Britney Spears, Femme Fatale
Reviewed by: Chris Bosman
One of the biggest struggles I’ve encountered as an occasional fan of pop music is trying to battle the gripe that pop stars don’t write their own music. Since the explosion of the singer-songwriter in the 60s, there has been a distinct line drawn in the sand between those that compose and perform their own music and those that merely perform the music written by others. As pop music has become increasingly manufactured, that line has become darker and thicker and there are people who view that line as a cut-off point. If you don’t write your own music, you’re ignored. But if you look at the history of music in a big picture way, the history of performers who were also writers is a mere blip on the face of music. The separation of writing and performing duties has been the case for far longer, and with good reason; having equal skills in arrangement and in performance is incredibly rare. Bands that have excelled at this often have divided those responsibilities in such a way that the burden of each relies more on certain members than others. Look at Radiohead, where Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke bear the actual songcrafting, and the performance is then split between the rest of the quintet.
Britney Spears has always been a manufactured pop star, from the Catholic school girl fantasies of “… Baby One More Time” to the far more overt sexuality of “I’m a Slave 4 U.” But of all her Mickey Mouse Club mid-90s brethren, only Justin Timberlake has a better career than Ms. Spears, even considering her head-shaving meltdowns. Part of this is because whoever chooses songs for Britney– and whether that’s Britney herself or someone associated with her, I don’t know– chooses well. “Toxic,” probably Spears’ best song, was produced by the Miike Snow team, who had and still have credibility in electronic music circles independent of their work with the former teen-pop idol. That streak continues on Femme Fatale, Spears’ seventh (seventh!) album.
Femme Fatale is definitely manufactured pop music. Most of the songs here tread what has become the new pop music standard, basically “Like A G6″-style synths, deep four on the floor bass twomps, and an ugly neon ecstasy glow to the atmospherics. But there’s a reason why Spears still has a singing career despite her unspectacular voice: she’s a natural performer. The way she slithers over her beats with unrestrained sex appeal clearly separates her from her oodles of imitators (I’m looking at you, Ke$ha). It’s not enough to breathe new life into the cheesy pick up line turned sexual come on of “Hold It Against Me” or the plain heard-it-before bore of “I Wanna Go,” but it what it doesn’t reinvent, it at least makes listenable.
Other indicators of the album’s cool calculation include run times. Except for the will.i.am featuring “Big Fat Bass,” every song here is in the three to four minute range, almost perfectly formulated for radio rotations. And, yes, there are thirteen producers and twenty-eight songwriters that contributed to Femme Fatale. But what makes listening to the album interesting are the bits that sound inappropriate for Top 40 radio. Like Miike Snow before him, the biggest oddball name in Spears’ liner notes is popular dubstep producer Rusko, who has worked previously with T.I. and Rihanna. And dubstep influences pop up a lot here, from the purpled-out synthesizers of “Big Fat Bass,” the actually genuinely fucked up bridge of “Hold It Against Me” or the woozy buzzsaw modulations of “Trouble For Me.” For a record that often works down to the level of its imitators, it kicks off with the unabashed “Till the World Ends,” which sounds more like a dubstep track that Spears was allowed to contribute vocals to.
Nothing on Femme Fatale is on the level of previous dance storm burners like “Toxic” or “Circus.” And there are times, like when newcoming rapper Sabi shows up on “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” that the record devolves into coattail riding, a shame from a team and a performer who used to be setting the bar. But it’s on songs like the honestly affecting dance floor ballad of “Trip To Your Heart,” or album highlight “How I Roll”’s pairing of major key pianos and exquisitely arranged hand claps and dying video game sound affects, that we remember why we pay more attention to Spears than we do her legions of imitators. Not all of these experiments work, of course; closer “Criminal” is cringe-worthy in its faux-Ren Faire melodies, but that’s made up for by the surprising drops and tones that show up even in the most prototypical dance pop track. She isn’t the one writing or producing these songs, but that doesn’t take away from their power or quality, and while this isn’t Spears at her best, it’s still one of the strongest pop music albums to come out in a long while.
[This review was initially credited to the wrong person. It was written by Chris Bosman, to whom this happens far too often. - Ed.]