five thots on blackout

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

five thots on blackout

1. her vocals are protean, deepening, turning into a flotilla of electronics, thinning and thickening, they are occasionally contained by the production, often overwhelmed by the production --but the listener is always aware of the production. this album ends the transition from oops i did it again, with he perfect american bardot breathiness to the harsh, angular and almost atonal toxic.
2. this is the first album where she is not credited as a song writer, only as a producer, and much of the album is about the creation and destruction of images--combined with dated ellen van unworth photographs, it suggests the common wisdom, that she is not listening to anyone who can help her, is wrong. the opposite is true here--even with out writing any of the songs at all, she has too many people to listen to. the more people surrounding her, the less control she has. which means the album is an anthology of late post millennial trends in popular music, an inadvertent, already dated time capsule.
3. she mentions her self twice or three times a song in the third person, all of this third personing does not provide much needed critical distance, it makes her sound dissociative.
4. its also an album of paranoia--but the weird thing, is that everyone is looking at her, attacking her, so the paranoia is the wrong word, its more of an accurate example of her life, her chaos, her mental health, etc, but most importantly, her pleasure. addictive personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, its the first album made crazy not by coke or booze but an over dose of fame.
5. but the going out is documented, the songs careen wildly, crash into each other, change tempo, vocals, and instrumentation, producers and what is produced. harmonies are dropped, added, mixed in and mixed out, it becomes polyphonic and then singularly driving in a matter of seconds. it is almost a folk work--like what harold finster would do if he had a capacity for clubbing and a taste for bisexual tail. (which is my round about way of saying, it is intended as an album, a statement, a document that is 60 minutes long, ambitious for someone who's genius came previously in 3 minute bites)

i think its a brilliant album, unhinged, strange, pleasure seeking, and throughly crazy--i also don't think its traditionally good.

Comments

[datura800.livejournal.com]

She IS credited as a songwriter, on 2 songs. She isn't credited on her debut.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

i agree with this post basically! "executive producer" credit always interesting - like it's saying "this album was inspired by the person, the legend and the concept of miss britney spears 07"

my dubstep mates are going nutsssss over 'freakshow'

devil's advocate

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

aren't we all being just a bit tabloid but taking this so much more seriously that the hand-wringing of (to pick a easy but totally undefined straw man) hundreds of insecure indie (or emo) boyz? is it actually "good," (brilliant) or is it just the lucky product of someone with a singularly fucked up life. (ie. to ashlee or lindsay this is just boring crap, whereas um, well, whoEVER would seem really interesting and brilliant because it was so far from their life).

Re: devil's advocate

[koganbot]

Good questions, but have any indie or emo boys put out an album this year that's remotely as scrappy and scratchy and visceral as this one? That's not a rhetorical question, since there are hundreds (thousands?) of indie and emo albs these days, so the answer might well be yes. (As a matter of fact, the A.R.E. Weapons album is a good set of ragged electro gutterpunk, has a shot at my Top Ten, even though it's not up there w/ Britney's. And if we can nominate Kelly Clarkson as an insecure emo-goth girl, her alb is in range of the Britney, though its greatness is mitigated by too many nongreat songs.)

I'm not sure why you wouldn't say "brilliant"* rather than "lucky product" here. Or if it is lucky product, how does that make it not good? The brilliance is surely collaborative, but Britney's voice - no matter how many filters and bkgd singers - absolutely dominates this album, gives it consistency from track to track, is this unsettling combination of neediness and anger and mischievousness (I'm coming 'round to "Ooh Ooh Baby," though I still think the tune needed one more change). Or maybe what I'm saying is that the voice on one song associates itself with the voice on the others, so the anger-danger of the first two tracks makes the bright electro-sprite of Track Three seem wanton and scary rather than just bouncy and fun. That laugh at the start of "Gimme More" gives me shivers, makes the whole album seem an elaboration on that laugh, even when it isn't. (What is that laugh? It's not joy. It's like she's saying "So there.") I wish she had put "Mystical (State Of Grace)" and "Baby Boy" at the end, since their steady mellow sadness would round the album out**. As it is, my reaction is something like my reaction to Appetite For Destruction: I like listening to the record, but I probably wouldn't want a human being who embodied the personality of that record actually in the room with me.

As for how much my knowledge (or what I think is my knowledge) of Britney's not-so-singularly fucked-up life affects this: I don't know.

I'm still nonplussed. I haven't figured out this album. I'm listening to "Get Naked," which may be the strangest thing on there. She's mainly present as breaths, but those breaths give the electroscratch blips and electroscratch blips their character. And the character of the song is more narcissistically demanding than inviting.

*Not that this album is great from start to finish (it's not like last year's Paris album, which didn't stumble 'til the final track). But its effect never lets up, whether the song is strong or weak.

**And if she had the slightest interest in cred, which apparently she doesn't, these two tracks would prove that at least some of the time she's still got vocal chops. (Or maybe they're old recordings.) There does seem to be something heroic about her indifference to cred, though maybe I'm just projecting heroism onto what's basic dysfunction. But most other fuckups try to clothe their fuckuppery in platitudes.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Well, we wouldn't expect indie boys (at least mid-2000s variety) to be scrappy, scratchy, and visceral, and that's sort of the point: we're enjoying looking at the car crash. (Imagine Chinese Democracy finally appearing as a acoustic soft rock paean to domestic life.) And as to why *not* brilliant, again i would say that we are reading into it: would it be brilliant if it were a first album from an unknown performer?

i guess i'm just being a bit rockist because, despite finding various individual sounds quite interesting, i'm still not finding it that musically compelling -- i agree about the paris album -- and i'm not sure i feel any reason to be more interested in this than i do with michael jackson for "leave me alone" or several gigabytes of indistinguishable rappers boasting about gangsta life.

[datura800.livejournal.com]

'would it be brilliant if it were a first album from an unknown performer'.

Yes. Yes it would. But of course it being Britney takes it to another level, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Such is the nature of pop icons, and that's why 'Blackout' is off to a spectacular start while the Paris album died a death.