The hype machine is a duplicitous beast, and nowhere is that more apparent than on Britney Spears’ ‘Britney Jean’. Billed pre-release as her most ‘personal’ record, a claim emboldened by its title, it is in fact a dreary tramp through club staples and tired ballads.
Work Bitch, the album’s lead single, hinted at this of course. Its lyrics, dotted as they are with Maseratis and Martinis, are barked out by a voice so heavily auto-tuned that Spears’ personality appears to have been surgically removed from its four minute run time. That it remains one of the collection’s high points is indicative of the malaise elsewhere.
Where ‘Femme Fatale’ was a diverse extension of the darkness that characterised ‘Blackout’, ‘Britney Jean’ is entirely lacking in identity.
Ostensibly a record about isolation, it quickly dispenses with anything approaching subtlety or meaning as a string of producers - will.i.am,William Orbit and David Guetta among them - come and go, each seemingly content to cough up little more than airy synths and pounding beats.
Lyrically, ‘Britney Jean’ flits between unintentionally hilarious and deeply flawed. Perfume’s refrain (“I’m gonna mark my territory”) is a low point in a song packed with them, while T.I stops by on Tik Tik Boom to offer a neat line in misogyny: “She like the way I eat her, beat her, beat her. Treat her like an animal somebody call PETA."
The first line on the record, from Alien, hinted at more. Before the chaos, Spears sings: “There was a time, I was one of a kind.” Amid the competing reigns of Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, Spears had the chance to land a sledgehammer blow, to remind everyone that she was here first. ‘Britney Jean’ is not up to the task.
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