"Blackout" Turns 17: A Retrospective

Graphic by Adelaide Russell

by bennett himmel

It’s February 21, 2007 in LA, and the American Dream has gone AWOL. Britney Spears, the reigning princess of pop, more concept than human, stands like a deer in headlights in front of a paparazzo’s car, head freshly shaven, golf umbrella in hand. “Please guys…don’t do this,” her assistant whimpers, just out of frame. BANG! The umbrella hits the passenger side window of the paparazzo's van. “FUCK YOU!” Spears yowls like a cornered prey with its claws out. “FUCK YOURSELF!!!” She runs back to her car. The door slams, and she drives into the night. In that moment, Britney Spears went from sweaty, shimmering, serpentine schoolgirl sex symbol to a histrionic town crier, the laughingstock of the city of angels. Her entire team was scared of her. She couldn’t see her kids. It was rock bottom.

“My body feels like an inferno,” Britney groans on track 11 of her fifth studio album Blackout, released less than a year after the incident, and how could it not? Spears was coming off the tail end of one of the hardest years that any pop star has had to go through. She went to rehab, got divorced, subsequently lost custody of her two children, and to make matters worse, the whole thing was being broadcast live to the world through TMZ and every supermarket tabloid. And on top of that, she had an album to make. I doubt anyone on Spears’ team was expecting anything good to come out of these sessions as she was clearly unfit to work. If this were all happening now, there’s no way a label would even consider putting money behind an album for someone in such dire straits. But Britney was the label’s resident cash cow, and CDs needed to be ready by Christmas time, so into the studio Britney went.

It’s a shock, then, that Blackout still stands as Britney’s magnum opus, a mutant, whirring, mechanical core text of electropop and pop music as a whole. Britney’s whole thing up until this point was a certain kind of detached relatability, that she was the prettiest, coolest, smartest, nicest girl in your high school class. Of course you weren’t just like her, but you desperately wanted to be, and you could be if you tried hard enough. Blackout, then, is the first Britney Spears album about how it feels to be Britney Spears, how it feels to have everything and feel nothing. Most of the songs on the record appear to be about the normal pop topics: sex, love, getting schwasted at the clerb, sex again, but, they treat these topics like they’re instinctual, animal behaviors: the club as the church, the mattress as the altar.

The lead single, “Gimme More,” is a fine example of this. It’s a song about sex, but also a song about feeling watched, and a song about fucking loving every second of it. “They want more?” Spears purrs over cold, robotic, dark synths. “Well, I’ll give them more!” It helps that the song is an absolute banger too. It has some of the strangest production I’ve ever heard on a mainstream radio pop song with producer Danja’s deep, devilish ad-libs bouncing from channel to channel. Britney’s biggest hits were all somewhat dreamy, but “Gimme More” is straight up nightmarish, a hedonistic anthem and an absolute classic.

It’s impossible to talk about Blackout without talking about “Piece Of Me,” the one song on the album that’s explicitly about Spears’ personal struggles and relationship with the media and fame at large. It stands as one of the greatest works about fame, loneliness, and anger in the 21st century. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was seventeen,” she sighs, opening the song in media res, not sounding angry, sad, or horny, but just deeply, deeply bored. She rattles off a laundry list of problems the media has with her, so clearly aware of how she’s being perceived: “I’m Mrs. Most-Likely-To-Get-On-The-TV-For-Stripping-On-The-Streets-While-Getting-The-Groceries, no, for real, are you kidding me?” Production-wise, her voice is autotuned to oblivion, but it’s used as an instrument. It robotically smears and stretches and swoops across the song’s canvas of buzzing, bleep-bloop synths. It is manic and dizzying; it is brilliant.

The album’s deep cuts are no less fascinating. “Get Naked (I Got A Plan)” is a song that turns sex into a satanic ritual. The beat is terrifying, even more so than “Gimme More,” and the song is even more fascinating since it’s either entirely constructed of hooks, or doesn’t have one at all…I still can’t tell. It’s easily the most experimental thing Britney has ever been a part of. It sounds beamed in from the hottest, sweatiest, dankest, darkest club in LA, with synths that shimmer like diamonds and bass that could definitely break a pair of headphones. “Heaven On Earth,” thematically, is the rest of the album’s antithesis: a spiraling, dreamy ode to love in its purest form, and also the album’s best song. You can hear so much of the future of pop in this track; the heart-on-sleeve lovestruck attitude of early Charli XCX, the progressive, pop-agnostic song structure of Magdalena Bay. Words can not describe how gutsy it was in the year 2007 for a pop song to have a minute long fade out in which Spears repeats “fall off the edge of my mind” like a mantra.

It is worth mentioning that this album may perhaps be more about Britney Spears than by Britney Spears. Spears is only listed as a co-writer on one song–the fun if slightly innocuous “Ooh Ooh Baby.” Most of the album’s writing is handled by either Danja or the production duo Bloodshy and Avant with the former on the darker, weirder songs, and the latter on the synthier, poppier side of things. Spears is listed as “executive producer,” and it’s the only album on which that has happened, but that could honestly mean anything. Even if she wasn’t that heavily involved in the making of the songs, it feels like an album that could only be a Britney Spears album. The point feels moot. In her memoir, Britney called the album “the thing I’m most proud of in my whole career.” I’ll let you be the judge of how involved she was, and if that even matters.

It’s been seventeen years since the release of Blackout, and it feels even more relevant now than ever. Charli XCX’s culturally domineering BRAT feels like the album’s true spiritual successor, loud synths and depressive lyrics and all. Rising pop star Chappell Roan has been experiencing a similar hounding by the new media world. Just swap out TMZ with Pop Crave, and you’ve got a somewhat similar story. But what about Britney? It’s been eight years and an entire anti-conservatorship movement since her last studio album, and she’s said time and time again that she’s retired from the industry. But I still see the Britney from Blackout in the Britney of today, as she spins around her mansion on Instagram, her eyes blank, gorgeous, powerful, vengeful, manic, sexy, and free.