Who wants a piece of Britney Spears? – Daniele Cassandro

“Paparazzi exist for the same reason stars exist. We want to see their photos. We want to see them happier, richer, crazier beautiful, wilder, with lives we can only dream of. Until the party ends and we are reassured in our belief that, after all, not being them is better ”.

Thus the American journalist David Samuels closed a long article published in 2008 on The Atlantic entitled Shooting Britney, a title that could mean either “photographing Britney” or “shooting Britney”. For those wishing to read it, it came out in Italian in 2008 with the title Paparazzi, for the International Time Zone series. Samuels was rebuilding the industry that between 2007 and 2008 revolved around the public collapse of Britney Spears, a former child prodigy and international pop star by now passed away.

Gossip magazines both in print and online, blogs, photo agencies, social networks still in their infancy, everyone wanted a souvenir of the fall of Britney Spears, a bit like everyone took home a piece of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The photos of Britney who, with a haunted air, grabs the razor from the hairdresser and shaves her hair to zero, and those of a few days later in which she goes into a rage and umbrellas the car of a paparazzo were devoured by an audience in fibrillation that was discovering the disruptive force that the herd could have in the network.

Britney’s image has been publicly torn apart: bad mother, adrift pop star, sloppy, shabby woman with a big glass of Starbucks in one hand and a pack of Cheetos in the other, like any bad girl. white trash. The destruction of Britney Spears was kind of reality show which ended up derailing. Samuels in her investigation recounts the ambiguous and unhealthy relationship that Britney and her people had with paparazzi agencies and the media. The star needed them to keep her interest alive, they needed her because every one of her that went out of her, even just to go shopping, was gold. The bar was raised more and more: Britney Spears tried to play along but in the end she was crushed. And the paparazzi, their patrons and the public wanted more and more. Samuels says it clearly: Britney was expected to die and photographing her on the verge of death would be her real coup. The final one.

It is therefore singular that Blackout, Britney Spears’ best album to date, was conceived during that hellish time. Her latest album of her unreleased songs, In the zonedated back to 2003 and contained highly successful pieces such as Me against the music (a duet with Madonna), Toxic (a memorable production of Bloodshy & Avant), the ballad Everytimee Outrageousa piece by R Kelly whose text, now that the author is in prison for sexual violence against minors, appears decidedly sinister.

The four years between 2003 and 2007, the year of release of Blackout, are a geological era in the times of pop music. Britney Spears does not produce new music but she is more famous than ever: she marries, for the second time, the dancer Kevin Federline with whom, before the divorce in 2007, she appears in a disastrous reality titled Britney and Kevin: chaotic. In 2005 his first son, Sean Federline, was born, just a year later his second, Jayden James, was born. In February 2007 the real begins reality show, what everyone wants to see: its collapse. In those four years, Britney stops being a pop artist and becomes a slaughterhouse celebrity.

The first public appearance to launch a new piece occurs on September 9, 2007, when it playbacks Gimme more at the MTV Music Awards. The exhibition is a disaster: Britney Spears has a glassy and lost gaze in the void, she does not move in time and looks like a broken doll. It matters little that Gimme more both a great piece, a production by Danja and Jim Beanz that portends a new synth pop direction. Few even notice the exclamation, today a meme carved in the collective imagination of a generation, which opens the song: “It’s Britney, bitch”.

When his album came out in a hurry on October 30, 2007, Blackout, Britney Spears’s music no longer interests anyone. She has lost custody of the children, she has obvious psychological problems and the public attention is all focused on her private life. By now it seems written on a script that has had the green light from the whole production: Britney has to close her reality by dying on stage. Maybe crashing into a car like Lady Diana.

Same day as Blackoutthe Eagles, legendary Californian rock band, release their first unreleased work since 1979. Long road out of Eden of the Eagles sells seven million physical copies in the United States, Blackout by Britney Spears, accustomed to having every new album number one on the charts for as long as it has existed, only sells a million. It’s the perfect storm: Britney’s defeat is also part of that particular moment in the record market when the pop audience stops buying records while the classic rock audience continues to do so.

What it makes Blackout a unique album, still the best of the singer from McComb, Mississippi, is precisely the awareness of having nothing to lose. It is a work in which a group of superproducers (Danja and Bloodshy and Avant in the lead) huddle around a free-falling artist and take the controls of the crashing plane. Britney’s creative contribution is minimal: the only piece she signs as a co-author is also the most traditional, Ooh ooh baby. Yet she is everywhere, her story is smeared on every track of this apocalyptic and edgy album of acidic synth pop.

Britney Spears’ previous albums were a sort of Cencelli manual of commercial pop music: weights and measures, genres and sounds were distributed by the milligram. There had to be the two or three pop dance hits, often quite similar to each other, the two ballads and perhaps the most rnb or latin piece to grab a slice of the “urban” market. In Blackout none of this happens: it’s a monolith, the most cohesive album Britney has ever made because all the pieces look like gigantic, rattling mechanical exoskeletons that transform the frail disgraced lolita into a giant fighting robot.

Nothing in Blackout it plays, not even for pretense, like a traditional instrument: maybe just a guitar round in the intro of Ooh ooh baby; the rest is all synthetic, acidic and robotic and every trace of humanity is deliberately sucked away by a radical production that, in a pop context, has something suicidal about it. It’s as if the producers are looking for a sound to describe Britney’s self-sabotage. Rolling Stone in 2017 described Blackout as “a punk masterpiece”, suggesting in a perhaps somewhat emphatic way that Britney had done something similar to Metal machine music by Lou Reed, perhaps the most shining example of self-destruction in a career in rock.

Britney’s voice is also treated to become unrecognizable. In Blackout no one tries to make her sing in a traditional way. The distortions of the autotune let out only the heavy southern accent and that vibrato of a country singer. For the rest, the presence of Britney in the record is a ghost trapped in the machine, “the ghost in the machine” to quote the Police.

Piece of me is the cornerstone of the album and perhaps the best piece of Britney Spears’ entire career. The song is the daughter of Leave me alone by Michael Jackson, possibly the first pop piece to stage the media’s persecution of a pop star. But if Michael Jackson tried to defend her privacy and wondered about the rapacity of the tabloids, Britney knows that she is meat already torn to pieces to be sold: “Do you want a piece of me?”. She sings in a robotic and dehumanized voice and then returns all the distortions of her public image to us: “I’m the lifestyle lady of the rich and famous (do you want a piece of me?) / I’m the lady oh my god that shameless Britney! (do you want a piece of me?) / I’m the exclusive lady! Latest news! (do you want a piece of me?) / I’m the lady is too fat she is too thin (do you want a piece of me?) “. The sound is claustrophobic and compressed, a circular and relentless groove that even at the moment of breakdownthat is, when it stops and then recomposes itself and starts again, it does not let even a breath of air pass: it is as if it continues to vibrate and hum even in those very short interstices of silence.

Britney’s Blackout it is a machine especially in the pieces in which it is proposed as party girl. In Radar is a fun robot: a cluster of shooter pixels on the dance floor. The attack of the Bloodshy and Avant piece quotes obliquely Tainted love by Soft Cell (already sampled by Rihanna in Sos in 2005) and once again the groove is unstoppable in its being so synthetic and mechanical. Britney is a machine even when she hypersexualizes herself and exposes herself to listener voyeurism in Freakshow and in the hilarious Get naked (I got a plan). There’s nothing really liberating about Britney’s sexualization in these pieces: unlike when, at 17, she appeared half-naked amidst soft toys in a Rolling Stone cover shot by David LaChapelle, Britney is now an adult and uses the exhibitionism as a pickaxe to further tear apart his public image. The true prophecy of Blackout it is precisely in these minor songs that are too absurd to be singles: dance songs that tell of how exhibitionism will be the currency of the new season of social networks and in which everyone and everyone, and not just pop stars anymore, will be pieces of flesh exposed to the most cruel and extreme judgments.

Blackout it is an act of self-sabotage, a promotional failure, a glorious synthpop album at least five years ahead of its time and above all it is the sound of a phase of pop culture that ends forever.

Britney Spears
Blackout
Jive-Zomba, 2007