Member Since: 10/1/2011
Posts: 53,790
|
Quote:
While there was reason to be skeptical—Spears's most candid moments, like comeback documentary For the Record, are never really that candid—there was also reason to welcome the news. 2007's Blackout and 2011's Femme Fatale, among her career’s best, were innovative, beat-heavy pop records that delivered cutting-edge EDM sounds and dabbled in dubstep before any of her peers did. But critics also noted that Spears often sounded robotically detached—a result of heavy vocal processing and Spears phoning it in—and there's only so many times she can sing about sexy encounters in the club before tedium ensues, on top of it becoming blatant fiction.
But now that Britney Jean is here, it's clear that a “personal” Spears album isn't at all what fans really want—or where she succeeds. It’s her most disappointing release yet, a snoozefest of shallow mid-tempos and limp club tracks that chase trends rather than invent them. And the glimpses into Britney Jean Spears, the artist, are, frankly, neither interesting nor informative.
There’s never been much evidence that Spears has much to offer as a songwriter. The last time she had as many writing credits as she does on Britney Jean was a decade ago on In the Zone, but for every “Everytime”—Spears’s haunting, piano-ballad response to Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River”—there’s “Someday (I Will Understand),” her forgettable pregnancy prophecy. (As we’ve also learned from Beyoncé, a pop performers having a songwriting credit doesn't necessarily mean much.)
It's fitting that Spears was a one-season judge on singing competition The X Factor, because the title of the show is really the only way to explain the career longevity she's had at this point. (This mild album, and the 32-year-old’s impending Vegas residency suggest she may be winding down.) Even when she's half-heartedly going through the motions of her choreography or lip-syncing in “live” performances, the Spears fandom often operates on the assumption there's something she's holding back, and it clings furiously to evidence that supports this notion.
But as Britney Jean unfortunately suggests, a solid and successful Spears album isn’t one where fans get “the real Britney.” It’s one where she sounds just human enough and just invested in her work enough to let fans project their fantasies of whatever “the real Britney” is: someone still hungry for creative control and agency, someone whose vocal idiosyncrasies bring out the best in producers, someone who isn’t a total zombie. Britney Jean forces fans to confront the fact that the truth—her truth—is probably a disappointment.
https://news.google.com/news/url?sa=...Usi9N4ffgAeMYg
|
And that's all there is to it.
|
|
|
|
