Britney: Big Girls Don't Grrrrrrowl

Britney Spears possesses exactly two salient points and one asset worth discussing. She is perhaps not unique in Hollywood in this respect, but if her own chit-chat is to be believed, her latest album, Britney, is the ambitious product of her growing maturity and artistic integrity. Spears would have us believe that her burgeoning sexuality is part of a critically respected, yet popularly titillating career path dominated by Madonna for two decades. While certainly she deserves credit for setting such lofty goals, Britney falls so far short of its purported artistic achievement that it could well mark the defining moment of Spears’ decline and fall. Even with the collaboration of the music industry’s most innovative producers—Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins and the Neptunes—Britney is without a doubt the worst album ever released in the crowded, desperate field of teen pop.

The genre Spears inhabits, teen pop, operates under different rules than the standard pop/rock material. The cardinal rule of teen pop is that it must be relevant to the targeted generation of eight to 15-year old girls. A teen artist achieves relevance, often translated into coolness, with a combination of catchy, tuneful melodies, upbeat and appealing music videos and a distinct separation from the drudgery and toil of the real world teens inhabit. With Britney, Spears has failed in all three objectives. In seeking to redefine her appeal, she has seriously compromised her once-secure position as queen of the young.

In stark contrast with her previous work, Britney has none of Spears’ trademark overpoweringly catchy tunes. For all her critical failure, at least songs like 1999’s “Sometimes” and 2000’s “Lucky” possessed melodies liable to stick in one’s head for days. Instead, Britney is one long stretch of discouraging filler songs virtually devoid of melody. Where a workable melody does exist, as in “That’s Where You Take Me,” her producers smother it with excessively jerky beats and incoherence. Perhaps her all-star cast of producers were too highly paid to be satisfied with a more subdued but smoother style. The Max Martin/Rami team that produced her previous string of hits is also responsible for the bulk of this album, but their gift for appealing to the masses has evaporated in the year between Spears’ previous album, Oops! I Did It Again and Britney.

Spears extensively substitutes melody with a curious style of quasi-singing that can only be described as guttural muttering. The technique is featured prominently on the album’s first single, the ridiculously titled “I’m a Slave 4 U.” Even her most ardent fans would concede that she is worthless as a pure vocalist, but bad vocalists can still be effective singers: witness Bob Dylan. Instead of electronically manipulating her voice à la Cher in 1998’s “Believe,” Spears’ producers have her perform an aesthetically repulsive half-talking, half-singing sound. Somewhere between a growl and a croak, her voice is entirely disjointed from her young girl image. More than anything else, her muttering style is the single most dismal artistic failure on the album.

When she is actually singing, Spears’ airy, thin voice fails as it hovers in an uneasy relationship with the production. Often it is simply swamped by the background music as in “What It’s Like to Be Me.” Elsewhere, her voice weighs down an otherwise dynamic track. Her producers have yet to find a satisfactory method for dealing with her voice’s fundamental weaknesses.

While Spears is vocally unremarkable, she has succeeded by creating a series of charming music videos that made her an MTV mainstay. The Nigel Dick-directed “Oops! I Did It Again” combined a cornball plot with a Martian princess interpretation of her exotic sexuality. “Oops!” was colorful enough for the young set, yet interesting enough for a broader audience. MTV’s Total Request Live gives teen pop more exposure than most other genres, and in an age of Billboard chart apathy to her singles, it is the primary outlet for her national exposure.

But the lead video for her latest effort, the single “I’m a Slave 4 U,” has faltered even among TRL’s generous audience, recently finishing as number five. She swirls and gyrates in a sweaty, dirty urban setting—hardly the upbeat and bright finishes of most successful teen pop. Spears is also at the end of the line on the path of clothing-removal; after this video, she soon will have nothing left to take off. An adolescent market used to sexual tension and barely repressed desire, will not respond well to the overt lust of “Slave.” Her initially bubbly optimism has become a dark and tormented struggle: one that interests no one but herself.

Least of all does the new album convey anything beyond the dreariness of the typical teen life. Rather than depicting a lush vision of beautiful people in beautiful places, Spears sings about one predominant theme: her repression and desire to break free. Not only is the motif a trite one, but it also is repeated with such monotony on her album—eight of the twelve tracks are about her restrictions—that it loses all significance. The other four songs are overt sexual invitations, neither particularly interesting nor titillating.

Discouraging too is the rough, hasty feel of the album. The cover and interior art is just ugly, with a rather curious motif of the primary colors magenta, blue, and cyan. None of the photos are appealing to any degree; cheesecake fans will be sorely disappointed. Spears doesn’t even look happy to be at her photo shoot—her once youthful exuberance has metamorphosed into a tired repetition of midriff shots. The album’s music itself is less than forty minutes long over twelve tracks, and none of the songs has the strength to sustain itself for even four minutes. She may just be playing to short adolescent attention spans, but simultaneously throws out any semblance of real effort.

Britney’s strongest case for success would be as a pure dance album. In hiring the who’s who list in R&B dance music producers, she should at least expect to be given beats worthy of club play. Unfortunately, she explores few interesting rhythms. There is no truly captivating “Get Ur Freak On” here, but a sequence of abrupt beats that can shift suddenly and inexplicably multiple times in one song. Seekers of innovative dance music would best stick with far more effective recent material by Daft Punk or Sarina Paris, or even ‘N Sync.

With her latest album, Spears has cast herself as the prophetess of a maturing demographic of girls and their horribly repressed sexuality. Ultimately, her visions are not original, not interesting and not resonant with the world’s youth. No aspect of the multimedia extravaganza that is Britney Spears now fulfills the potential she once mastered. For all the runaway popularity she once enjoyed, Spears has made her greatest step yet to discard it entirely.