Album Review: Britney Spears- Britney Jean



There was a time I was one of a kind…

Whether it’s intentional or not, the opening line to Britney Spears’s seventh album, the aptly titled, Britney Jean, is more than a little self-aware. There was, in fact, a time when she was one of a kind—from the moment the “Baby One More Time” video hit MTV, through a good chunk of 1999—until all of the other young female pop singers started showing up (Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson.)

It’s somewhat odd to think of Britney Spears, a woman in her early 30s, as an “elder stateswoman” of popular music—but based on her age when her debut album was released, and given her career over the last decade and a half, that’s the role she has slowly eased into.

It hasn’t been an easy road for her—there was the “dark” period where she cut loose, married a back-up dancer/rapper, and spit out two kids. There was the stint in rehab where she shaved her head and attacked a photographer with an umbrella.

Somehow, she’s managed to bounce back from all of this, and still have a career that people take seriously.

You better work, bitch…

Not really helping her in the “elder stateswoman” department is the first single from Britney Jean—“Work Bitch,” where she takes a bit of a, “when I was your age,” attitude towards some unnamed, faceless up and comers, lecturing them on how if they want the finer things in life that they, well, need to get to work. Bitch.

It’s on “Work Bitch” that Spears uses her skills learned at the Madonna School of Vaguely Foreign and/or British Accents—putting implacable, ridiculous sounding diction and pronunciation on her words, while dated sounding “big beat” techno synthesizers and bass drums sound off behind her.

Britney, where are you from? I just love your worldly sounding accent. Oh, you’re from Louisiana. Well, I would have never guessed…

Britney Jean’s finest moment arrives early on in the form of “Perfume,” a mid-tempo ballad about a love triangle. “I hope she smells my perfume,” Spears coos on the track, leading me to wonder which of Britney’s own fragrances she is referring to. It’s by no means one of the “best” pop songs of the year—far from it. To my knowledge, Spears has a good voice, but she allows herself to be weighed down by production effects. On “Perfume,” they are scaled back quite a bit, but there is still something…less human…in her delivery. It feels a little restrained, like this song could have been exponentially more believable had she just went for it, but it, along with the rest of the album, feels incredibly rushed and possibly phoned in.


Clocking in at a generous 35 minutes, the “Standard Edition” of Britney Jean contains a sparse ten songs, only a few of which clear the four-minute mark—not to say that these songs need to be ANY longer than that. Oh my, no. Good heavens. Three minutes is more than enough.

I don’t claim to be an expert at popular music, nor do I claim to be some kind of scholar at the canon of Britney Spears, but the stale, boring, and forgettable songs on Britney Jean will have you longing for the halcyon days of “T.R.L,”—and listening to this album made me realize that we should all just admit that Spears’s early run of singles were all pretty incredible from a well-written pop song stand point.

While “Work Bitch” serves as kind of a “Hey, I’m still here take me seriously please,” to listeners, a bulk of the other nine songs she’s brought with her are pretty forced in their over zealous attempts to sound “modern.” Also, when one of your guest spots is from will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, it’s REALLY hard to take you seriously.

The album’s lowest and most saccharine moment arrives towards the end, with the tepid slow jam duet featuring Britney’s sister and former teenage mother Jamie Lynn. “Chillin’ With You” juxtaposes strummy acoustic guitars against the big beat, frenetic drums, along with some weird wooshing noises for good measure. The biggest winces come back to back—the insipid refrain of “When I’m wi’choo, I’m chillin,’ I’m chillin,” followed by Jamie Lynn’s verse—her mousey voice overshadowed by that of big sister—begins with “I sang so loud that I smiled.”

I’m sorry, but what the fuck does that mean?

Both Spears women are “assisted” by the use of Auto-Tune on their vocals, which is still commonplace in contemporary popular music, even if the artist in question doesn’t need it. Britney seems to be slightly better, at least, of working with it, and is attempting at times to roll her voice so that it makes that warble sound everyone wants to hear. Jamie Lynn does not, however, know what to do, and therefore her voice comes off as meeker than it probably is, being flattened out by a special effect.

The final track, “Don’t Cry,” may be an attempt to console the listener—“Don’t cry, the album is almost over!” It’s yet another half-assed mid-tempo ballad, built around a whistle that pops up here and there, along with those big sounding drum beats and big, buzzy sounding synthesizers, while Spears says goodbye to some unnamed fellow.

While Spears may be telling the younger generation of pop stars that they need to get to work to earn their place, Britney Jean is proof that as an “elder stateswoman,” the said younger stars are just doing laps around her. There is little to no emotional in any of these songs—the entire album feels distant, like a contractual obligation that Spears had no interest in filling. And in the final unenthusiastic moments of the record, I realized that while an artist like Miley Cyrus is incredibly polarizing and “controversial,” on the ballad-y tracks on Bangerz, she at least puts forth real emotion, making the listener feel something.

The only something I felt by the time Britney Jean finished up was relief that it was over, and that I could delete the files from my computer.

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