Blackout, which is not only the greatest of all Britney’s albums, but one of the most innovative and influential pop albums of the past decade. It’s where America’s sweetheart changed her name to Mrs. Oh My God That Britney’s Shameless and got real, real dark on us. On Tuesday, October 30th, 2007, when the world was trying to write her off as a joke not for the first time, not for the last – Brit dropped music way too weird for the radio, all alien and distorted, warping her Southern drawl into a surly electro-punk sneer. Within a couple of years, everybody was trying to sound like this. It’s Britney, bitch.
Blackout is an avant-disco concept album about getting famous, not giving a fuck, getting divorced, not giving a fuck, getting publicly mocked and despised and humiliated. It’s an album about dancing on tables in a cloud of glitter and Cheeto dust. But mostly it’s an album about not giving a fuck. If our girl could emerge from the wreckage with an album like Blackout, there’s hope for us all.
Every now and then, a pop queen delivers a masterpiece that stops in the world in its tracks Blackout was not one of these masterpieces to everyone.
It got widely dismissed as a career-ending flop, in the wake of her disastrous performance of “Gimme More” on the MTV Video Music Awards, stumbling through her dance moves, giving up halfway through. People decided Blackout was a pitiful crash-and-burn from a has-been skin job.
The performance was so bad that it caught the attention of South Park yes you read right South Park they did a whole episode on Britney Spears.
Honestly can’t remember why half her face is missing I haven’t watched this episode in ages anyways.
Blackout is where Britney vents all her raging party-girl hostility, from the way she snarls “I’m Miss American dream since I was 17” in “Piece of Me” to the way she spits “stupid freaking things” in “Why Should I Be Sad.” No wonder the radio got scared away this is her version of Lou Reed’s nihilistic noise opus Metal Machine Music. We’ll never know if Lou listened to it, but surely he would have admired a statement like “Get Naked (I Got A Plan).” Nobody has ever been able to explain how Blackout happened how a star in mid-meltdown managed to document it all so vividly. It’s not like anybody sat down and decided to make a great album, least of all the artist herself out of twelve tracks, the only two she had a hand in writing were “Freakshow” and “Ooh Baby Baby.” There was no production mastermind pulling strings behind the scenes. Blackout had an all-star team of circa-2007 hitmakers: Danja, Jim Beanz, T-Pain, Bloodshy & Avant, Freescha, Fredwreck, Henri Jonback, the Neptunes, the Clutch. Yet they all outdid themselves. Sonically, the abrasive robo-screech was years ahead of its time. It’s almost as if the producers and writers were using Blackout as a beta test, trying out their craziest ideas on the assumption that the album would bomb and nobody would listen.
By the time Blackout came out in October, everybody figured Brit was over. “Gimme More” reached Number Three on career momentum, but it stopped the other singles cold; “Piece of Me” stalled at Number Eighteen while “Break The Ice” missed the Top Forty. If you were in NYC for Halloween 2007, you probably remember the streets were crawling with Britneys serving the “Gimme More” lewk; half the ladies on the L train that night kept screaming “It’s Britney, bitch!”
Blackout is one of my favourite Britney Albums Every single song from this album is on all my playlists and that’s on what…… periodt ok bye dolls I’ll probably do another blog on this whole era and the tea and scandals that went down around this time.
Until next time stream blackout xx
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