New York City October 29th, 2021 (SteroeGum). Twenty years ago Britney Spears recorded “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman.” A goopy piano line and a karaoke-bar drum machine preset signal its seriousness. She and producer Max Martin wanted a ballad manifesto for Crossroads, a road-trip film about being Britney Spears but with Dan Aykroyd as the father resisting her maturation. For their idea of sensitive lyrics they tapped Dido Armstrong, whose “Thank You” turned into a massive hit in its own right after Eminem’s fan-ambivalent “Stan” interpolated its chorus. Recorded in Stockholm with Martin’s crew, “I’m Not A Girl” boasts a solid Spears performance; she sings the words in her thin, whiskery, fey timbre. She sounds like neither girl nor woman: She sounds as if the pitch-altered Prince of “U Got The Look” had imitated a senior citizen. The result is weird, powerful, and listenable — check out that key change in its last third, where she goes for it — if not quite a triumph.
“Weird, powerful, and listenable” also describes Britney, the album Spears released the last week of October 2001, 20 years ago this Saturday. Not quite a triumph either. Fizzing up the giddy aerobicized climaxes of Martinized grease-free pop with crucial songwriting/producing contributions from the Neptunes, Spears wanted what every pop star since 1983 had done when they conflated maturity with sexual availability. But she couldn’t get Prince in 2001 No Doubt got him first, sorry. Instead, she got Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo at the apogee of their first fame.
You know who also reached his own apogee? An ornery, stupendously incurious governor of Texas whom the Supreme Court made president and who as president oversaw the most spectacular intelligence failure in American history. Despite the croakings of doom from traditional media types who while rubbing their chins pondered whether we had watched the death of irony, pop music during the 9/11 era was as glorious as the times were low and dishonest. The pop environment in which Spears released Britney was not escapist; it reflected the aspirations and lusts shaped by Total Request Live and Nightline as much as by consumer preferences — same as it ever was.
But the multivalent conversation between R&B and hip-hop got those consumer corpuscles flowing. Occasionally the former got harder, the latter got softer. On the week Britney‘s biggest hit “I’m A Slave 4 U” peaked at #27, it shared chart space with Shakira, Alicia Keys, Mary J. Blige, Ja Rule, and Ginuwine. Slush-o-ramas like Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” and Enya’s tidal love-is-the-seventh-wave “Only Time” were huge too, indicative of the collective mourning. Creed’s garlic-breathed “My Sacrifice” too. Otherwise a ruthlessly concentrated and densely percussive frivolity reigned.
“Weird, powerful, and listenable” also describes Britney, the album Spears released the last week of October 2001, 20 years ago this Saturday. Not quite a triumph either. Fizzing up the giddy aerobicized climaxes of Martinized grease-free pop with crucial songwriting/producing contributions from the Neptunes, Spears wanted what every pop star since 1983 had done when they conflated maturity with sexual availability. But she couldn’t get Prince in 2001 No Doubt got him first, sorry. Instead, she got Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo at the apogee of their first fame.
You know who also reached his own apogee? An ornery, stupendously incurious governor of Texas whom the Supreme Court made president and who as president oversaw the most spectacular intelligence failure in American history. Despite the croakings of doom from traditional media types who while rubbing their chins pondered whether we had watched the death of irony, pop music during the 9/11 era was as glorious as the times were low and dishonest. The pop environment in which Spears released Britney was not escapist; it reflected the aspirations and lusts shaped by Total Request Live and Nightline as much as by consumer preferences — same as it ever was.
But the multivalent conversation between R&B and hip-hop got those consumer corpuscles flowing. Occasionally the former got harder, the latter got softer. On the week Britney‘s biggest hit “I’m A Slave 4 U” peaked at #27, it shared chart space with Shakira, Alicia Keys, Mary J. Blige, Ja Rule, and Ginuwine. Slush-o-ramas like Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” and Enya’s tidal love-is-the-seventh-wave “Only Time” were huge too, indicative of the collective mourning. Creed’s garlic-breathed “My Sacrifice” too. Otherwise a ruthlessly concentrated and densely percussive frivolity reigned.
© 2021 ALL RIGTHS RESERVED MSH WorldWide Company By Marcelo Santiago Hernández.
