A woman drives fast along the California freeway with the radio screaming, delirious with grief. She does this every morning, dressing quickly in her Beverly Hills home so as to leave no time to think. Changing lanes is like a dance the way she’s trained herself to do it, seamlessly and to the beat. She walks barefoot into gas stations, rinsing down pills with warm Coca-Cola and chatting mindlessly with the attendants. Her marriage is over. Her showbiz career is dead. Her child has been taken away. She is known to cry at parties or get carried home; close friends have come to believe she’s insane. It is only on the freeway, when the music is loud, that she can forget what’s become of her life. To fall asleep she imagines herself on the road: “The Hollywood to the San Bernardino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world.”
How chic the story sounds the way Joan Didion tells it in her 1970 novel Play It as It Lays. The woman is a trainwreck but a sharp and glamorous one, numbing out on pills as a critique of moral rot in 1960s Tinseltown. Books are great that way. Played out in real life in the year 2007, the tale loses its cool; now the woman is a punchline whose endless personal disasters keep a burgeoning new media economy afloat. It seemed that every week, or sometimes even every day, brought a hysterical new headline regarding the downward spiral of America’s pop princess. (“HELP ME!” “INSANE!” “OUT OF CONTROL!”) “We serialize Britney Spears. She’s our President Bush,” said TMZ founder Harvey Levin in a gruesome Rolling Stone cover story from early 2008, which began with Britney wailing in a San Fernando Valley shopping mall as a crowd closed around her with their Sidekick smartphones brandished. “I don’t know who you think I am, bitch,” 26-year-old Spears snarled to a shopgirl approaching for a photo. “But I’m not that person.”
What had become of the Southern sweetheart was not a symptom or appraisal of a new century’s decay but the foremost emblem of it, or possibly its cause. A New York Times essay that summed up 2007 as the year of the trainwreck, in which “prominent figures from every arena of public life did harm to their reputations and livelihoods in devastating fashion,” led with a description of Spears’ lifeless performance at the VMAs that fall. “Is there any measurable way to prove what many of us feel in our gut,” the article went on, “that 2007 was the year when the excesses of our most reliably outrageous personalities finally started to feel, well, excessive?” Or was it that the billion-dollar gossip industry, newly powerful online, had willed this chaos into being? It was the dawning of the era of perpetual surveillance, and websites once considered too sketchy to break news were scooping the “real” outlets when it came to all things shallow and macabre.
It had been nearly four years without new Britney Spears music. She remained the defining figure of American pop culture, only what that meant had changed, and by then the image of the happy blonde from Kentwood, Louisiana, had been replaced a few times over. “Have you ever gone further than you wish you had?” Diane Sawyer asked the singer gravely on Primetime in 2003, whipping out the pages of a recent Esquire shoot which styled her in little more than a dozen strings of pearls. Its accompanying story, written by Chuck Klosterman, opened with the sentence, “Britney Spears is pantless,” and went on to conclude: “She is not so much a person as an idea, and the idea is this: You can want everything, so long as you get nothing.” On the cover she was made up like Marilyn Monroe, with whom she shared a knack for articulating her own myth with more profundity and wit than most smug writer types.
In the years since her last record, 2003’s In the Zone, Spears had married a dancer from Fresno, gave birth to their two sons, negotiated a divorce, lost custody of the babies, went twice to rehab, shook off her management team, and spent her days hunted by cameramen through the gas stations, pharmacies, and drive-thrus of L.A. She also wrote a blog. For $25 a year, you could read the singer’s musings on the fearsome beauty of tigers (“their eyes, their stripes, their constant quest for survival”) or poems she’d written: “Manipulation is the key/They screw it in/Because you’re naive,” went one from 2006. Other times she’d weigh in on her latest dramas with good humor and startling self-awareness. “Recently, I was sent to a very humbling place called rehab,” she wrote in spring 2007. Three months before, she’d shaved her head bald at a hair salon in the Valley as the paparazzi snapped on. Headlines called her crazy, but she looked strangely serene. “It felt almost religious,” Spears described the moment in her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me. “I was living on a level of pure being.”
In a blog update from June 2007, Spears appeared in a cheap wig and elbow-length white gloves, posing like she might have circa Oops!... I Did It Again. “I’m asking my most die-hard fans for some assistance in order to name my upcoming album” the post read, presenting the following titles for fans to vote on:
As a riff on her own image, it was better satire than the cheap shots at the star that pervaded late-night TV. In any case, she named the album Blackout.
In a ritualistic deflowering ceremony stretched out across three years, millions watched as Spears transformed from a shy schoolgirl to a sweat-slick jungle queen, writhing beneath a python onstage at the VMAs. I can’t count the times I’ve replayed these performances—1999, 2000, 2001—trying to articulate what made her such a star. Her melismatic voice, sung from her nose and not her chest, lacked the power of the divas of the ’90s, trembling instead with plucky naivety. But beneath her confidence and cheery disposition, the pathos of her best songs (“Sometimes,” “Lucky,” “Everytime”) always seemed to trace back to the loneliness of being misconstrued. “Notice me,” she whimpered on the first line of the latter. In the 2004 video, she drowns in the bathtub of a hotel room from injuries sustained in a paparazzi chase while a baby is born in a hospital nearby. Spears wrote the treatment herself.
By September 2007, four years had passed since Spears’ last VMAs appearance, where a campy kiss with Madonna had triggered lesbian rumors and conservative talk show ire. Compared to the promo blitzes for her previous albums, she had so far done almost nothing to advertise the long-awaited Blackout, her fifth album to be released later that fall. Her performance of its lead single that would open the awards show was hyped as the equivalent of Elvis’ 1968 comeback special. “My team was pressuring me to get out there and show the world I was fine,” wrote Spears in her memoir. “The only problem with this plan: I was not fine.”
Sleepless, under-rehearsed, and fresh off a backstage run-in with her ex Justin Timberlake, who’d take home more awards than any other artist that night, Spears had a panic attack. With messy hair and denim-blue contacts, she staggered around the stage, shimmying miserably to a song called “Gimme More.” “I knew it was going to be bad,” she described in the memoir. “I could see myself on video throughout the auditorium while I performed. It was like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror.” The camera panned the crowd: Rihanna stifled a giggle, 50 Cent arched a brow. Spears looked so tragic up there that I doubt too many viewers were paying much attention to how nuts the music sounded. Her voice stretches and smears and splinters, interrupted now and then by a man who sounded like Satan, or perhaps Dracula. It’s a song about surveillance in the guise of a song about sex, showing you how it feels when the two topics are entwined—a pole-dance number for the panopticon. “They want more?” she gasps over the beat’s zombified thud and the creepy oohs and ahhs of the spectral background choir. “I’ll give them more,” she promises, whispering it like a threat.
At home, the song’s producer, Floyd Hills, watched, waiting for a sign: “Just give me that one pop to let me know you back.” The beatmaker better known as Danja had come up under Timbaland, the most influential producer of the century thus far; they’d shared credits on Timberlake’s 2006 album FutureSex / LoveSounds, which ran the charts and earned the former boy band member newfound cred. That summer, Danja had begun to work with Spears on the album that would mark his solo breakthrough, which she’d call in her memoir “the thing I’m most proud of in my whole career.” The producer had become obsessed with the dance music he’d heard in the nightclubs of Miami, a year before the Daft Punk tour that brought their French touch to the American mainstream in 2007. “Everyone was bouncing around to Benny Benassi’s ‘Satisfaction’ and Tiesto, literally in a trance,” Danja recalled of one night at Club Space. “I was like, that’s it. If my music doesn’t make you feel like that, what are we doing?”
The Blackout sessions flowed without direction or distraction, with Spears estranged from her old team and unburdened by the notion of “pop.” “She might have been going through more in her personal life than what we knew at that time, and it got a little crazier when we were deeper in the project,” Danja said a decade later. Still, the crew of writers—among them Keri Hilson and T-Pain—were struck by the singer’s instincts. She knew exactly what a Britney Spears record should sound like at that time. “You would know how she felt about a song by pure body language,” said Danja. He stuck to beats that made her dance in the booth: “Something hard and edgy with hip-hop undertones. Once I realized that was what she wanted to do, that’s where I stayed.”
A synth on the fritz, an animal shriek, and the slap of a bag of quarters on the folding counter of Hell’s only late-night laundromat: so begins Blackout’s second single, “Piece of Me,” the coolest song of Britney Spears’ career. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17,” she sneers, her voice thrown and refracted, sinking through Auto-Tune ooze into a beat from Bloodshy & Avant, the Swedish duo who’d helped her win her first Grammy for “Toxic” in 2004. You could simplify the song as a piece about the obliteration of selfhood as the cost of mega-fame, its decayed sound paired perfectly with its rotten subject matter. But that description makes it sound like Spears would play the victim. Instead she rolls her eyes, already bored with your obsession.
“Piece of Me” is among the great works of American art about fame. But at the 2:08 mark, it becomes a masterpiece as Spears’ voice glitches, stutters, and doubles over the throb of a synth line as elegant as the 2000’s iciest grime. It is rightfully here that the careers of Charli XCX and PC Music begin, with music that still sounds like the future of pop 17 years later. Most critics at the time attributed Blackout’s radical sound to the non-Britney Spears names among its credits, where she is listed as executive producer. (“She has done almost nothing, in the recording studio or outside it, to convince fans that Blackout is really hers, or really her,” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in a New York Times review.) But in ways that anticipate Kanye West’s Yeezus six years later—the treatment of the human voice, the purpose behind each sound—such an alarming album on fame’s shattering potential could be made only by this artist at this moment.
And what exactly did Blackout emerge from? Taking notes to write this piece, bullet points played out like a mid-aughts version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: “BIMBO SUMMIT / BLING RING / PORNHUB / WILL.I.AM / ROCK OF LOVE / CINESPACE// KIM K SEX TAPE / SOULJA BOY CRANK THAT / JUICY ON MY SWEATPANTS / DEADMAU5 / BLOGHOUSE / ANNA NICOLE SMITH” It’s the era’s naughty qualities that most stand out today. But the trashy-fun abandon never quite made it to pop, which still felt quaint beside the bacchanalian club rap and stadium R&B. (“It’s been boring,” Spears said in 2006 regarding the pop scene. “Nothing’s been wow to me.”) Cher’s “Believe” had brought Auto-Tune’s post-human sparkle to the radio in ’98, though songs by T-Pain and Lil Wayne that normalized the plug-in as an expressive tool were still mostly seen as gimmicks. Blackout took the concept further, going beyond naughty to feel genuinely sinister: a glimpse inside a life from which every bit of normalcy had been stripped away.
“I’m crazy as a motherfucker, bet that on your man,” Spears sing-songs on Blackout’s weirdest song, “Get Naked (I Got a Plan).” The track buzzes like a lightbulb dangling from a string as Danja assumes the role of a maniacal wizard, smearing his cackling vocals across space and time. Spears’ chants and teases are stretched and pulled to the limits of what is recognizably human; still, she rides the beat. It’s a song about sex that makes you consider abstaining from it forever, and that’s before Danja slips into a terrifying trance, grasping mechanically at Spears like a demented pervert robot.
The year before, Spears’ superstar ex had made a promise to bring sexy back. I listen to FutureSex/LoveSounds today and cringe, less for the pleasures of millennial misandry than for how purely wack it sounds when played next to Blackout. Why is it that Blackout sounds vital today where FutureSex sounds limp, though Danja’s fingerprints are all over both records? You could call it a vibe shift: FutureSex marked the end of Timbaland’s 10-year reign as urban radio innovator, while Blackout looked ahead to our synthetic future. (Timbaland’s slick beats in the late ’90s and 2000s conjured images of hoverboards and flying cars, but it’s the melancholy futurism of TLC’s FanMail that resonates today in its 1999 vision of lonely androids refreshing their inboxes.) More than that, Spears understood something Timberlake didn’t: Abjection is a powerful aphrodisiac, and desire requires a void.
Venture too far down the rabbit hole of 2007 Britney cliché and you might end up at the idea of Blackout as an evil album, an exploitative document of a woman at rock bottom. The cliché extends to the well-intended but condescending coffee mugs emblazoned with the catchphrase “If Britney Survived 2007, You Can Make It Through Today.” But to view Blackout through a lens of victimhood is to miss how fun and wild the album can be. Irksome on the first few listens, “Radar” becomes addictive in its counterintuitive swing, her vocals just behind the beat like today’s rap avant-garde. On “Freakshow,” Spears raps in a campy-cool mode between Peaches and Fergie (“On some superstar ish, pushing hot Bugatti whips”) before her voice is chopped to smithereens as Bloodshy & Avant try their hand at dubstep wobbles. Even harder is “Toy Soldier,” an amped-up K-Fed sneak diss co-written by Sean Garrett, the pen behind Ciara’s “Goodies” and Beyoncé’s “Upgrade U.” (Call me crazy, but I hear glimmers of Azealia Banks’ “212” in its bratty bounce.)
The only press Spears did for Blackout was a live radio interview with Ryan Seacrest that October. KIIS-FM had told her it would be about the record, until the questions began: Do you feel like you’re doing everything you can for your kids? How often will you see them? “It felt like that was the only thing that people wanted to talk about: whether or not I was a fit mother,” Spears remembered in her memoir. “Not about how I’d made such a strong album while holding two babies on my hips and being pursued by dozens of dangerous men all day, every day.” Still, she managed a quick mention of her favorite track: “Heaven on Earth,” the nearest Blackout comes to a love song. Its inspiration (Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”) is all climax, but Spears works the other way, surrendering the final minute to freefall. “I falllllll off the edge of my miiiiiind,” she exhales, spiraling to a level of pure being.
Where her previous CD booklets had arrived with gushing “thank you” lists, Blackout came with none at all. It was the first Britney Spears album without a No.1 debut when a last-minute Billboard rule change bumped the Eagles’ seventh album, sold exclusively at Walmart, to the top. Even the glowing reviews wondered whether this nihilistic album was by Britney, or about her. Why not both? Years later, a leaked email from Spears demanded co-direction credits for the “Piece of Me” video. “I am learning more and more to take charge of my own life for a change,” she wrote. “If that bothers you then go sign another artist.” (She signed off: “Cheerfully yours.”)
