Penn: Morning Album Reviews — Britney Spears (Finale Part three, day five) (Patreon)

1/21 Britney Spears’ 2007 Blackout

As El’s essay How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair demonstrates, the combination of music and gender is a very delicate situation for trans youth. I owned Britney Spears’ 1999 debut record, …Baby One More Time, (the title track of which I have always despised) on CD. It was one of the first CDs I remember having, and I don’t particularly remember buying it. I think when you’re a 13 year old girl in 1999, Britney Spears albums just manifest on your black wire CD tower.

I listened to it well enough to have opinions: “(You Drive Me) Crazy” is a legitimately fun high energy dance number with an inexplicably smooth bridge followed by a guitar solo that just blast in from nowhere, “Thinkin’ About You” is having a conversation with R&B of its era, her take on Sonny Bono’s “The Beat Goes On” is just producers All Seeing I remaking their own cover of the song with a new vocal and failing again to improve on the original… though truth be told, I low-key loved it in 1999. But largely, I shelved it next to Spiceworld and Backstreet’s Back and went on with my life. I had rock and roll to discover, and the specific way Spears was sexualized (especially in the “Baby One More Time” video) made me exceptionally uncomfortable, not that I knew how to identify that at the time. It simply mirrored a deep discomfort I carried throughout my life, and I did not like it. It was time to put childish things away, and by 2000 no one bothered to make Oops!…I Did It Again materialize among my possessions.

There was some background noise about her, sure, but I had homework to finish, so it would be over a decade before I bothered to look back in on her as an artist. Even then, it’s pure happenstance; I had cable for the first time in several years, and caught the video of “Circus” from her 2008 record of the same name. I was obsessed with its rotating two-phase stylistic structure that keeps everything moving and its wide eyed confidence. Not to mention that the video is simply a visual masterpiece of lighting and direction. (Seriously, Chappell Roan wishes she was this cool.) Ultimately, the record Circus disappointed, but it sparked me to listen to some of her back catalog that I’d missed. As it turns out, what I had missed was Blackout.

Of course, it wasn’t just me that had to do a double take on the traumatized ex-Mouseketeer. I believe my opinions on Britney Spears to be broadly in sync with the general consensus in this year of our lord 2025, except, perhaps, in intensity. But this is my column, and we were literally just talking about reassessing records from the past. Not only is it not just a ‘60s thing, contrary to what I imply yesterday, it doesn’t end at the 90s, either. (I guess time really does move faster as you approach 40.)

Even still, very few artists have gotten quite the critical turnaround that Britney Spears has received in the years since the truth of her abusive conservatorship emerged and the general public realized that maybe that kid had a point, and we should leave Britney alone. Eventually, people started doing shit like inducting Blackout to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s library, and calling it a “punk masterpiece” (“If our girl could emerge from the wreckage [of her life in 2007] with an album like Blackout,” says Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone, a decade after the fact, “then there’s hope for us all.” I don’t know how hopeful or, for that fact, “emerged,” Spears felt, but you do you, Sheffield. We mad agree on the first part, at least.) 

But damn, we made her work for it, and for every other scrap of respect and peace she has. So, what the fuck was going on there? What makes Blackout such a uniquely good record? I think it’s the shaved head.

No, really. I mean it.

The timeline gets a little hard to follow at points but, basically she’d been working on Blackout since March of ‘06. She’d been married for a couple of years to Kevin Federline, who at the time was best known as a backup dancer, although now he is best known for being an absolute snake. In September ‘05, they had their first son, then nearly exactly a year later, their second.

“Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope,” she said on the topic, explaining that Federline was not around often, and so “no one was around to see [her] spiral—except every paparazzo in America.” 

Only two months after the second baby was born, Spears initiated a divorce, and was dealing with an already nasty custody battle. Only a couple months after that her aunt, with whom she’d been close, died of cancer. Spears is both constantly and never alone.

That February she went to a salon and asked to have her head shaved. The woman working there tried to convince her to reconsider, but when she turned to answer the phone, Spears began to shave her own head. There’s this photograph I love—and categorically we should not have it—of her in the middle of this. Before she looked to the window, (her security guard had been bribed to pulling the curtains open, of course) and we get that more crazed looking photograph that all the tabloids wanted to use as their cover, there’s one of her, finally alone for a moment, grinning at her reflection.

This is not a breakdown. Or, at least, it’s not exclusively one. This is a woman taking control, likely for the first time in recent memory. She calls it an “almost religious” experience; a way to “push back.” It also turns out to be the last bit of freedom she gets for years after. 

She was thrown in rehab. The day she got out, upon being denied access to her children by Federline, a paparazzo taunts her, asking “how does it feel?” Apparently, hitting his car with an umbrella didn’t answer his question; this seems like a skill issue on his part, as it’s a perfectly clear, and valid answer to me. In any case, she’s driven right back to rehab by her own mother.

In September of ‘07 she’d have a critically bad performance at the VMAs, and that was the last nail in the coffin of her public reputation. Britney was, as “Piece of Me,” the song that most grabbed my attention when I gave the record a listen years later, puts it “Mrs. ‘Oh my god, that Britney’s shameless!’” from that moment on.

In October, the Billboard charts would literally change their eligibility rules the day of release to keep Blackout from debuting at number one. Literally overnight, as if letting the crazy lady have a number one hit was going to be an affront to the Queens’ Silver Jubilee I suppose Blackout is a punk masterpiece, after all.  (Or are the Sex Pistols a boy band?)

Perfect for: “It’s Britney, bitch”