

"Piece of Me" exemplifies the creepy, puppetlike quality of the record. "Blackout" makes a good case for the Britney brand without curtailing the downward slide of the Britney person. Baby One More Time." There's something unsettling about a celeb so out of control releasing an album so competent. Her celebrity, like Madonna's, was built on visual teases like the Catholic school uniforms in her first hit video, ". Spears could recoup a lot of the impression of vacancy if she could write a hit herself or, more important, pull off a dance sequence or public appearance without seeming utterly out of it.
#Britney spears gimme more so bad professional#
With so many hot producers competing with one another, what you hear on "Blackout" are not songs so much as commercials for songs - a team of professional songwriters frantically overselling and spinning the image of a celebrity who has essentially left the building. But the self-consciously stylish tin-can beats on "Blackout," referencing every '80s synth phenom from Trio to Berlin and smothered with vocal tics cribbed from Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera, actually testify to Spears' absence, and point to the irrelevance of her modest contribution to the process of building her brand. "Crazy" is acceptable in pop, clinically insane is not. Her record company would no doubt like us to consider this album a bold assertion of Spears' identity and, by extension, relative sanity. She has always outsourced the basic creative components of her music - all she needs to do is show up at some point and do something reminiscent of singing or dancing, like her zombieish turn at the MTV Video Music Awards. The tsunami of tabloid news she has generated - so much that blogger Chris Crocker's cri de coeur in her defense generated its own backlash - initially makes it a relief to realize that even during a maelstrom of overexposure, Spears managed to record at least one new hit, the electroclash-influenced "Gimme More." Michael Jackson was not as resourceful during his crises, but then again, he writes his own material, so personal trauma can directly affect his output.įor Spears, work might have meant text-messaging songwriter/producers of the moment like Farid "Fredwreck" Nassar, Kara DioGuardi, the Neptunes and others, taking direction from the impressive team assembled to create her brand, and keeping her name in the papers. Our head-shaving, drug-abusing, rehab-escaping, ProTools-needing, coochie-flashing, K-Fed-marrying, K-Fed-divorcing, child-welfare-endangering, bonkers-going, MTV Video Music Awards-appearance-flubbing bitch. Chris Crocker became a viral sensation after he posted a video in which he tearfully defended Spears.Britney Spears begins "Blackout," her first album of new material since 2003's "In the Zone," with the defiant, unnecessary assertion, "It's Britney, bitch." What did she call us? Surely anyone who has seen a magazine in the past five years knows that she is our bitch. Viewers and professional critics were far from impressed. The BBC's David Willis said her performance would "go down in the history books as being one of the worst to grace the MTV Awards." "Brit was bummed out that she had to sing to track, and then her heel broke so she couldn't even dance so great." "It was one bad thing after another," the friend added. "She would have had to wear one of those headset things and they are so not cute." "She, like, really wanted to sing, but she just couldn't," a friend of Spears told E! News at the time. The performer who became famous for her amazing VMAs performances, gave a lackluster, seemingly unenthusiastic one, complete with lip-syncing. It marked her first major performance in three years. That September, almost 10 years ago, Spears released a comeback single, "Gimme More." Wearing a black sequinned bikini, mid-calf boots and hair extensions, she performed the song for the first time at the 2007 MTV VMAs. In 2007, the pop star had a public meltdown. She shaved her own head at a Los Angeles salon, attacked a paparazzo's SUV with an umbrella and spent time in rehab. "Gimme More"? At the 2007 MTV VMAs, Britney Spears appeared to not give less of a damn.
