teen – DJTim:E's Pop Music Journal

So, I saw a tweet from Gay Times earlier this week, linking to a feature on their website, ranking Britney’s 9 studio albums to date. I felt compelled to start a rank-off (I said rank) with the long-running publication, as their columnist, Daniel Megarry reckoned “Glory” was the best she’s managed in her whole 21-year recording career…

Anyway, without further ado…

9 Britney Jean (2013)

I won’t be too mean and say the album is a f*cking embarrassment, shambles, Myah Marie’s debut album proper etc. However…

There was an air of excitement around the launch of this album, particularly when Britney returned to the public eye for the first time since she’d topped the charts worldwide with the Tulisa-penned “Scream and Shout”, 9 months before her appearance in the Nevada desert one September morning in 2013. She was there, with a gaggle of Britney-alikes to announce the announcement of her Vegas residency! Also, there was news that will.i.am was the executive producer on the forthcoming album, which Britney herself proclaimed to be her most personal album to date…if I didn’t think someone had been drugging her before……

Logic should have said something was going to be wrong with that statement… a “most personal” album, executive produced by a man, who had become famous the world over for taking any trace of personality out of the big-mega-radio-smashers he produced.

There was no reason for any PR to tell Britney to tell her interviewers, that the album was going to be that meaningful. She had been the queen of bops for 14 years by that point. However, her fans would have liked to have heard her voice on more than just one song, the Sia-penned “Perfume”. If and when Britney is heard on the rest of the album, she’s been layered numerous times with effects and/or Myah Marie, the controversial “backing singer” who was given a more prominent role on Britney albums by 2013.

The backlash was obvious: upon hearing the album, it tanked in the charts, with her lowest peaking album to date in the USA (#4) and even worse in the UK (#33). Team Britney realised the mis-step as well. Other than the one saving grace on the album, the top 10 hit “Work Bitch”, no other song was performed from “Britney Jean” on the Piece of Me residency by the time the next album was released just 2 years later.

5/10

8 Circus (2008)

This album was out in a flash; a clever piece of damage control on Team Britney’s part. I’ve mentioned Team Britney a few times, implying I don’t think Britney has been capable of doing anything herself. This isn’t her fault particularly. The way she has been put out there since the ambulance incident of January 2008, has suggested she has become more of a pop puppet since then, than when she was on top of the world in 2000/01.

The album came a year after the release of “Blackout” and sounds like its weaker sibling. Danja was on hand for the album’s best deep cuts, including “Kill The Lights”. The album also had a perfect collection of singles “Womanizer”, “Circus” and “If U Seek Amy”, all accompanied by killer promo videos. The best song otherwise, was relegated to “bonus track” status, the garage-band-lite “Amnesia”. I think the reason why the song works so well is it’s one of the few songs Britney doesn’t sound electronically perfect, in fact she sounds so out of tune in parts, it’s refreshing! The rest of the album is either filler, unheard of on any Britney album since her 1999 debut (“Blur”, “Phonography”) or it’s verging on cringeworthy (“Mmm Papi”, “My Baby”, raise your hands). However, the damage was controlled successfully and a major tour went without a hitch if we ignore the Australia episode.

6.5/10

7 …Baby, One More Time

From reading articles on this album and its singles, I seem to be in the minority of people who think the Stop! Remix of “Crazy” is superior to the original mix, as featured on Britney’s debut album. It’s appearance would have been welcome on a hypothetical reissue of this collection.

Like with many pop debuts, a lot of shit was thrown at the wall to see what would stick. No surprises, it was the Max Martin songs which shone the most (the title track, “Crazy”, “I Will Be There”) and would shape the sophomore album. Her first single carries the collection well enough on its own to not be further down this chart.

Other notable songs: “Born To Make You Happy”, “From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart”.

7/10

6 Glory (2016)

A lot of fans regard this as part of the “Holy Trinity” of Britney albums, along with “In The Zone” and “Blackout”. I can only assume that is because it’s the first album in recent history where Britney sounded like a human rather than a humanoid.

This is Britney Spears, a girl/woman who made a brand for herself by being affiliated with songs that you danced hard to, shoved a straw behind your ear and pretended to have a microphone to lip-sync in (just me?…) I don’t know anyone who bought into the brand for her vocal acrobatics. Her tone is enough (this is no excuse for Myah though!). They should have just let the music do the talking.

Instead, what we were given as an apology for “Britney Jean”, was a collection of MOR songs which wouldn’t have sounded wrong on a Justin Bieber album. No surprises then, that the same writers that he used on his most recent album were drafted in to create most of “Glory”.

There were some high points, don’t get me wrong; “If I’m Dancing” (WHAT A SONG!), “Private Show” (yes, I’m the one who likes “Private Show”), “Do You Wanna Come Over”, the modern day sibling of “Toxic”.

Although Britney’s worst selling album to date (this can be somewhat attributed to the collapse of the physical album market against her aging core fan base), “Glory” served the purpose of telling people Britney is still around, to a small degree…but not enough that she needs to carry on down this route for the forthcoming 10th album. Please bring Danja, Max and Bloodshy & Avant back!

7/10

5 Britney (2001)

I was bought “Britney” for my 16th birthday, by which point the song “I’m a Slave 4 U” had been the only single from this album. I therefore didn’t hold much hope that this album would be a patch on her previous collection, “Oops….”

For all the bitching the stans do about Britney’s team, the more I type, the more I realise how much of Britney’s career has been successful because of the team who are now so derided.

This album was the one where she started to become a woman (“I’m Not a Girl”…) and was loosely the soundtrack to Britney’s only feature film to date, “Crossroads”. It was also the last album for 10 years that Max Martin and his writing team at Cheiron were involved with. Bubblegum was out and Janet Jackson mk2 was in.

For me, it took until I was 22, to get into this album. Then it all clicked. The collection has a lot of of-its-time sounds in the form of tracks like “Lonely”, “Boys”, “Slave” but also one of Martin’s best compositions “Cinderella”. Word has it the upcoming Britney musical will feature this track which is excellent news! This is also the last album where you really hear “sweet” Britney, in the form of “When I Found You”.

A great album, even if it took me 6 years to realise it.

7.5/10

4 Oops! I Did It Again… (2000)

This is one of those albums I remember where I was the first time I listened to it- the listening post in Our Price, Burton-on-Trent. It was like an eargasm, hearing the first growling note of “Stronger”, coming straight off the back of the “innocent” on its title track, without a stop for air, before it abruptly hushes….just stops, in fact. Like WTF?!

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough pocket money that day to buy the album there and then. Sad times.

When I did finally have the album in my little Boots CD micro system, I was overjoyed. The best bits of “Baby, One More Time…” stretched across 15 songs, courtesy of Max and co. It takes 9 songs to hit a bump in the road (“Where Are You Now”)…Before then the listener is treated to all the singles, including “Lucky” and “Don’t Let Me Be The Last To Know”, plus a cover of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Britney speaking to her friends on the phone in somewhat unnecessarily forced segues into the next songs.

In hindsight, having Britney change tact for the 3rd album was probably the best career move. I don’t know that a 3rd collection of bubblegum gems would have worked in the long run, especially knowing how fickle us pop fans can be in our formative years.

8/10

So my Holy Trinity of Godney goes like this:

Blackout, Femme Fatale, In The Zone. But, in which order?

So, let’s start with the common favourite…

3 Blackout (2007)

I’ll be honest, the music is probably ever-so slightly better on this album than my #2. However, sentimentality has come into play with this one.

What a perfect urban/pop crossover album. Saying that, when the album was released, I connected to it about as much as Britney seems to have done with “Britney Jean”. I was much more invested in Girls Aloud and my first boyfriend.

As I mentioned in my recent post on the 8th anniversary of the leak of “Femme Fatale”, it’s only been recently I’ve appreciated just how shit a time Britney must have been having during the post-Kevin, pre-Vegas years. So, the trips to the hairdressers, the hospital and the umbrella shop all now shape the way I listen to “Blackout”. The song that always makes me the most emotive, is “Break The Ice”. This was released as a single not long after Britney looked like she was going to do something catastrophic to herself, not helped by the fact the promo video was an animé film, which ends halfway through the song. I always now think about the what ifs, get quite sad but, this feeling helps me really feel the song more as it plays.

Other highlights are “Gimme More”, “Piece Of Me”, “Radar”…actually it might be easier to mention the lowlight, “Ooh Ooh Baby”, which ironically seems to have been the inspiration for the perfect “Womanizer”.

I get why this album is adored by the ~~gays~~ fans so much. If it weren’t for sentiment, I’d put it at the top of my list too.

9.5/10

2 In The Zone (2003)

This was a massive surprise. After still not being enamoured by the whole not-a-girl phase, all I could go on, in a time before I had a computer to listen to any leaks, was the first single, “Me Against The Music”. The single was picked up during my lunch break when I was a trainee accountant, from Woolworths if my memory serves me correctly. The Rishi Rich remix was also perfection.

But, even-so, could one single really be enough for me to be ready for what I was about to experience?

2004 would become the year I saw Britney live for the first time, she’d become a bad bitch in the news and, I’d batter my copy of “In The Zone” through constant plays. I think the only other albums that would get a look in that year would be Scissor Sisters’ debut and Anastacia’s “sprock” album.

“Toxic” was perfect, obviously. Bloodshy & Avant were the producers of the moment (and would become Galantis years later) and Cathy Dennis was the songwriter of the time, responsible for “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” for the real Kylie, “Don’t Stop Movin'” for S Club 7 and “Anything Is Possible” for Will Young. The combination of this songwriter with these producers also created Rachel Stevens’ debut solo smash “Sweet Dreams My LA Ex”. We’re all glad the other singers rejected “Toxic” though.

This album was so good because it, like its predecessor, “Blackout” felt a bit darker than what had come from Britney previously. The vocals on “In The Zone” were less processed, the tracks were mainly co-written by Britney for the first and (to date) the last time. It has her apology to Justin, “Everytime”, which she managed to mime on piano during the Onyx Hotel Tour. Queen of Faking It! ❤

It also helped that this was the year I went from a Britney fan to a Britney stan. The press started going to town on her but, at this time time she seemed to relish in it. I remember shortly after her quickie wedding to Jason Alexander, she was in a newspaper stating she was planning to get one up on Justin Timberlake, after he’d managed to forge a solo career with significant help from the diss track “Cry Me A River”, and beat the levels of success he’d managed the previous 12 months.

Oh and she sang about her hand as well.

9.5/10

1 Femme Fatale (2011)

I’m not going to say much about this album here as there’s plenty of detail in my post, celebrating the 8th anniversary of its leak here.

However, this is my favourite Britney album, because it’s just got the best writing and production team (personal lives aside) in Max Martin and ** ****. It had just enough will.i.am, Ina Wroldsen and Darkchild thrown in for good measure. I’m a stereotypical gay to a certain degree, therefore I love the album for its saturation in autotune. The vocal effects are part of Britney’s legacy after all.

It has “I Wanna Go”.

Enough said.

10/10. I’d give it 11 if that wasn’t stupid.

So, it’s over to you now. In which order would you rank Britney’s 9 albums? Let me know in the comments below.

They were the darlings of the Brit Awards 2019. Following a controversial performance of “Woman Like Me” where Jesy nearly got her tuppence out on national telly, managing not to mis-step during the awkward-as-hell, but equally hilarious, interview with show host Jack Whitehall, and THEN going on to win the “Best Video” category, with the aforementioned song, they had a decent night.

The award could have been for “Best Hair” for all it mattered as this award was, essentially a fan vote, based on who could get the most hash tags on Twitter. It would seem the Mixers (the fans) are a devoted bunch of girls and gays.

So what happened to all those people who got off the bus between their biggest era to date, the “Glory Days” album campaign, and this, the “LM5″/leaving Simon Cowell phase?

In summer 2018, following another successful tour, Little Mix were the featured vocalists on Cheat Codes’ most recent hit “Only You”. Formulaic, plinky-plonky EDM-lite for the Capital Radio listener to lap up. Even that wasn’t enough to reach the top 10 in the UK. The last time the girls were linked to a single, unavailable on any album, was when they teamed up with CNCO for a revocalised version of the Latin American boyband’s record-breaking smash, “(Bailamos) Reggaeton Lento”. This song, released in the UK just 8 months prior, smashed into the top 5 and helped propel (a 4th edition of) the 4th Mix album, over the million sales barrier, something they’d not achieved before.

Go further back and, Little Mix could have been as musically credible as Girls Aloud once were when they were released from the X Factor(y), by unleashing songs which bucked the trend time and time again: “Wings” (UK #1 in 2012), “DNA” (UK top 3 hit), “Move” (UK top 3 smash in 2013). The first 2 albums, “DNA” and “Salute” weren’t particularly big sellers- they sold well, don’t get me wrong, about 1 million globally between the pair of them. The music was well crafted as well as the injection British pop needed in the first half of this decade.

Rather than continue down the precarious route of music snobbery and turning into the NME’s bum chums, someone saved the group from Simon’s free-swinging axe, by giving them “Black Magic”. The song was the soundtrack to the summer of 2015 even though it had more than a whiff of 80s throwback to it. Being so backward-thinking was a pretty radical move. This song helped turn the group from fair-to-middling chart touchers to ring-shitters round every girl group since the Spice Girls 15 years before them.

2016 and 2017 saw Little Mix become Simon Cowell’s biggest act at the time and with it came a deluge of singles featuring tagged-on rent-a-rappers including Machine Gun Kelly, Stormzy and Kid Ink. Was this Syco’s attempt to break the group into the American market after the almost-but-not-quite attempt a few years before? Well, it didn’t work and the Mixers started to get a bit fed up of it. The Twitterati began to question whether the group would ever release a single on their own again?

So when “Only You” was the first new single in a while, there was a lot of anticipation. What a disappointment it turned out to be. Where was the bombast and sass that made Little Mix trail blazers? OK, so no act gets a 100% strike rate. (“Headlines” anyone?) Let’s see what happens when NICKI MINAJ is featured on the first single proper from “LM5”. Nicki can be the icing on most pop singles if she’s affixed somewhere in the proceedings. “Woman Like Me” was the start of Little Mix’s Year of the Woman campaign, aka the LM5 era. After the success of the last few ‘first’ singles from their albums, there was expectation for this song to blow everything before it out the park.

Instead, the song didn’t hit the top spot and 4 months on from its release, its UK Spotify streams aren’t as stratospheric as those LM songs before it. Never mind, the album will rectify this surely? The answer was a resounding “no”. Upon release, the album sold 50,000 copies in week 1, reaching number 3 in the UK, before falling out of the top 10 within a fortnight! “LM5” has now been out for 3 months, with a moderately successful first single proper and 3 promo singles which went OK. “Strip” was the biggest hit of the promo tracks, hitting the top 30 for a week. Not bad, but, in a market full of ladies promoting stripping back to basics, including the massive Christmas hit “Thursday” by Jess Glynne (who, coincidentally or not, co-wrote “Woman Like Me” and shares certain lyrics on this song with “Strip”) it feels like the track didn’t go on to become the runaway hit the record label hoped (the fact a video was made for it as well suggests there was an attempt to push this all the way). Again, something didn’t quite connect with the general public.

2nd single “Think About Us” has yet to even enter the UK top 20, even with a feature from Ty Dolla Sign, who helped make fellow X Factor group Fifth Harmony score their biggest hit with “Work From Home” 3 years earlier. The album has struggled past the 100,000 sales mark in the UK which is pretty awful for their standards and is so far their worst seller by a mile. Now the Christmas market has long died, which they relied on for the last 7 years to hit the massive sales, it’s not looking good. Is this the reason Simon split with the girls? He jumped as soon as he could see the Little Mix ship was sailing.

The group have stated that “LM5” is the album they always wanted to make. Maybe, too much input from the girls is the reason they’ve disconnected somewhat. Manufactured groups who go from having everything mapped out for them to trying to do it their way hardly ever works very well (examples: Spice Girls ditching their manager which undoubtedly helped Geri think she’d be better to leave, STEPS going for a more grown-up sound in 2001, Girls Aloud doing a song without Xenomania?!?!) Perhaps poorer ratings for The X Factor in 2018 and their absence from the series finale, which they were usually the star performers in these shows, meant too few people in their target audience were watching what they were doing.

Here are my predictions for what will happen next for Little Mix:

Once the campaign for this album has dried up (which I fear will happen sooner than anyone had hoped during its creation), they will announce an “hiatus” upon completion of their Autumn tour, for which tickets luckily went on sale before anyone could get used to LM5 (or not as the case seems to be). I would hope that the girls realise from history, that going solo probably won’t work out and they still need each other to be successful. So, they could return in 2021 for a 10th anniversary celebration and bring out an album free of featured rent-a-rappers, with a sound reminiscent of their “Get Weird” collection. Maybe they could do an Olly Murs and tag on a 2nd CD with their greatest hits.

I really hope Little Mix don’t quit altogether because the coins aren’t coming in as vast an amount. I don’t think they’ll be able to pull off enough of a credible facade to reclaim their former glory days without the power of the Syco machine chugging along in the background…especially when the music isn’t quite there either.

Tag: teen

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