Member Since: 3/30/2009
Posts: 79,408
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- Four years after her last record, Britney Spears returned to the music industry on October 26, 2007, with an album recorded throughout 2006 and 2007, "blacking out negativity and embracing life fully." The album features tracks from the likes of Pharrell Williams and Bloodshy & Avant, who contribute "Piece Of Me," a self-aware commentary on the negative press surrounding her, alongside new collaborators, Danja, Keri Hilson, the Clutch and Nicole Morier.
- Britney returned out of the blue with the Danja-produced, "Gimme More," on September 9, 2007. The song was well-received at radio across the world, becoming the most added song and "greatest gainer" on Mainstream Top 40 radio in the US two weeks running, and peaked at #68 on airplay alone on the Billboard Hot 100, before rising to #3 and becoming her second biggest single to date. The single has become one of Britney's defining hits, hittng #1 worldwide.
- The critically acclaimed "Piece Of Me" was released on November 27, 2007, scoring her another worldwide top 5 single. The Bloodshy & Avant production features backing vocals from Robyn, with Britney, the "American dream since I was 17," taunting the press. The video, directed by Wayne Isham, won three VMAs later that year.
- "Break The Ice" was one of the first songs to leak from the "Blackout" demo disc, with a completely different ending to the finished album version. The Danja production was one of the critical highlights of the album, with an animated video, directed by Robert Hales, featuring a superhero version of Britney.
- Britney's fourth single from "Circus" was planned as the fourth single from "Blackout," originally due for release in mid-2008. Promotional CDs were recalled, with the announcement that Britney was back in the studio, healthy and back at work, so, as the single had charted in many small markets, the track was included on "Circus" as a bonus track. It was chosen as the fourth single from "Circus" in May 2009, to cross-promote her Candie's endorsement deal.
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Originally posted by Rolling Stone
Musically, “Hold It Against Me” sounds a lot like what Britney was doing on her 2007 gem "Blackout," the most influential pop album of the past five years. But then everybody else in the music world is biting "Blackout" these days, so why shouldn’t Britney? When she was entering her darkest period in terms of her personal life, while much of the world was writing her off as a joke, she was also releasing her most innovative music, going for distorto-rama robot-disco propulsion and alienated synth-gloom ambience. It’s funny how people underrate Brit’s impact on the way music sounds now, just because her personality gets in the way, but if you listen to an hour of pop radio today, you’ll hear an hour of people trying to top "Blackout."
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Originally posted by Pitchfork
"Blackout" is superb modern pop, which could probably only have been released by this star at this moment. Britney makes for great car-crash copy and her record can fit into that if you want it to. But remember that what made "Twin Peaks" so great wasn't the central good-girl-gone-bad story, it was the strangeness that story liberated. And Britney's off-disc life is both distraction from and enabler for this extraordinary album.
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Originally posted by The Guardian
Faced with a public image in freefall, an artist has two options. One involves making music that harks back to your golden, pre-tailspin days with lyrics underlining your complete normality: the hope is that the public will fall for the ruse that nothing is actually wrong. The other is to throw caution to the wind: given your waning fortunes, what's the harm in taking a few musical risks? Happily, "Blackout" opts for the latter course, unleashing a ******* of ferociously distorted synthesizers, electronically treated vocals, snapping drum samples and bovver-booted glam rock beats. The results are largely fantastic.
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Originally posted by Dr. Luke
I feel like Britney kind of has her own genre: If you look at songs like "Piece of Me," they all were sort of influential and led the way.
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