Britney Spears - Blackout

u know, i knew Perfect Lover was great the 1st time, but when i heard it the second time i really got it

― Surmounter, Friday, October 26, 2007 12:43 PM (nine years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

love this too

'Being Boiled' is an absolute classic. Good to see people comparing nonsense to synthpop classics isn't a new thing on here.

uh Blackout is a synth pop record, most of it good or classic.

this thread is weird. remember when ppl cared how much credit britney deserved or didn't deserve for making amazing music? feel like that was a big topic when i was in college. first it went 'britney is talentless hack' then 'even if she makes good music other ppl deserve the credit for doing it for her' then 'well she probably deserves some credit for curating this' then 'well she probably deserves lots of credit bc u know this is her voice and her decisions and her album' then 'fuck u britney is awesome'

― Mordy, Saturday, February 25, 2017 12:24 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the "this is her decisions and her album" argument almost always bothers me, because in order to combat the "talentless hack" argument -- I mean, a legit goal -- people tend to overcompensate and misrepresent/gloss over reality, generally business/industry reality. Britney is a rare case where some of this is actually public (i.e. she's still under a conservatorship, meaning "this" quite literally is not her decisions and her album)

It's that phenomenon whereby non-critics who like music don't much discuss who produced albums or how it was made but when it's Britney they never fail to point out how many people are involved in making it even when they don't know their names.

xp Also plays to the old rockist argument of the importance of the person the record is credited to be 'controlling' the content as a producer would - wgaf when it's firing on all cylinders.

Fuck happened to Danja tho huh?

I wouldn't call that a non-critic phenomenon -- with pop artists, this sort of thing tends to crop up among professional, somewhat old-school critics

glad this thread got bumped, I almost forgot how fuckin' strange this was. I hated Ms. Spears for a long time but as soon as "It's Britney bitch" dropped I changed my tune. I remember hearing the single for the first time and just being in disbelief, felt like it just had no commercial potential whatsoever. then I heard the full thing and it was like 12 "Windowlickers" in a row. its even better than the Teen Mom album.

20 years since ....Baby One More Time

Pete Paphides:

True story. At the end of 2009, employed as The Times’ chief music correspondent, I was commissioned to ask my colleagues for their favourite albums of the decade & collate their nominations into a Top 100.
When the votes came in, it transpired that I had been the only one who voted for Britney Spears’ Blackout. Which meant that it barely scraped the 100. This was clearly an unacceptable state of affairs. So I bumped it up to number 5 anyway. #noregrets