I once wrote a short piece about the tendency of American culture to enshrine and celebrate mediocrity at the expense of the excellent. It wasn’t my finest work, all things considered, but even now, I still like the title I gave it:

The Britney Principle.

In all seriousness, the popularity of Britney Spears is one of the most inexplicable musical phenomena of the past ten years. Neither outrageously attractive nor even a moderately good singer, Britney carved a ridiculously high-sales career out of the intersection of canned teen-pop drum tracks and unpleasant schoolgirl fetishism, becoming a postmodern Madonna for a world in which talent has been deconstructed as a mere tool of the dominant paradigm. Or, if you’re feeling less pretentious, she’s proof positive that an advertising machine willing to throw obscene amounts of money at a problem can sell even the most subpar of products.

Anyway, Blackout comes on the heels of a string of personal problems on the part of Ms. Spears that would make even Robert Downey, Jr. uncomfortable. One might expect that this album would be an attempt to display some maturity, some artistic growth. However, if you go in anticipating that, the first sounds of the record — a half-awake Spears grunting, “It’s Britney, bitch,” should disabuse you of those ideas quickly. Blackout is an album so wafer-thin, so deliberately superficial, that it makes Paris look like OK Computer by comparison.

Britney herself sounds almost disembodied, a thin-voiced, tuneless ghost flitting halfheartedly around the plinking synths and ProTools drumbeats. At no point does she sound even marginally involved in the proceedings — she’s just picking up a paycheck here, nothing more, meaning that even the occasional moments that might have been of interest, like almost-catchy club stomper “Heaven on Earth,” are dragged down by Britney’s very presence. All semblance of humanity is carefully eliminated by running her vocals through so many vocoders, filters, and pitch-shifters that even Daft Punk might consider it overkill. The excessive electronics give Britney’s incessant heavy breathing and nonstop come-ons a vaguely creepy edge; it’s sort of like being propositioned by your blender.

And make no mistake, sex is pretty much all Britney is going to talk about on Blackout. The strip-single “Gimme More” isn’t even close to the most over-the-top example; the album also includes a song called “Get Naked,” which features Britney duetting with what sounds like the horniest robot ever to raid the quaaludes stash, and something called “Freakshow,” which is about as subtle as it sounds. The closest thing the album gets to a change of pace is “Piece of Me,” a whiny bit of stop-picking-on-the-poor-pop-star drivel that Britney couldn’t even be bothered to co-write. If you don’t want them snapping “pictures of your derriere,” Ms. Spears, maybe you should, you know, wear some underwear. Not that I’m the first person to suggest this, not by any stretch of the imagination, but alas, I somehow doubt I’ll be the last either.

The productions are sort of subpar attempts to mimic the kind of dance-minimalism that Timbaland has managed to beat to death over the past couple years, crossed with an unhealthy love of the last Justin Timberlake album, ironically enough. There’s a veritable army of producers, but they’re essentially interchangeable. It’s shiny, and glossy, but to call it soulless is like calling Kevin Federline’s rap career “not as successful as might have been hoped.” Also, these songs are severely short on hooks, which isn’t a good thing for an album by someone who wants to be a pop star.

With a little more of a push, this album might have been a brilliant skewering of the hollowness of so much modern pop music, a subversive parody of Spears’ own image and the society that produced it. Sadly, Britney isn’t anywhere near that self-aware, and so we’re instead left with twelve tracks of the most vapid, unnecessary, ugly music that I’ve heard anywhere recently. It’s not sexy, it’s not catchy, and it’s not even funny, and I can’t think of any setting in which this album would be of any value, except maybe as a white elephant gift at your office holiday party, assuming that you hate your job.

What, you were expecting something better? This is Britney, bitch.

Release date: Oct. 30, 2007
Label: Jive
Rating: 1/10
(And yes, I’m gonna keep giving my albums numerical ratings. Sometimes, conformity is the truest form of rebellion :-P)

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