October 30, Britney Spears’ Blackout Day
p2pnet news | Music:- Today is Blackout day and, “Can ‘Blackout’ beat Britney’s bad press?” – asks one headline.
Because today her new album hits the streets, although it’s already online, needless to say, including an Aussie version with an alleged four bonus tracks.
But will Blackout be exactly that?
Spears has lately been generating one negative headline after another centering on her marriage breakup and her children, her heavily criticised performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards, her various driving misadventures, and so on.
But many, if not most, of her troubles can probably be tracked directly back to drugs and alcohol.
It’s no doubt been grim. But it’ll get worse until she makes dealing with her addiction as her number one priority.
And it’s not like she’s surrounded by caring, supportive people.
Says Rob in When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.
It was 1999 when I got my first taste of the inner-workings of a major record label – I was a young college student, and the inside of a New York label office seemed so vast and exciting. Dozens of worker bees hummed away at their desks on phones and computers. Music posters and stacks of CDs littered every surface. Everyone seemed to have an assistant, and the assistants had assistants, and you couldn’t help but wonder ‘what the hell do all these people do?’ I tagged along on $1500 artist dinners paid for by the labels. Massive bar tabs were regularly signed away by record label employees with company cards.
And >>>
I met the type of jive, middle-aged, blazer-wearing, coke-snorting, cartoon character label bigwigs who you’d think were too cliche to exist outside the confines of Spinal Tap.
And >>>
An industry of excess. But that’s kind of what you expected from the music business, right? It’s where rock stars are made. It’s where you get stretch limos with hot tubs in the back, where you get private jets and cocaine parties. Growing up in the ’80’s, with pop royalty and hair metal bands, you were kind of led to think, of course record labels blow money left and right – there’s just so much of it to go around!
These quotes are taken out of context from an incredible article by someone who used to work with, and for, the music industry. And they don’t refer to recent activity. But Joni Mitchell and other established stars have said much the same thing, and it’s unlikely things have changed very much since Rob’s early days with big music.
Nor is Spears alone. Ask Lindsay Lohan, for one, or Paris Hilton. But if she wants to get older, she’ll get wiser.
Meanwhile, will Blackout do it for her and for her label, BMG’s Jive?
Says the New York Times:
Unlike all the other Britney Spears albums, this one hasn’t been accompanied by the usual avalanche of magazine interviews, talk-show appearances and televised performances. Ms. Spears scarcely lacks for publicity (she remains the paparazzi’s favorite quarry) but she has done almost nothing, in the recording studio or outside it, to convince fans that ‘Blackout’ is really hers, or really her. That doesn’t make it any harder to delight in how good the best songs sound. But that may well make it hard (or impossible) for fans and skeptics to treat this CD as a serious comeback attempt. Ubiquitous, one way or another, for almost a decade, Ms. Spears has finally managed to become a spectral presence – on her own album.
Says USA Today:
Though her voice is mostly awash in synthesizers and vocoders, her sass and attitude are the driving force. She sets the tone by declaring, “It’s Britney, bitch!” at the beginning of album opener and lead single “Gimme More,” and she shows that she isn’t sweating people’s opinions. But songs like that also show how hard it is to separate Britney the singer from Britney the celebrity.
And, ‘Blackout’ is simply the next, predictably pre-ordained step in ‘The Britney Spears Story,’ which also doubles as her life,” says Newsday, going on:
It’s the point in the narrative where the commercial failure of her album finally makes her realize that she needs help. It will be followed, of course, by rehab – both image and otherwise – and the inevitable comeback featuring songs about empowerment and making it through the rain and stuff, tentatively titled “The Emancipation of BritBrit.”
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
What makes “Blackout” so over-the-top-bad isn’t Spears, however. Her seemingly minimal involvement is pretty obvious and her over-processed, faux-electro vocals could basically be dropped into any setting or reprocessed to fit any situation.
The real failure is in the ridiculous things that the songwriters give her to sing and the uninspired musical backdrops that the producers provide her.
And who was behind the incredibly stupid fake priest promo shots?
Meanwhile, it’d be really interesting to see what Spears can do by herself without any ‘help’ from corporate music industry.
Or is she merely a Big Music creation and nothing more?
Maybe one day we’ll find out.
JN
Also See:
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for the download, and here for details. Click here or here to learn how to by-pass censorship in your area.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:59 am
On have to be a moron to pay attention to th Britneyslut crap.