In the event you’ve either
A) been living under a rock
or
B) are Hacks, and therefore seemingly immune to trends in pop-packaged consumerist music
let me hip you to a little clue: the VMAs are tonight. And MTV is promising that, this year, there’ll be “stellar, world-changing collaborations”.
Let me guess: Timbaland and Timberlake! Together! God, never, EVER, saw that one coming.
And…and…AMY WINEHOUSE will SHOW UP! Jesus, I’m earning my money today.
Or, or maybe…oh, wait…Dave Grohl and Mr Soul Machine? CRAZY!
(ok, that last one’s actually the most boring of any of them)
Granted, there’s no way in hell that my most desired duet, Rihanna and Beyonce doing a “My Umbrella’s To The Left” medley with, of course, a guest verse from Jay-Z (”My girls ganged up, all right/I’ma sleep outside tonight, ha ha, holla atcha boy etc etc etc” ), would ever happen. However, there sure as hell is a reason to care:
Apparently, Miss Spears is making a comeback.
No, no, no NOT Jamie Lynn Spears.
NO, not the picklepack bunch, either. Although one of their unnamed pickles certainly does look like a blondeish country bumpkin pop star we know…
Call her “Dyl Spears”.
No, I mean the one, the only, the not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman known formerly as Mrs. Federline. For those of you who are too young to remember life before Oh No They Didn’t, Britney Spears once kinda ruled the roost roundabout the pop parts (in a fashion akin to what Sylvester said to that crooked-ass police: “we had a life before you butted up in it”).
Britney may have gone bat-ape shit the past few…whatevers…, but she’s giving this pop music thing another go, and is confirmed to open the Video Music Award ceremonies tonight.
If you want to sneak some rehearsal footage, MTV has it here. But, if you want to hear the song she’s betting the reformation of her pop crown on:
Ok, so, initial thoughts:
1) Timbaland? Is that you?
2)Uh..”it’s Britney, bitch”? You’d better fucking hope this song ends up sticky and hooky as New Order’s bassist covered in jam, because otherwise TMZ’s gonna make that line bit you on your Funyun-tasting ass.
3) The vocal chopping and stuttering at the end is fucking awesome…if the world had never heard EVERYTHING THAT RESULTED FROM FUTURESEXLOVETIMBERLAKE.
I dunno. Britney, in a fashion akin to a handful of artists who always push shit forward, never releases the most flooring track first. Remember In The Zone, which was welcomed into the world like a lukewarm bath via the Madonna collaboration “Me Against The Music”? It wasn’t until a few months after the release that “Toxic” broke free and conquered. This one’s got potential for growth, especially if packed right at the front of a hot, hot 10 song album.
(Get that? 10 songs. TOTAL. Leave us wanting more, Brit.)
There’s another song circulating the dumptrucktubes right now:
Maybe “Cold As Fire” is the code-name for the secret Army Of Britneys that have really been doing all the unfortunate crack-whore-starlet antics attributed to their lord-and-master Spears as of late. Maybe this song is from a rejected 2005 album that never saw the light of day.
But it’s undoubtedly annoying as hell. According to Bette Noire, it “sounds like she’s vocalizing baby talk”-this is the sort of thing she could have gotten away with on the first album, but not one more time after. Now, with the aged Britney being what she is, it’s the sort of sped-up discocrank that sounds like a good idea at 5 A.M., three days later, after a few lines, a few shots and a BJ successfully given to a trachiotomied squirrel in the back of a Kia.
Regardless of whether this is old or new, the pervasive image that’s in the public conscious of Spears isn’t going to be shakeable. It’s that verysame public image that she’s going to have to re-mold, to fight against by sidestepping entirely. I hate to bring it up again, but fucking look at Timberlake. No one saw “Sexyback”, or the futureravefunkhump of the full LP, coming. He’d cried a river, sure, but no one saw him ejaculating glitter made of a fractured disco ball into it.
So, if you need a reason to watch the VMAs tonight, do it in memory of the dancefloor-wrecker pop sensation that Brit Brit was, before the grits and grit got her down-n-out. My money’s on her pulling the wig, stupid hat and HOW RUDE shades (which I am dubbing as a result of the origins of the wondertwins who popularized them), and revealing her actually-sexy short new haircut underneath, and letting fucking loose.
I hope. I. Hope.
And who knows? Maybe time will tell that this new stuff really IS fire.
But it’s left me pretty damn cold thus far.
(Oooh! Burn! See how I used the thread of “fire” imagery to pull the whole thing together? Yeah? Yeah? See that?See how the one song was “Cold As Fire” but I said it just “left me cold”? Ooh! Yeah! High five!)
If you need a reminder of the awesomeness that was Britney (and, apparently, once upon a time, Justice), here’s your remix, on Sunday:
Britney Spears and Madonna: Me Against The Music (Justice Remix)
