Category Archives: March pop

Radio Pop That Didn’t

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These reviews originally ran on Madeloud.
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Brooke Valentine
Physical Education Mix Tape

Houston native Brooke Valentine’s debut, Chain Letter, was one of the greatest R&B albums of the oughts…or of all time, for that matter. From the loping, burping strut of “Pass Us By,” to the tongue-in-cheek goth-funk of “I Want You Dead” to the aching, breathy heartbreak of “Laugh Til I Cry,” Chain Letter was all over the place stylistically, but tied together with humor, smarts, and audacity. Valentine and mad genius producer Deja were convinced down to the giant flying bat on Brooke’s half-shirt that female-helmed R&B could be every bit as bizarre and crazy as rap by the likes of Outkast and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and they were damned well going to prove it.

Musically they succeeded, and then some. Commercially…well, that’s a different story. Chain Letter had only one bona-fide hit, the funny but relatively unadventurous Lil’ Jon produced “Girlfight.” Singles released to promote her follow-up went nowhere, and after months of hemming and hawing by her distributor, Virgin, the album was shelved and she limped back to Deja’s Subliminal label.

Earlier this year, Physical Education, the album that never was, was finally released by Subliminal as a mixtape. It’s definitely a retrenchment. The flashes of bizarre wit and eclecticism are gone; there aren’t even any ballads here, much less profanity-laced tirades against valley girls. Instead, what we’ve got is track after track of deep, throbbing, ominous Houston crunk.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Valentine and Deja may be working to keep the smarts on the down-low, but try as they will, they can’t quite make a duff track. Valentine is not by any means a great singer, but throughout the album her throaty whispers and moans drip sex and insouciance. The production (I presume by Deja, though there were rumors that Valentine did some of it herself) is also stellar. Pimped Out is built around a weird synth motif that sounds almost like an electronic duck has been drafted to quack rhythmically while Chamillionaire raps along. “Make It Drop” has some of the funniest rear-obsessed lyrics this side of Sir Mixalot: “I can make that ass pop/like hydraulics on drop; I can make that ass stop/like you runnin’ from the cops.” “Gold Diggin’” starts with a wash of demi-classical synth strings and then opens out into a heavy, hesitating thump which also somehow manages to swing hard enough to lift Valentine and the uncredited guest rapper up off the backing like they’re jazz performers. “Thug Passion,” too has an impossibly hooky stuttery beat which keeps you off-balance no matter how many times it repeats.

The only thing I miss here is the 2006 “D-Girl” single, with its surging keyboards and that sample from N.W.A. pattering through the tough production like a whispered, half-forgotten threat. Even with that track left off, though, this is still hands down my favorite R&B release of 2009 to date. So if you’re going to download it, be sure to pay for it, would you? I don’t want Valentine and Deja to completely run out of money before they release their next full length.
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Allure
Patiently Waiting; Time’s Up (4 stars)

Like everyone else, the vocal group Allure was pulled along in the wake of Destiny’s Child in the early 2000s, abandoning the smooth jams of the 90s for a tighter, funkier, more hip-hop friendly sound. But where Beyoncé has moved on, Allure got stuck. Their new ep (Patiently Waiting) and album (Time’s Up) both sound like they’ve dropped through a wormhole from 2001.

Which is kind of great. Nothing against today’s radio, but there was really something special about that moment a decade or so ago when R&B songwriting and production suddenly caught on fire — a mixture of newbie fumbling and professional calculation as hip hop realized that this, this right here was the way it was going to take over the world. No doubt there’ll be an uncomfortable retro-early-oughts movement any time now, but this isn’t that. Instead, Allure clearly just never got the memo that itchy/cheesy Kevin Briggs beats aren’t where the market is at.

Patiently Waiting takes that obliviousness and runs with it. From the sweeping, harmonized tough-girl-threats-with-horn-sample of “What Goes Around;” to the materialist tinny looped steel-drum reworking of “Favorite Things;” to “Treat Him Rite” with overdriven eighties video game bleeps that somehow slide right into a sexy, laid-back groove — it’s 20 perfect minutes of gloriously out-of-date pop. Hell, even the obligatory skit is great, featuring some of the most piercing shrieks I’ve ever heard outside of a Diamanda Galas album.

Twice as long, Time’s Up has a bit more filler, but it’s still plenty good. “The Other Side” is awesome faux early Timbaland, with layers of beats and squeaky vocal hiccups bounding around each other while the singers volley “you’re a no good cheater” lines back and forth between the soloist and the harmony backup. “With Out U” is a great mid-tempo disco roll — Andy Gibb for the hip hop generation. “Walk in My Shoes” is something of a rote ballad with too, too gospel vocals — but even so, the low-key guitar playing and the harmonizing makes it listenable.

It’s those harmonies that are maybe the most refreshing thing about the album. Not to take anything away from the amazing sucrose delivery system that is Danity Kane, but there’s also really something to be said for a group whose vocal arrangements are tight enough to add hooks to the song, rather than just keeping up with the production.

Even Beyonce herself has given up on the vocal group aspects of her legacy these days, so it’s up to groups like Allure and the similarly-backward-looking Cherish to keep the faith. Not a good career move, exactly — harking back a decade is no way to get radio play. In fact, both Patiently Waiting and Time’s Up are CD-Rs, burned on demand, which suggests the singers themselves don’t expect to move a ton of copies. But whether or not anyone buys it, this is still some of my favorite music of the year — even if it is the wrong one.
 

No Longer Destiny’s Child

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These reviews first ran on Splice Today here and here.

Beyonce, 4

“I Was Here” off Beyonce’s latest album, 4, is one of those songs that makes you re-evaluate an artist’s entire oeuvre in light of the capacious bucket of liquid feces that has just been upended on your noggin.

Not that Beyonce hasn’t spawned crap before… and crap of similar provenance. She’s always had a weak spot for surly self-vaunting, reaching perhaps its apex in 2001’s “Survivor,” a song devoted largely to taunting the two women she’d forced out of her band. Still, crass as it was, “Survivor” at least had a hook. “I Was Here,” on the other hand, brings all the self-absorption and none of the pop smarts. Beyonce takes a deep breath and belches out barrels of Broadway glop, enthusing over her own career success with unembarrassed egotism and Hallmark card triteness. (“I want to leave my footprints on the sands of time…want to leave something to remember so they won’t forget.”) Moving into her second decade of mega-success, Beyonce is proud to let us know that she’s got absolutely nothing to talk about except how cool it is to be mega-successful. She makes her mirror look deep.

In fairness, this has always been a big part of Beyonce’s appeal. Male rock and rap stars are notorious narcissistic assholes, but female performers, from Madonna on down, tended to seduce their listeners with at least as much vulnerability as swagger. Beyonce, though, was all about the girl power put-down; from “Bills, Bills, Bills” through “Irreplaceable” through “Single Ladies,” Ms. Knowles never pleads when she can sneer instead. Her message isn’t so much “I Will Survive” as it is “Fuck. You.”

As rock and rap have shown, “fuck you” is a pretty popular slogan, and Beyonce has certainly opened the way for women in pop R&B to be bigger jerks. It’s hard to imagine how we would have gotten from Ashanti and early Mariah Carey to Ke$ha and Lady Gaga without Beyonce in the middle.

But while Knowles may have broadened the range of attitudes available for female pop singers, her own emotional reach has always been limited. She can be triumphant, she can be hectoring… or, yeah, she can be triumphant. It’s pretty clear at this point that she’ll never manage a song like her former bandmate Kelly Rowland’s “Still in Love With My Ex,” a rapturously heartbreaking track about betraying yourself and everyone you care about. To sing that song, Rowland had to admit to weakness, and Beyonce isn’t going to do that any more than Robert Plant or Snoop Dogg would. When Knowles talks about being hopelessly in love on “Rather Die Young,” it’s all about burning out before you get old; James Dean and gasoline and leaving a beautiful corpse. Similarly, “Start Over,” about a love she can’t leave behind, ends up as a surging future-hope anthem. Rowland’s adult despair and self-loathing—or, say, Patsy Cline’s—might as well be in another language. Beyonce’s a rock star, and rock stars kick life in the ass; life does not kick them.

Rock stars also look really stupid when they get old enough to know better… and there’s some indication that Beyonce may run into that problem as well. Her longevity has been astonishing in a genre where careers are often measured in months rather than year, but, however belatedly, her shtick is starting to fray.

“Best Thing I Never Had” is Beyonce once again kissing off some dumb dude with a mid-tempo lyricism that is much less engaging than “Irreplaceable”; “Run The World (Girls)” is a percussive girl power jam without the humor or novelty of “Single Ladies.” “Love on Top” tries to re-energize the flailing diva by reaching even further back, all the way to Destiny’s Child‘s first album and the summery, girl-group vibe of “No, No, No.” Beyonce responds with a strident, hog-calling vocal that dutifully beats the song’s would-be flirtatiousness to death and dances on its corpse.

There are a couple of bright spots on the album. “Countdown” is a bizarre, lurching mini-masterpiece; with horns, steel drums, keyboard bleeps, and a bizarrely out of sync Boyz II Men sample all bouncing around each other as Beyonce declaims and soars and even woofs like a dawg. It’s weird and sexy and hip—more like an Amerie or Robyn track than most of Beyonce’s solo work. She’s still got some fire in her, so maybe 4 is just an unfortunate detour, and she’ll figure out a way to make decent albums again. I won’t hold my breath though. Once rock stars start to suck, there’s generally no going back.
 
Kelly Rowland, Here I Am
The cover of Destiny’s Child’s 1999 mega-smash Writing’s on the Wall shows three blindingly hot women swathed in clingy white diaphanous nothings—and, Kelly Rowland. Beyonce, LaTavia, and LeToya look like they’re ready, waiting, and eager for superstardom; like they’ve spent their whole lives preparing for the moment when they could bare their shoulders and be showered with adulation and cash. Rowland, on the other hand, has a deer-in-the-headlights stare. You can almost see the cartoon thought bubble above her head, “Are we done yet? Can I put on some clothes now?”

It’s not that Rowland is particularly unattractive for a civilian. But standing next to Beyoncé Knowles, one of the more heart-stoppingly beautiful women on the planet, she does end up looking a little horse-faced—like the sit-com best-friend, carefully chosen not to upstage the star. Rowland, who lived with the Knowles’ from the time she was 14, solidified her stand-by-your-BFF cred when she remained with Beyoncé during LeToya and LaTavia’s acrimonious split from the band. On subsequent albums, Rowland did her usual thing, flanking Beyoncé and new bandmate Michelle Williams, looking hot but not too hot. A notable exception is DC’s 2001 Christian album, where the trio all wear something approaching street clothes and Rowland actually seems… comfortable.

Destiny’s Child is long gone, and Rowland has invested in breast implants—but whether she’s an A or a B-cup, in a band or out, she’s still a second stringer. Her only big hit without Beyoncé, 2002’s “Dilemma,” wasn’t a solo success, but a collaboration with Nelly. Her post-DC solo album, Ms. Kelly, didn’t do squat in terms of sales, though it was surprisingly strong musically. Its first track, “Like This,” featured Rowland’s thick Houston accent wrapping itself around a sparse head-nodding hook. The song had character and made you remember why you always liked that best friend on the sitcom better than the boring lead.

The same cannot be said for Rowland’s latest album. In some ways, this is the logical culmination of her career—a work devoid of ambition or vision, designed to underwhelm on every level. The title, Here I Am, seems to have been chosen specifically for purposes of self-refutation. The opening song, “I’m Dat Chick,” is resolutely anonymous. Rowland’s accent is obliterated in an onslaught of autotune, and Tricky Stewart provides a bland anthemic backing.

That’s how it goes throughout. Ke$ha uses autotune to give her castrating party girl persona a snotty adenoidal edge; Britney uses autotune to turn herself into a robot. Rowland, though, just uses it to rub off the edges of her personality, like she’s afraid you’ll notice that she’s singing without a real frontwoman. The obligatory guest appearances by various rappers just drive the point home more painfully. Rowland’s pro forma cooing on “Motivation” sounds lame on its own… but when you put it next to Lil Wayne’s languidly, goofily lascivious rap (“I put her on the plate/and then I do the dishes”), the putative star’s lack of star power becomes actively embarrassing.

It’s a well-known truth that pop success is far more about marketing than musical talent or genius. Lady Gaga isn’t an especially gifted musician, and she doesn’t even look like the typical pop star sex bomb—but despite all that she has charisma out the meat dress. Rowland, on the other hand, has neither sex appeal nor marketing smarts. She poses topless on Vibe, and the media reacts as if a bra fell in the forest and there was no one around to hear.

The sad thing about this is that with Destiny’s Child and even on her own, Rowland has been involved in making a fair amount of great music. Ms. Kelly is arguably better than any of Beyonce’s solo albums, and the harmonies of Beyonce and Kelly together with their bandmates are some of the most heavenly musical sounds of the early 2000s. On Here I Am, though, Rowland is swallowed by her own lack of wattage, trying so hard to be a diva with charisma that she sounds like any random diva, minus the charisma. It’s a reminder, maybe, of the many ways in which pop stars find themselves constrained. Everyone knows that you only get an audience if you make a certain kind of music and have a certain kind of image. But Rowland’s career suggests, too, that failing to sell your image can in certain circumstances, not only reduce your audience, but can also end up gutting your music.

Pop Ephemera

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These reviews all ran on Knoxville Metropulse
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Mariah Carey, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel

Nineteen years into her career, Mariah Carey remains almost uncannily consistent. Though she’s had her ups and downs, certainly, she is, at this stage, neither a bloated self-parody nor a longtimer settling into a comfortable groove of second-tier irrelevance. Instead, she’s what she always was — an immensely talented singer and songwriter who is also the apotheosis of MOR. So thoroughly does she embody easy-listening that she transforms everything she touches. A shout out to ODB? A handful of dancehall oh-oh-ohs? Even, believe it or not, marching band arrangements? All of it turns seamlessly to sugary smooth radio gold — “Candy Bling” as one particularly appropriate song title puts it.

Some may sneer at the plastic artificiality of it all; Jim Derogatis, for example, whined his indie-rock whine about how Mariah’s too corporate because she has Elle ads in her CD. And, yeah, it’s true — she’s not torn up over her success like Kurt was. But perhaps in part for that reason, she was able to stick around, and so we have songs like “h.a.t.e.u,” a languid break-up ballad begging for a change that never comes. “I can’t wait to hate you,” she sings in harmony with herself, hitting her inevitable whistle register notes like overdetermined cries of pain. The familiarity is comfort and ache both at once — the sadness and joy of still, still, still being yourself. Mariah really does make more sense the longer she stays at it, laying down the same surface over and over with painstaking craft, until even our shallowest dreams and hurts seem to echo with depth.
 
AmerieIn Love & War
If funk could walk, the first twelve minutes of In Love & War would be Jesse Owens. Producer Rich Harrison may be gone, but Amerie can still slam the dance floor harder than anyone since Prince — and at moments you have to wonder if even the unpronounceable glyph himself wouldn’t have to jump back and beg for mercy at the virile swagger packed into Amerie’s every devastating “ooo!” The jagged, repetitive drums and percussive horns of “Tell Me You Love Me” are (gloriously) reminiscent of Amerie’s own “1 Thing”; “Heard ‘Em All is based around a sinuous pseudo-Bollywood loop that gets worked so hard it transmutes into rasta declamation. “Dangerous” and “Higher” combine classic rock and funk into a seamless, explosive package that makes even successful fusions like P.E. or Funkadelic seem a little naïve and klutzy.

There are nine more songs here, but…well, really the less said about them the better. Amerie’s clipped, declamatory phrasing, so perfect on the funk, sounds blandly uninvolved when she slows down the tempo, and even her best ballads come nowhere near the passion or invention of Mariah Carey…or even Britney, for that matter. Someday, maybe, Amerie will recognize her strengths and make an album that kicks from start to finish — and when she does, that album will be one of the greatest funk documents of all time. In the meantime, if four perfect tracks are all I get, I’ll take them and say “thank you.”
 
Alice Keys,Element of Freedom

“I just want you to feel a sense of freedom, I want you to feel out-of-the-box, feel inspired,” Alicia Keys said about her new album on BET. And, yep, Element of Freedom sounds exactly like she wants you to feel that. There’s lots of breathing in earnestly to tell you that she’s, like; earnest; lots of inspirational lyrics about how she wants to know how it feels to fly and how she’ll be waiting through distance and time. And lots of songs which start soft and then swell up as she emotes. Earnestly.

Amidst all the classy blandness and kind-of-funky-but-oh-not-too-much hooks, the Beyonce collaboration struts in like a red hot diva determined to set someone’s dreary ass on fire. Suddenly we’re talking about texting over a beat that isn’t embarrassed to be a fucking beat, and you’ve got a vocalist singing nonsense lyrics not like she’s earnest, but like she’s going to throw you down on the ground and grind your NAACP Image Award so hard that it breaks in half.

As for the rest of the album…well, Keys’ piano-driven “Empire State of Mind” probably isn’t significantly more clichéd and/or unendurable than Billy Joel’s piano-driven “New York State Of Mind.” Faint praise, yeah, but it’s all I’ve got.

The Groove That Ended

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This first appeared in The Chicago Reader.
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Today fabulous divas and thuggy rappers use the same producers. They sing about the same things—mainly clubbin’ and sex. They date each other. And they appear not just on the same radio stations but on the same tracks. For all practical purposes, hip-hop and R&B have merged into a single commercial juggernaut.

Ashanti, who’s been out of circulation for four years, has already proven herself a diva, but her big comeback, The Declaration, is also her attempt to fully and finally embrace radio reality. It’s the album where she shakes off the influence of label owner Irv Gotti and hooks up with a bunch of megaproducers to prove she can rock the dance floors of the late aughts even harder than she rocked the bedrooms of 12-year-old girls in 2002.

That was the plan, anyway. But The Declaration is completely anonymous. It feels like it could’ve been put together by any second- or third-rate R&B diva—Christina Milian, say, or Lumidee. It’s not terrible, and there are some nice moments—the piano loop on the lead single, “The Way That I Love You,” works well, and “In These Streets” gets lodged in your head in that pleasurable/painful way certain pop songs do—but the moments of inspiration are fleeting. Even Rodney Jerkins, who’s been on fire these past couple of years, seems to be sleepwalking; his production job on “So Over You” sounds like he unearthed a duff Brandy track from ten years ago and remixed it while doing his taxes. “Girlfriend” is a dreary knock-off of Ciara’s “Promises.” And Akon’s contribution to “Body on Me” is just like every other one of his wack misogynist whines—the man is a one-trick blight.

Even more distressing, though, is the slide in Ashanti’s singing. She’s largely abandoned the slightly nasal burr that put a poignant catch in everything she did. Gone too are the smarts, which made her one of the most underrated pop singers in the business despite her thin voice. Nothing here matches the aching pause in “I’m so… happy, baby” (from “Happy,” on her self-titled debut), the clipped, funky stutter in “Focus,” or the jazzy phrasing that swings her sublimely off the beat in “Don’t Let Them” (both from 2004’s Concrete Rose).

On The Declaration Ashanti runs through a smorgasbord of vocal styles. On “You Gonna Miss” she vacillates between a hard-edged pseudo-Beyonce and a processed pseudo-Ciara. On “Things You Make Me Do” she seems to be imitating the sensual purr of her old rival Tweet. It’s like she desperately wants to be somebody else, or anybody other than herself. On the execrable faux show tune “Shine,” Ashanti insists that “They can’t shut out your light/ No matter how hard they try.” But this record is proof that, if you give them just a little help, they can in fact smother your inner beauty under a big, fat bushel of blandness.

Of course, negative reviews of Ashanti albums are par for the course. Except for the millions of tween girls who bought her CDs in the early aughts, pretty much everyone despises Ashanti’s music. Even contrarians who laud the virtues of disposable plastic pop tend to prefer Beyonce or Kelis or Mariah Carey. Ashanti, who was briefly as big as any of them, rarely merits a mention.

Ashanti’s problems—now and then—mostly stem from being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist. Specifically, she has a very uncomfortable relationship with hip-hop. Her 2002 debut included some of the most embarrassing faux-street skits ever committed to disc, with the pitiful Gotti incongruously bellowing profanities like some sort of Tourette’s-afflicted ungulate (“I’m feeling the shit out of you, you’re feeling the shit out of me”). A remix of her big single “Foolish” featured a sexually explicit rap by the deceased Biggie Smalls, with Ashanti cooing encouragement. Instead of buying her some cred, it just made her seem cluelessly ghoulish.

The trouble is that Ashanti came on the scene just as R&B and hip-hop were fusing. In the 90s hip-hop was certainly an important influence on R&B, but there was still some distance between them. When Aaliyah sings “One in a Million,” for example, it’s emphatically R&B—the music is groove based, and the lyrics are a straightforward tribute to perfect love. Timbaland’s beats function as an insistent but separate voice, so that the track becomes almost a duet, a love song from R&B to hip-hop with Aaliyah and the breakbeats trading endearments and vows.

The two genres consummated their relationship at the end of the decade. Acts like Destiny’s Child (with producer Kevin Briggs) and Kelis (with the Neptunes) moved away from grooves and toward more complex song structures, integrating beats and multilayered vocals. Lyrics also began to adopt a much more in-your-face hip-hop attitude—instead of agonizing over the men who done them wrong, Beyonce and Kelis come across as tough and angry, chewing out stalkers, cheaters, and parasites with gleeful disdain. On songs like “Bootylicious,” Destiny’s Child even slipped seamlessly from singing to quasi-rapping while boasting about their sexual charms.

Ashanti is a different story. The music on her debut was the last, gorgeous gasp of 90s R&B. Taking his cue from Butterfly-era Mariah Carey, producer 7aurelius didn’t so much write songs as pour glittery, translucent glop over beats and vocals. The result was a syrupy, trudging, pulsing drone—doom metal by Care Bears. Ashanti and her infinitely multitracked doubles often sound buried alive, desperately emoting from inside an echoey pink plastic prison, repeating and repeating R&B signifiers (“Baby baby baby baby baby”) until all meaning is squeezed out of them and they start to register as pure sound. It’s overwhelmingly, swooningly, gooily romantic, miles away from the invulnerable iron-bitch strut of Beyonce or the true-pain confessions of neosoul artists like Keyshia Cole. In other words, it’s neither tough nor real. There’s nothing hip-hop about it.

Ashanti’s next two albums kept the same format—lousy skits, ravishingly ethereal music—but fell off progressively from the massive commercial success of the first. Gotti’s legal troubles certainly helped sabotage 2004’s Concrete Rose, but in any case the space in R&B for artists with so little real affinity for hip-hop was shrinking. On 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi, Mariah Carey proved she was flexible enough to adapt and still make good music, but Ashanti… well, not so much. On The Declaration, in order to fit in with the current state of R&B, she’s systematically erased all traces of her musical personality.

I’m not trying to say that everything was better back in the day. Though 90s R&B had its moments, overall I think the genre has benefited enormously from hip-hop’s influence. Still, there’s a price; pop is a zero-sum game, and when one style wins, another loses. That’s why today Ashanti’s early albums sound like a transmission from another world, a place where R&B never took that left turn but instead went straight on, stuck in one endless, shimmering groove.

It’s Nobody, Bitch

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Of all the pre-processed, artificial, talentless pop blow-up dolls, Britney Spears is quite possibly the most processed, the most artificial, and the most talentless. Beyoncé can actually sing. Lady Gaga has performance art attitude. K$sha has rock and roll attitude. Rihanna has an accent. Even the relatively anonymous Ciara can dance.

In comparison, Britney is a cipher. Over the years, she’s mimicked a range of pop styles, from the faux-Beatles psychedelia of 1999’s “The Beat Goes On,” to the 2001 faux-Prince funk of “Boys.” But you never get the sense that those styles exactly influenced her, or that she even knows who Prince or the Beatles are. Without Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake’s whole performance schtick would dissolve. Without Prince or the Beatles or even Madonna, Britney’s producers would just feed her something else. This is ludicrously illustrated in 2007’s Blackout, where whoever’s in charge decides to turn Britney into a confessional artist. On “Piece of Me” she coos and growls about her public meltdown and her kid and how unfair everyone is to her, and she sounds as engaged as if she’s reading someone else’s tax forms. When Christina Aguilera whines about her critics, she seems sincerely self-obsessed. For Britney, though, talking about her life is just another pose she can fail to carry off convincingly.

Which is absolutely not a bad thing. On the contrary, Britney’s utter lack of emotional investment in her own music has served her well throughout her career. The contrast with Xtina is instructive. Aguilera has 10 times the voice Britney does. But she also has at least that much more ambition, without any more discernible intelligence. Her increasingly desperate efforts to turn herself into something more respectable than a dumb pop singer—a classic diva! Lady Gaga! Anything! Help!—have resulted in one of the most embarrassing public careers in recent memory. For Xtina followers, her mangling of the national anthem wasn’t so much a horrible misstep as a logical culmination of her evolution as a singer. And I’m speaking as someone who liked Aguilera’s last album!

Britney’s had her own public disasters, of course. But they never seemed to touch her actual music, in large part because nothing touches her music. A Britney song has the perfect purity of an unwrapped Twinkie; it exists outside authenticity and time and art in an inviolable envelope of plastic. This has only become truer as her career as advanced. Way back on Baby, One More Time, Britney sounded almost human—on the first moans of that album she even came within a mortar shot of soul. No fear of that on the recently released Femme Fatale. Autotune was made for Britney and Britney for autotune. Her non-personality is systematically erased; she’s more herself than ever, which is to say she’s more no one.

Just because Femme Fatale is arguably Britney’s most characteristic album doesn’t necessarily mean it’s her best. The song selection overall certainly isn’t as strong as In the Zone, and I think Femme Fatale is a step down from her last effort, 2008’s Circus, as well. Still, there’s plenty to like. From the insanely catchy whistled hook of “I Wanna Go,” to the catchy and burpy low end on “Big Fat Bass,” producers Dr. Luke, Martin, Billboard and others pack the disc with enough gimmicks for an ABBA album or three. The sing-song girl-meets-bloop “How I Roll” does Robyn better than Robyn does. “I wanna go downtown where my posse’s at / got nine lives like a kitty cat,” turns streetwise posturing into music-box girl-group nonsense, an apotheosis of rapturously treacly yearning. But the highlight of studio fuckery may come on “(Drop Dead) Beautiful.” In the middle of casually objectifying some hot guy, Britney lets out a lascivious laugh which is almost instantly processed into a computerized squeal. It’s like the producers heard a flicker of sincere emotion and panicked. Drown it out! Drown it out! Where’s the confounded FX knob?

The totality of the self-effacement on Britney’s albums is definitely funny, arguably disturbing—and also, I think, kind of moving. For instance, at the beginning of “Inside Out,” Britney sings “gotta look my best if we’re gonna breakup.” It’s a wry, rather sad line, and it seems true as well—you want to impress the boyfriend more when he’s on the way out, though logically you should want to less. The lyric touches on a sense of being out of control, of trying to remake yourself to no good purpose.

I don’t think this is a glimpse of the real Britney. Someone else wrote it, and her delivery certainly doesn’t suggest she thought about it too hard. Rather, the lyric resonates with the fact that there is no real Britney. And that in turn points to a sometimes-neglected truth. Pop and love and life—they’re not just about swagger and personality. They’re also about disappearing into everyone and no one; about ominous, bitter, and sometimes sweet nothings. Britney is not the pop star as genius. But there is a kind of genius in the way she incarnates the pop star as nonentity.