On ‘Blackout,’ the beleaguered pop star gives us less...
“Ego? It may not be the greatest word of the twentieth century, but it’s sure the driving poison in the vitals of every popstar,” rock critic Lester Bangs wrote of a post-Berlin Lou Reed.
Britney Spears’ sex-drenched Starbucks-fueled deus ex machina, Blackout, certainly drips of bombast ego. From the electroclash half-snarl of “It’s Britney, bitch” on opening track “Gimme More” (the club fantasia Ms. Spears lurched to at the MTV Video Music Awards like the Bride of Frankenstein in a sequined bikini) to the robo-synthesizer clunk of the paps-driven “Piece of Me,” Ms. Spears’ ego is the driving poison of Blackout.
At press time, Spears was knocked from the No. 1 slot on the Billboard album chart by an unforeseen technicality. The Wal-Mart waves of amber grain from the Eagles trumped Ms. Spears’ voice coder minimalist-pop. It’s fitting that Blackout was banished into the runners-up position like some overeager partygoer with herpes. It’s an album packed to the brim with minor technicalities.
The uber-production team of Timbaland protégé Nate Danja Hills, Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant and Pharrell Williams wedge Ms. Spears’ flimsy vocals in slickly produced urban-pop bass. But while the layered production gizmodgery and winking lyrical cynicism from Ms. Spears’ stable of pop tunesmiths deliver results not worthy of a Britney Spears release, the star of the show stumbles around in a Digitech Talker hangover.
She’s still selling sex, but on the rubbery nu-disco of “Get Naked (I Got a Plan),” it’s just plain sad. It’s a parody album that doesn’t realize it’s a parody album. But if you lived your life like Britney, Blackout would be the soundtrack to your life, too.
The major-label-done-me-wrong motif is a perfect bookend to an artist’s career. And for a genre-defying paradox such as Nellie McKay, who in the past has dabbled in neo-cabaret ditties and meaty hip-hop inflected bravado, both drizzled lightly over piano arpeggios, the major-label-done-me-wrong motif was pretty much a given.
Columbia Records gophers chafed at the very thought of McKay’s gargantuan slabs of social engineering Muzak set to up-tempo block chords (that’d be her peppy gay marriage scorcher, “Cupcake”) because it’s a hell of a lot easier to foist the latest frappy swill of Natasha Bedingfield down the willing throats of the American populace.
So for McKay’s critically lauded and whipsmart debut Get Away From Me, Columbia Records execs did what came most naturally. They fed a few elevator-pop zingers to Grey’s Anatomy and prayed to Clive Davis that the ABC viewers would buy her records.
As for McKay herself, she buckled under the major label system and butted heads over her sophomore effort, Pretty Little Head. She also passed out Columbia Chairman Will Botwin’s personal e-mail address at a performance in Los Angeles for fans to air their grievances, and a few weeks later, both Botwin and McKay were sacked to the curb.
Now a free agent, her third release Obligatory Villagers is being released on her own label, Hungry Mouse with distribution efforts from powerful adult-alternative indie, Vanguard Records.
And sure to form, it’s McKay’s most perplexing album to date. For starters, after quibbling with Sony-Columbia over lengthy double albums, Obligatory Villagers clocks in at the svelte half-hour marker. After her stint in the Kurt Weill Broadway revival, The Threepenny Opera, Villagers finds McKay sifting through richly textured big-band arrangements like some Gen-Z version of Lawrence Welk.
AfterElton.com caught up with Ms. McKay in a secluded studio recently where she’s currently hard at work on her fourth album for a little one-on-one.
