Let me take you back to 2013. The birds are chirping, I have recently met The Veronicas, and Britney Spears is on a publicity tour. Her previous album, Femme Fatale (2011), is her best performing commercial hit with multiple top ten singles. The following tour has raked in millions of dollars for the Spears brand, followed by an extremely lucrative judging gig for The X Factor. A collaboration with will.i.am seals the deal by hitting number three on Billboard. This is the hottest the Spears brand has been since the year 2000. Understandably, interviewers begin asking about this upcoming record.
Where will the Princess of Pop take her sound next?
For a while she seems to simply has no answer. Then “hip hop” is a descriptor. “Artsy fartsy” is another. It seems as if there might be guitars involved, although that’s unclear. Much like many of her later career interviews, Britney is illusive and vague about the music. She doesn’t seem to know how to describe the album she’s working on. Eventually, Team Spears settles on the phrase “most personal album to date”. She does, however, know how to talk about her upcoming Vegas Residency.
Clearly, all will be unveiled with the lead single.
That song, Work Bitch, leaks out in dribs and drabs. The title is hinted at by bloggers (misspelled as Werk Bitch) and it is teased via interviews that suggest the song is a gay anthem of sorts. Rumours speculate a RuPaul sample. But one thing is for certain, Britney is back.
Emphasis on BRIT.
In retrospect, this is the last Britney Spears song that matters to her musical legacy, as it stands today. It becomes her opener, an easy win with crowds. Despite -or because of- an inexplicable British accent and a drop in place a chorus, it’s an easy ear worm that peaks in the top twenty. Plus, she looks great in the video. Fans are mostly positive and the public find it fun enough. There isn’t the hype that surrounded her previous major drops, but it’s at least a step forward. Britney Jean (2013) was going to be good.
Except it wasn’t.
The album roll out that follows is a mess. Her sudden turn to explicit pandering to a largely gay, male audience comes at a time when that is more frowned upon. With the gruelling Vegas schedule, there’s no time to promote the song via performances as she had with the previous album’s singles, and interviews quickly focus on the upcoming residency. When she travels the world, Britney still fails to perform the song. In fact, she seems a little scared of talking about it at all. The pop star replaces the word ‘bitch” with “b” in an attempt to distance herself.
Perfume follows, a SIA penned ode to scents and cheating that is the only song Britney seems willing to identify in interviews without being prompted. The song is fine. In fact, it’s good. Like all SIA songs in the early 2010s, it’s a chance for a pop star to perform vulnerability, supported by rumours that Britney Spears and her ex-fiance Jason Trawick split over cheating. The video rollout becomes messy, but the song fails to land with audiences anyway, so it doesn’t register as a problem. It later becomes (briefly) part of the Vegas set. There’s an infamous clip where Britney seems to be lip-syncing to the SIA demo.
It’s…probably fake.
The album drops, and the most memorable part is Britney discovering Ryan Seacrest is straight. An album release party fails to play the entirety of the record, a rarity for that type of event. There’s a documentary called I Am Britney Jean (2013) that mostly focuses on, you guess it, the Vegas residency. Promo following that consists only of two abortive single drops:
Til It’s Gone, a bland EDM breakup moment, and
It Should Be Easy (ft. will.i.am), a song entirely built around vocoder and crushed dreams.
Don’t bother with either of them.
Britney Jean (2013) is an album with no flair to it. Every interesting collaborator (Darkchild, Hitboy, Charli XCX ect.) was pushed to the side in favour of a sound that mimicked the Europop, electronic “bangers” that pop producers would push on label signees with no individuality for years to come. Thematically, it’s empowering in a very nondescript way. She loves to dance, she loves to work, she loves to love. Very little about this feels at personal or particularly real. In fact, the only parts of the album that feel distinct are those that aren’t Britney at all.
William Orbit’s production on the opener Alien features a clear clip in the vocals of the chorus that doesn’t sound purposeful. Which is unfortunate, as this features all the elements of a Lucky-style, introspective moment for the pop star. A musical legend, known for his work with Madonna, Orbit is maybe the only notable producer outside of will.i.am to feature on the album. The song only becomes known to the public when audio of Britney warming up by singing the song poorly, leaks.
The rest of the album is a sea of moments that feel indicative of a problem. The British accent on Work Bitch. A weirdly violent T.I. feature on the G.R.L. reject Tik Tik Boom, where he says the line “beat it like an animal/somebody call PETA” (CLASSY). A high note on the Katy Perry penned Passenger that is clearly just SIA. Jaime Lynn Spears showing up for a duet where Britney, publicly alcohol-free at the time, croons about red wine while chilling with her sister.
Or, at least, it’s supposed to be Britney.
Fans have long speculated that Britney Jean is less the product of Britney Spears and more the work of session singers. Myah Marie, Britney’s most famous background singer and impressionist, is usually the main suspect. And it really doesn’t sound like the pop star. Runs on Tik Tik Boom sound like a bad impression. Low notes hit weird across the album, the high note on Passenger, as just said, is clearly just SIA. Body Ache, the sixth song on the tracklist, almost sounds like a duet when the second verse comes in. There is no featured artist, obviously. Britney’s voice is easy to reference but difficult to accurately duplicate, and the vocals you hear on the record feel like the result of that.
In short, this is an album that feels like a stain on a musical legacy that mostly sparkles. Even for non-fans, this is an obvious poor showing. The production lacks flair, the promo suggests that Spears doesn’t know of the work she put out, and it effectively ends her time as a leading voice in pop. She ascends to legend status in the following years, not because she’s done, but because there’s no other way to keep her around after this. It’s not the type of album an artist comes back from, because it’s not the type of album that feels like you need to come back from. Bad, yes, but there’s no comeback here. It’s the corpse of a big pop moment. But everyone loves Britney. So we shipped her off to Vegas, and Britney Spears the pop star, at 32, was now in the same bracket as Cher and Celine Dion.
This is where we need to get serious.
In retrospect, this album is the product of abuse. The Britney Spears conservatorship, led by Jaime Spears -her father- forced a work schedule that meant there was too many things going on at once. The drugs she was allegedly put on clearly made the problem worse, and the result is a moment in time when the systems of ‘pop star’ Britney just collapsed, and they seem like they were meant to.
I don’t know whether Team Spears meant to trap her in Vegas. But, in context of the controlling behaviour that has surfaced, this album feels like another part of that abuse. The power of simply being “Britney Spears” was lessened when she became a has been. Her starpower made the Vegas residency cool after a while, but for a woman who’s last years in freedom centred around making an album she wanted to and only promoting it in small and eccentric ways, this feels like an attack on her artistic soul. The album is filled with alleged Britney writing credits, and maybe she contributed something, but it feels unlikely.
Returning to those promotional interviews, threads emerge. She’s a mother and, for a while, a future wife. Britney repeatedly says she wants more children, wants to retire eventually, wants her space. There’s fun to be had, but even as she laughs and cracks a whip in London to celebrate her new single, she looks worn out. In an era where pop stars like Lady Gaga would show up in full weirdo regalia and Katy Perry would be done to the nines, Britney is dishevled. Her hair is messy, her outfits are ready for a parent-teacher meeting. The glam she has on is understated. In these interviews speaks about her spirituality, and on the deluxe edition of the album, all three (seemingly legitimate) new songs speak to religious themes in vague ways. Jesus bops, if you will.
This is the picture of a woman looking for a saviour.
In the following years, things got better, then worse, then finally good. Glory (2016) showed that she could still enjoy making music, even if interviews suggested she had to do it in secret. She met her current husband, then fell into an extremely demanding world tour that ultimately sparked the conflict that ended her conservatorship. Legal troubles remain, but she’s finally allowed an independence, in her forties, that was denied to her for 13 years. I couldn’t be happier for her.
At the time, Britney Jean just seemed like a pop star giving up. Fifteen years into her career, the pop princess was ready to retire. But now, it’s a clear cry for help. In an era now where pop stars take months or years between projects, Britney was in year 5 of constantly working. Three albums, two world tours, a major television show, multiple cameo appearances, the Vegas residency and countless other commitments had filled the half decade she’d endured since the conservatorship began. Her kids, the reason she accepted this situation in the first place, spent the majority of their time with their father.
There’s a moment in I Am Britney Jean where her team has a meeting. Britney is nowhere to be seen. They’re discussing her schedule and the subject of her birthday comes up. When someone suggests she take the day off, they’re ignored and more work is marked in the calender. That’s indicative of what her life was in 2013. Even with all she did, she couldn’t even get her birthday to herself. I am grateful that she can take time now to relax. Maybe she’ll return to the mic or the stage, maybe she won’t. But she deserves to exist on her own terms. She isn’t an object for our entertainment, she’s a woman.
“I am a performer. I am a mom. I am funny. I am your friend. I am Britney Jean.” - Britney Spears, 2013