Britney against the music
MANILA, Philippines – By now you should’ve heard it, downloaded it and played it ad nauseum. Hold It Against Me, originally scheduled for release on Jan. 11, was part of Britney Spears’s New Year’s resolution: her as-yet untitled seventh album. But after accidentally premiering early on New Zealand iTunes, the single was rushed to radio and then released on US iTunes, where it shot straight to the #1 position within just eight hours. It crashed servers like when Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance leaked, remember? and gave both fans and skeptics something new to dance to.
Co-produced by Max Martin, who worked on Robyn’s latest triptych, and Dr. Luke, the latest hit oscillates between aggressive hard house and Euro-cheese, with a weird dubstep breakdown at the 2:17 point thrown in for good measure. Britney’s digitally processed voice finds its home in the song’s doomed spring break ambience; it’s definitely darker than 3, her last number one, and is poised to propel Britney back to relevance, or at least today’s version of it.
Copy editors must have tripped over themselves thinking of clever headlines trumpeting this triumph, this supposed return to form. But notice: Hasn’t Britney “come back” several times before?
Every time the 29-year-old pop icon goes off the deep end then cleans up her act, people tout it as her comeback. Prior to Hold It Against Me, there it was the Britney-themed Glee tribute in September 2010, then Womanizer in 2008, which followed a well-received performance during that year’s VMAs, which came on the heels of her appearance on How I Met Your Mother as a brown-haired receptionist. All these came post-“Blackout,” which, upon its release in October 2007, was hailed by the UK’s Sunday Times as her “comeback album.” It seems that Miss Bad Media Karma is also Miss Oops… I Did It Again… and Again… and Again.
Throughout her lengthy career, Britney Spears has been a Mouseketeer, a naughty schoolgirl, a celebrity girlfriend, an unfit mother, a tabloid target, an ex-wife, a legend, a has-been and back. “I like playing with my image. I like to change things up every now and again,” she told Takashi Murakami in a recent issue of Pop, in which the Japanese Andy Warhol reinvented the singer as an angelic manga bride. Then again, Britney has also sabotaged her pop princess persona in the process, dropping her baby, shaving her own head, phoning in a stripperific performance of Gimme More at the 2007 VMAs.
While there are those who take pleasure in these series of unfortunate events schadenfreude there are others who choose to continue cheering her on. That said, the more Socratic among us would definitely question all this talk of yet another Britney Spears comeback because, if you really paused and thought about it, Britney Spears never really went away.
