Oops! I Did It Again
Britney Spears

Why is poor Britney so angry? To watch her dance on Top of the Pops, you might suspect that her body has been taken over by satirical aliens and forced to perform a strange ballet of robotic violence. Only a desperate glint in her eyes hints at the depths of her impotent rage.

Her new album will afford plenty more excuses to jerk around (or off, for her male fanbase): with its clinical percussion and huge cornflake-packet snare drums, 80s orchestral stabs and turbine sound effects, it’s invented a whole new genre: retro girlie industrial pop. Throw in a bit of harassed R&B while you’re about it, for a bizarre cover version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. (What, still? Even with the new breasts?)

What Britney is violently angry about, of course, is men. If she has dumped a man, she is a Nietzschean Uberfraülein (”Stronger than yesterday”); if she wants one, she wants one hard and fast (”Take me as I am”). As we know, she’s heavily into PVC catsuits and sadomasochism these days, so she trots off on some vocal adventures, too: wailing nasally like Axl Rose, rapping huskily, or wibbling diva-style around the melody. But her strangled high register can’t float the many saccharine anonyballads, which grind on sullenly with no purpose to their swellings.

The best songs are, thrillingly, exactly the same as her first hit, the jaunty child-abuse singalong “Baby One More Time”.¹ The indisputable pop genius of the single “Oops! I Did It Again” shuffles BOMT around to newly exhilarating effect, and a couple of other permutations (”Can’t Make You Love Me”, “When Your Eyes Say It”) are almost as insanely catchy.

But this isn’t just a lucky bag of furious revenge-pop, it’s also darkly crypto-fetishist. The producers are constantly rolling off the treble and bass frequencies of Britney’s voice for that “down-the-telephone” sound, and several between-track interludes present giggly phone gossip between Britney and her girlfriends, or Britney’s answerphone and a dumb-hick teenage boy. Cool. Whatever else it may be, Oops! is not boring — this is, deep down, an album about juvenile telephone sex.

1. Subjects assigned to this review by Lexis-Nexis: CHILD ABUSE (77%); MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS (75%); MUSIC INDUSTRY (71%). ↩

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