441. Britney Spears, "Blackout"

 


What were you doing in 2007?  I moved in with my girlfriend, soon to be wife, and got a dog.  All that domestic stuff!  It was a very nice year for me.  Britney Spears was not having that great a year.  Remember that scene of her shaving her head in front of thousands of popping flashbulbs?  2007.  Filed for divorce?  Temporarily lost custody of her kids?  All in 2007.

Somehow, during all this, she managed to put out what until yesterday I did not know was "the best and most influential album of her career," and even "one of the most influential albums of the last decade for the way it suffused hip hop, pop, R&B and EDM."  What I did find out, as soon as I put it on, is that this album is the Good Horny rejoinder to yesterday's Dark Horny.  Britney is out here and she wants to get it!

Ooh, ooh baby
Touch me and I come alive
I can feel you on my lips
I can feel you deep inside
Ooh, ooh baby
In your arms, I finally breathe
Wrap me up in all your love
That's the oxygen I need, yeah

Not exactly a Shakespearean sonnet, I know, but this song - titled, not incredibly cleverly, "Ooh Ooh Baby" - is just one of many pop gems on this album.  I was actually surprised by how much I liked this album, which I guess I shouldn't have been, because who doesn't like relentless hooks?  In fact, I was thinking you could probably take most/any of these songs and play them on acoustic guitar and they'd still be pretty good songs, with all the synth and room-shaking low end stripped out.  To wit, here you go: a very nice acoustic cover of the album's opener, "Gimme More."

Before I looked at the credits, I was expecting to see Max Martin all over the songwriting credits but no, it's Bloodshy and Avant, a DIFFERENT Swedish team of pop genii (Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg), who are also members of Miike Snow, who I already knew for their own insanely catchy synth-pop songs, so I guess I'm not surprised to find them here.  I was actually trying to place where I remembered the beat-drop-coinciding-with-the-start-of-the-chorus thing that happens here on a couple of songs and it's definitely a Miike Snow thing as well. 

I guess it speaks to the compartmentalization of music today that before yesterday I had never heard a single song from this album.  In 2007 I guess I was cloistered in my whiny white boy guitar rock or whatever.  Once again, I'm pleased to meet this album.

(My favorite albums in 2007 included Okkervil River's The Stage Names; The Weakerthans' Reunion Tour; Andrew Bird's Armchair Apocrypha; Scissors for Lefty's Underhanded Romance; and Black Lips' Good Bad Not Evil.  Like I said, mostly whiny white boys.)

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