Musical Spears
With her Circus tour arriving in Brisbane next month, Guy Blackman examines that often overlooked aspect of Britney Spears' life - her music.
Everyone knows the trashy Britney Spears. Everyone knows the head-shaving, wonky MTV-dancing, crotch-flashing, baby-driving Britney.
Everyone knows the Britney who got married for 55 Las Vegas hours, then served cheeseburgers at her next wedding, to backing dancer Kevin Federline. Living as we do in this celebrity-obsessed world, its next to impossible not to know the trashy Britney.
But how many people know the musical Britney Spears? The chart-topping, boundary-pushing, recordbreaking Britney? Amid all the messy tabloid melodrama, its easy to forget the reason anyone cared about her in the first place. The title of Spears latest album and the tour that reaches Brisbane for three shows at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre next month, Circus, tackles the perception of Britney as a sideshow freak, the Incredible Messed Up Lady, rather than what she really is - a singer, a performer, even a songwriter of sorts.
And while no one would argue that Spears is some kind of pioneering pop auteur, there's still a lot to like about her back catalogue. During her world-conquering peak, she was just about as cutting-edge as you could get in the world of global pop superstardom. Spears didn't just work with big names, she gave big names their names, and maintained her high currency in the world's most fickle industry for years, when most aspiring starlets are lucky to manage months.
Even in the past few downwardly spiralling years, there have been enough gems dotted through Circus and its predecessor Blackout to make them difficult to disregard.
And, as we've seen with everyone from Mariah Carey to Whitney Houston, divas certainly die hard - for every breakdown there is an eventual comeback. Spears is on the rise again, with Circus her biggest album since her 1999 debut. What's more, new track 3, from her soon-to-be-released compilation The Singles Collection, is the first non-American Idol single to debut at the top of the US charts in 11 years.
So leaving the eye-grabbing headlines aside, what to make of the music - yes, the actual music - of Ms Britney Jean Spears?
Right from the start, the teenage Britney had a toughness, an edge to her, that belied her tender years and her Mickey Mouse Club background. On the cover of first single ...Baby One More Time, she looks virginal and knowing, like a chubbier-cheeked Jane Birkin or a Lolita mere minutes away from blooming into womanhood.
Likewise in the video, she starts off as an innocent schoolgirl, but quickly raunches up her uniform with a midriff-baring knot in the shirt. The juxtaposition of sex and innocence is standard teen pop fare, but the song itself sends out no such mixed messages. There's nothing demure about Spears singing "When I'm not with you I lose my mind, give me a sign, hit me baby one more time". In fact, the hard-edged song was written with male singers in mind, originally offered by Swedish producer Max Martin to his star vehicles, the Backstreet Boys. They knocked it back, but just like Nancy Sinatra with These Boots Are Made For Walking, Spears tipped a male-oriented song on its head and made pop history. The single reached No. 1 in every country in which it charted.
It's the boy-band sound, as subverted by a 17-year-old girl singer, that gives the song its distinctive appeal. The smooth, insistent beats and moody key changes sound familiar, but having a pretty girl biting out the words (instead of a group of pretty boys) creates a frisson of excitement that takes the song somewhere entirely new.
The key to this early success, of course, is Spears pairing with Martin. Without him, she would never have become the global superstar she is today, but Martin also gained from Spears success. Before she came along, he was just starting to make his mark on the world, a 25-year-old Nordic wunderkind working primarily with boy bands including NSYNC, 5ive and Backstreet Boys. It was ...Baby One More Time that transformed Martin from just another young up-and-comer into an international uber-producer to the stars.
Since then, Martin has enjoyed a virtually endless behind-the-scenes chart reign, which he owes largely to Spears. She eased his transition from the boy band era into this centurys Pop Diva decade, during which he has produced and co-written for everyone from Kelly Clarkson, Pink and Celine Dion, to our very own Veronicas.
Martin and Spears worked their magic again in 2000 with the appropriately titled Oops!...I Did It Again, another album named after its lead single that sold in outlandish quantities around the world. The single is essentially a harder-edged copy of ...Baby One More Time, with the masochism of the earlier record flipped into a sadistic sneer. Despite her nasal twang, and a memorably silly video involving Martian exploration and a red vinyl bodysuit, when Spears declares "I'm not that innocent", she's totally believable.
Live performances around this time proved her point. Despite her pledge to remain chaste until marriage to then boyfriend (and fellow former Mouseketeer) Justin Timberlake, on stage Spears was anything but virginal.
She may not have had the moves of Beyonce or the vocal chops of Christina Aguilera, but she made up for it with a flair for theatrics and a willingness to go places most teenage pop stars wouldnt dare. Her shock flesh-toned body suit at the MTV Awards in 2000 predates Lady Gaga by almost a decade, while Spears was tumbling through the air on bungee ropes years before Pink even staged her first concert tour.
This is why the frequent lip-synching scandals always slide off Spears without leaving a mark - her fans don't go to her shows expecting technical displays of vocal ability; they want great pop songs and a show to remember.
Strangely enough, Spears debuted as a songwriter on Oops with the introspective Dear Diary, all doeeyed innocence and puppy love. She then bumped the songwriting count up to five on 2001's Britney, and moved to distance herself even further from her teen pop image with an album more influenced by hip hop and R&B.
Although some tracks were still produced by Martin, Spears branched out to work with other producers, and kick-started the career of now famous duo the Neptunes much in the way she did with Martin. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo had been producing urban artists since 1994, developing a cult following for their work with the likes of Kelis, Busta Rhymes and their own N.E.R.D. project, but really arrived when they created the killer singles Slave 4 U and Boys for a bona fide world-conquering pop star. Slave 4 U played with the same S&M tropes of her earlier hits, but with a much edgier, more minimal and modern sound, and gave the Neptunes their first US No. 1 hit.
This period is the recognised apex of Spears career, the time when Forbes magazine rated her the most powerful celebrity in the world, with estimated annual earnings of more than $39.2 million. Its also known as the Madonna-kissing time, when the Material Girl was so threatened by the magnificence of her younger competitor that she attempted to syphon off some Britney life-force with a controversial, vampiric kiss at 2003's MTV Awards.
Although Madonna also made out with Aguilera during the performance, it was a sign of Spears' supremacy that no one seemed to notice.
Musically, however, the best was yet to come. In her quest for creative liberation, Spears finally severed ties with Martin on her fourth album In The Zone, although she didn't have to look far to find her next collaborators.
She created Toxic, her most ambitious and artistically successful single to date, with another Swedish production team, duo Bloodshy & Avant.
The twangy western guitar licks, Bollywood strings and stop-start production made for the most exploratory pop song on commercial radio in 2004, but also the catchiest.
The cracks were also beginning to appear, however, as made obvious by the video to ballad Everytime, in which a paparazzi-persecuted Spears almost drowns in the bath.
Personally and professionally, everything began to head downhill for Spears, starting with her brief marriage to childhood buddy Jason Alexander in January 2004.
The drunken misadventure finally dispelled the illusion of Spears as some kind of superhuman pop robot. It made her seem all too human, and suddenly all her foibles and frailties came tumbling out. First Alexander, then KFed, then divorce, rehab, head-shaving, hit-and-run accidents, and more rehab, all fuelled by a gleeful and ghoulish media. More than five ears later, Spears is only now returning to some fragile semblance of normality.
But even during her most troubled period, there are musical gems to be savoured. 2007's Blackout has Gimme More, as made famous by her shambolic MTV performance, but the real gem is Piece of Me, which details all the hounding and harassment that Spears deals with every day. It's Spears' first public response to the hysteria surrounding her, and works wonderfully to personalise her experience, making it clear that there is a real woman under all the layers of scrutiny.
Then there are tracks like Womanizer and If You Seek Amy from last year's Circus, which are as catchy and engaging as anything she's ever done, just a lot more grown-up and shocking. If Spears still felt the need to prove she's no innocent teen queen, then the hardly subtle wordplay of If You Seek Amy(all of the boys and all of the girls are begging to) is just as effective as any panty-less car exit or bitter custody battle.
Of course, it has to be said that every Spears album is basically a few great songs, padded out by cheesy filler. She may have released some of the catchiest, most irresistible singles in recent pop history, but not many people would choose to sit down and listen to a whole album.
The thing about Spears, though, is that her biggest songs, no matter how committee-created or impossibly polished, have always been convincing because of her delivery, her commitment and her presence. For her mostly teenage fans, Spears expresses perfectly the conflicting urges of adolescence, the tension between chastity and sexual experience, between hedonism and responsibility, between confidence and vulnerability. And unlike the somewhat aloof Beyonce, Spears' trials and tribulations just make her seem all the more human and believable.
Even before her breakdown, Spears did not seem like a docile pop puppet; she seemed real and daring. But since all the tabloid dementia, she has become someone listeners feel they can reach out and touch.
Britney by the numbers
Britney Spears is one of the best-selling female artists in the world, with an estimated 83 million records sold worldwide. Shes the eighth best-selling female artist of all time in the US, and the best-selling female artist in the US this decade.
Spears is the only woman to have her first four albums debut at No. 1 on the US Billboard charts. Fifth album Blackout only managed a No. 2 debut, but sixth and most recent effort Circus landed at the top spot again.
Despite her recent dramas, Spears was back in the Forbes magazine's Celebrity 100 again this year, as the 13th most powerful celebrity in the US, and the second most powerful young celebrity. She is also the only person under 30 to have topped the list, in 2002.
Baby One More Time was the UK's best selling single in 1999, selling a then record 460,000 copies in its first week. It is the UK's 25th biggest single of all time.
In addition to her music sales, Spears has earned a reported $370 million from ads and endorsement deals. Some of the products to carry her name include a series of perfumes from Elizabeth Arden, a video game called Britney's Dance Beat and a singing Britney Spears doll.
brisbanetimes.com.au
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