"Blackout," the new album from Britney Spears, is as intoxicating as a snort of high-grade white powder. Like that nightclub indulgence, it's an expensive ride, crafted by a team of top producers exploring the outer reaches of cybernetic pop. Its dazzling studio effects, rhythmic reconstructions and vocal shape-shifting drag the listener in, as each song elaborates on the power of desire and desirability. It's hard to resist.
But maybe it's time to start just saying no.
Since it leaked online a few weeks ago, "Blackout" has been receiving buzzy attention. A few reviewers have trashed it, but most have called it a comeback. Spears' musical presence on the album may be minimal (dance-pop notables including Keri Hilson, Europop darling Robyn and L.A.'s own Nicole Morier shore up her vocals throughout, and Spears has just two deeply buried writing credits), and her public behavior remains cause for concern, but apparently that doesn't matter. The music's fun, the beats are fresh and the Spears that "Blackout" promotes isn't a person anyway but a publicly traded fantasy. Cynicism clearly outweighs compassion when it comes to poor, sad Brit.
The public agrees that Spears is a product worth purchasing. "Blackout," which was released Tuesday, is expected to chart at No. 1 next week, moving about two-thirds of the 527,000 units Carrie Underwood did the week before. This even though, beyond a sleepy and rather sad phone-in appearance on Ryan Seacrest's KIIS-FM radio show Wednesday, Spears isn't promoting the release. Maybe she's too caught up in the loss of her kids in a custody battle; maybe (even this seems possible with her) she really doesn't like "Blackout" all that much.
After all, it's not really her album, is it? It's one thing to recognize the fluid collaborative process that has made for great music since the days of disco, and jazz before that. It's another to blithely dismiss the importance of the figure who carries that music forth into the world. Spears is listed as executive producer of "Blackout," and the Wall Street Journal reported that it earned her a nearly $4-million advance. So the idea of Britney it presents must have some relation to her own idea of herself.
At any rate, there are three Britneys now. There's the tragic celebrity going through a public breakdown, who seems to have little command over her own actions and less over how others treat her, including the public that's circling and scorning her. Then there's the Britney created by Spears and many others over the course of a decade, an embodiment of the feminine libido in an age when empowerment and exploitation are often confused. Finally, there's the Britney the public imagines, a repository for our fears about what today's tough little girls might become and our disgust and fascination with the fame machine.
"Blackout" is an attempt by Spears and her latest crew of in-studio plastic surgeons to reconcile those three Britneys. But as seductive as the music is, it fails. Instead of reconciling the fantasy Britney with the one who breathes, these songs push aside her pain and defeat and substitute an almost militant wantonness. In the process, they abandon what made the invented Britney so appealing: her stance on the knife's edge between virtue and corruption, the innocence of a girl brash enough to declare "I'm not that innocent."
As the living, breathing Spears continues to crash downward in plain view, few seem troubled by the disconnect between the success of this album and the sorry state of its nominal maker. Even more disturbing, no one seems to care that the songs on "Blackout" uphold the very attitudes about femininity, sexual power, and the blur between reality and television-tabloid "reality" that have dragged Spears into misery -- and those of us enthralled by her into a state of callousness and cynicism.
Let's assume that Spears still wants to connect to the spirit of sexual liberation that took shape in the 1970s and went pop mostly through Madonna's efforts in the 1980s. "Blackout" contains some direct Madonna references. The CD booklet photo showing Spears sitting on a priest's lap, which has outraged the Catholic League, is an obvious nod. More generally, the album's mix of avant-garde dance music and libertine lyrics echoes controversial landmarks such as "Justify My Love" and "Erotica," which blended explorations of explicit subject matter with cutting-edge dance beats.
But Madonna's libertinism was always tied to a community -- an underground of self-identified queers and other sexual outlaws who saw erotic freedom as part of a larger movement toward gay and women's liberation. In comparison, the mood of "Blackout" is oppressively retrograde.
