Britney Spears is a pop star stuck in another era
THE MTV Music Video Awards is a venue where artists go to sin or to be redeemed. Justin Bieber began his unofficial, since-abandoned Apology Tour with a teary VMAs performance last year; in 2013, Miley Cyrus twerked her way into infamy.
It was on the VMAs in 2001 that Britney Spears performed I’m a Slave 4
dressed in an instantly iconic 2m-long albino Burmese python. (The snake is still alive, according to MTV.com, which checked. Her name is Banana.)
It was during this performance that Spears came into her own, a moment of liberation and self-expression in a career that has since offered her very little of either.
At the 2007 VMAs, during the year of her difficulties, Spears lip-synced through a listless version of Gimme More. She hadn’t performed live at the VMAs since, until Sunday night.
She spent the intervening years under a continuing court-ordered conservatorship that gives control of her life and career to her father, after a public breakdown in 2007. She now has her own Vegas residency.
Spears’s performance in Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was supposed to be redemptive, a high-risk/ high-reward gamble (typical pre-show headline: “Britney Spears to stage comeback at site of her most public failure”) that mostly went bust.
It wasn’t awful – she seemed competent and aware, and to hit every mark – it was just… wrong. Awkward. Dutiful. Old-fashioned. It was as if Spears’s understanding of pop showmanship ended sometime in 2005, which maybe it did, and no one had told her.
Spears perfor med her new single, the likeable trifle Make Me… with polite Bay Area rapper G-Eazy, who
Uappears on the record. He may have been chosen because he was unlikely to either upstage or terrify her, though he touched her face at one point and she flinched and shook her head.
It was a Vegas-y exercise. Spears played supplicant, backup showgirl to G-Eazy, whom she climbed like a pole. That she performed immediately after Beyoncé delivered a world-beating ode to female power that ended with the stage literally set on fire hardly seemed fair.
Spears’s VMA performance was intended as the third prong of a successful comeback that included her hit Vegas show and a solid new album, Glory, that dropped yesterday.
“Glory” arrived full of promise, which was unusual. Everyone knew Spears’s last album, 2013’s Britney Jean, was going to be a dud well before it got here. There were warning signs: The first single underperformed; it promised a more “personal” version of Spears it plainly couldn’t deliver; Will.i.am was on it.
Britney Jean offered up a PG-13, generic ideal of Spears as relatable and lovelorn, if distant. Glory, which fairly crackles with energy in comparison, is the musical version of a 3am booty call.
It’s a chocolate sampler box of beats and styles, many of them EDM-related: There’s wistful, wind-down electro pop (the excellent Man on the Moon), stuttery and ambitious club pop ( Better) and vintage R&B ( What You Need).
There are peppy homages to the Weeknd ( Do You Wanna Come Over?) and Selena Gomez ( Invitation).
Glory is fizzy and enjoyable, but then it didn’t need to do much, except meet basic levels of competence, and not be Britney Jean.
Spears needed only to seem present, which she does – she’s vivid and playful and sexy throughout.
She’s tart and bubbly and funny and she sings in French. – The Washington Post