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Originally written June 6, 2005. Let your mind wander over this tracklisting.
1. I'm A Slave 4 U
2. Overprotected
3. Lonely
4. I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman
5. Boys
6. Anticipating
7. I Love Rock 'n' Roll
8. Cinderella
9. Let Me Be
10. Bombastic Love
11. That's Where You Take Me
12. When I Found You
13. Before The Goodbye
14. What It's Like To Be Me
You knew it off by heart? Not me. I’ve always had a problem with the “Britney” album. I borrowed it out of the Library and they never asked for it back – that can’t be a good sign!
I first encountered it back when I was a hip-hop girl, listening ONLY to music with a danceable beat. And a lot of the tracks on “Britney” are not club music, they're mostly 4/4 like rock bands. Stomp, stomp, stomp!
To be fair, there were some tracks I always liked. INAG, a nice little ballad even though Radio 2 master-DJ Terry Wogan said she sounded like a munchkin on it. “That’s Where You Take Me” – kind of a spacy melody and beautiful, subtle, delicate vocal treatment. “When I Found You” – a wonderful ballad that gains intensity as it continues and just takes my breath away. “Anticipating” – the most fun ever on CD, a track that drives all cares away, shoots sunbeams through the dullest day!
But Lonely, Cinderella, Let Me Be, Bombastic Love, Before The Goodbye and What It’s Like To Be Me were all stop and start, pogo and jerk, no flow.
I really loved “I’m a slave 4 U”. I thought it was such a great track and it would fly to No.1 and the Britney-monster would roll on and on with her world domination. But it didn’t happen and I was shocked to sh~t. At that point I knew something very bad was happening in Britney’s career, something she didn’t deserve and I knew right then I had to defend her.
So I became a Britney-defender yet still not really a fan of her music. But after I fell in love with ITZ I started going back through her archive and began to love BOMT and Oops. “Britney” was the final frontier. So I started playing it in ways that get past my defences. In the car. Over headphones. And eventually it got inside of me.
Now I can enjoy the whole thing for its quality and power, the range of production styles, but most of all for the fact that Britney has sprinkled her magic dust over the whole thing and raised every track to a level that nobody else in pop can match.
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