding theme which is what makes it all so very fascinating. The fact that Britney is so practiced at it even makes it more compelling to contemplate.
In many ways it's the perfect pop album because it is filled with the superficial and plays on all the subtitles that make it fascinatingly human. Fatale is an album that aims to make the artificial human and transform blood into steel. It's a very cerebral composition and in many ways it may be Britney's smartest album because it shows the birth of another dichotomy that aims at the heart of the industry in this post-Gaga world. What is real and what is fabrication? Britney is done playing good girl/bad girl and is now asking another question. The answer as it always is with Britney is that she is both. She is both the sex-powered cyborg and the worn down post-traumatic survivor we all know she is. You'll have to look deeper than the surface though because she won't show you that, hiding it is half the fun.
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oh god urgh i ddnt have to find out. pause it in there. u would see a girl with weird wig.
in the second one she looks like her in fact
