Artist: Female solo artist
Career: recording since 1998, 2nd album
Language: English
Genre: Pop
Ode to Britney Spears.
I always had my escape set up. In case I didn’t feel like talking about 360 records from the year 2000 anymore, I’d use my trump card – this record -, and write a sex fantasy about Britney Spears (and me, of course) lurid enough to get me banned from Blogger.com. Problem solved.
Oh, I could definitely write it. Let’s start with the cover. Long before I felt the urge to play the album I meditated over the picture – well, it didn’t really empty my mind of thoughts, but it reduced it to one topic at least. The sphinxlike expression on her face, her shining hair in the artificial light, her fingers toying with the pearly strings of the curtains and simultaneously enticing me to come closer, the hint of perspiration on her chest, the laces on her pants just whispering to me to start unwinding them, she tilts her upper body slightly backwards pushing her hips out to me, her wonderfully naked belly. It was such a relief when we found out all those Mousketeer kids had been snorting drugs off of each other’s Mickey Mouse ears, and having decadent, rich teenager sex with each other. Cause I couldn’t keep my fantasy contained to pillow fights and foreplay (you know, the screenplay for her video clips) much longer. It was nagging my conscience the only thing to which she willingly gave up her belly button was Photoshop.
But finally I played it – and damn, it’s a strong, near irresistible pop record. The best pure pop record of the year? Maybe. It’s an overused line to compare this to Abba. It’s not inaccurate, but it’s kinda misleading. Certainly this has none of the gravitas some of us like to think we can hear in Björn and Benny’s songs. It’s more like ‘Waterloo’ – the album, when they still wrote songs like ‘King Kong song’ and ‘What about Livingstone’, and gravitas was nowhere in the same universe. Britney Spears doesn’t sing about exotic animals and explorers, in fact she only sings about one topic: how pre-teenage girls imagine the romantic life of teenage girls. But you know what I mean, gravitas and this record are nowhere in the same universe. It’s like Disney – it’s idealized AND cynical.
But on the other hand, it’s one energetic, melodic sugar bomb after another, with all the excitement people who write 360 reviews on the internet can only experience vicariously (middle-aged pop Svengalis holed up in Scandinavian studios as well probably). Crucially, though it makes some concessions to the prevailing trend of R&B/pop of the time, this is pure teen pop, ripe with big chorded choruses, harmonic evolution and things that R&B doesn’t seem to do. Yeah, she’s not the best singer (but who cares?) and she uses those voice effects that sound like strangulation (a little annoying), but this is not the kind of record that needs a strong artistic identity at its center.
Maybe you’re waiting for some kind of opinion about the version of ‘Satisfaction’ from me. Well, maybe the transplant from cultural critique to teenage romantic fantasy is sacrosanct to some. It doesn’t really matter to me. It’s not one of the best things here, but it’s in line with the album, an in between track, and anyway none of this is made to be analyzed.
Max Martin knows exactly the thought patterns this record sets up in my head. How else do you explain the ‘movie dialogue’ he scripts for himself and Britney in ‘Oops! I did it again’? Max: ‘Britney, before you go, there’s something I want to give you.’ Britney: ‘It’s beautiful. But wait a minute, isn’t this?’ Max: ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ He has his fun. That sex fantasy will have to wait for another day. Writing it down, anyway.
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