Oct 2001

Much to the delight of her gigantic and ever-growing fanbase (and just in time to put in your christmas stocking), Britney Spears is back with her third album, the much-anticipated 'Britney'. Raw, sassy, full of attitude and, dare we say it, sexier than ever, 'Britney' is a marked departure into a more mature sound that sees pop's most famous virgin pushing back musical boundaries and taking her career to the next level. Includes the single 'I'm A Slave 4U'.

• Rolling Stone (11/22/01, pp.86-6) - 3 stars out of 5 - "...By far her most personable album, the most consistently playful and least wince-inducing..."
  NME (11/3/01, p.34) - 7 out of 10 - "...BRITNEY pulls off the same trick that Janet Jackson's CONTROL did both musically and lyrically, announcing her womanhood with an explosion of club-dominated pop..."

This is the third album from Britney Spears and follows on from her 2000 release 'Oops...I Did It Again'. A more mature sound inspired by Madonna and Janet Jackson. Where the previous two albums focused on pop, 'Britney' is more dance, soul and R&B influenced.

This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files. Includes a Quicktime video for the song "Overprotected" with outtakes from Britney's first major motion picture relase.
Personnel includes: Britney Spears (vocals); Brian Kierulf (various instruments); Max Martin (guitar, background vocals); Esbjorn Ohrwall, Nile Rogers, Isaac Phillips, Paul Umbach (guitar); Josh Schwartz, Thomas Lindberg (bass); Rodney Jenkins (programming); Corey Chase (scratches); Daniel Savio (turntables); Jennifer Karr, Jeanette Olsson, BossLady, Ann Marie Bush, Sue Ann Carwell, Tyler Collins, Deann Dover, Albert D. Hall, Damien Hall, Nana Hedin, Annika Tornkvist (background vocals).
The Neptunes: Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo (various instruments).
Producers include: Wade J. Robson, Justin Timberlake, Brian Kierulf, Josh Schwartz, Max Martin.
Engineers include: Max Martin, Rami, Jamie Duncan.
BRITNEY was nominated for the 2003 Grammy Awards for Best Pop Vocal Album. "Overprotected" was nominated for the 2003 Grammy Awards for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Well, the question is no longer whether she's a little girl or a woman--Britney Spears has obviously been the latter for some time. The question now is how long she'll be able to pretend at keeping us guessing, and how long we'll pretend not to know the answer. With BRITNEY she continues the dance of corrupted youth and innocence to the delight of both her female fans and dirty old and young men everywhere.
While it's by no means the best song on the album, the ballad "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" typifies her commercial appeal (interestingly, though she writes several songs here, this one was written for her). The songs that ring truest here are those penned by Spears herself, such as the Chic-influenced "Anticipating" and the R&B flavored "Lonely," which play down the innocent girl/tart predicament in favor of presumably more realistic scenarios such as checking out her lipstick in the former and relationship dilemmas in the latter. Elsewhere she convincingly reduces Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'N' Roll" to its bubblegum essentials, while her interpretation of main squeeze Justin Timberlake's "What It's Like to Be Me" is arguably BRITNEY's finest moment.

In the late 1990s, Madonna had long since become a mature artist, turning her back on the carefree dance-pop of her early days. Teenage singer Britney Spears picked up on this specific Madonna era, albeit with a more girl-next-door approach. Her coy mix of innocence and sensuality (and infectious songs) made her a superstar, and helped inspire the teen-pop phenomenon that soon dominated pop music. By the early '00s, Spears was casting about for a more adult image, and remade herself into a vixen, experimented with acting and reality TV, and had two children with the controversial wannabe rap star Kevin Federline. While her personal life preempted her musical output for a while, she seemed on the road to artistic recovery after the 2006 birth of her second child. A critically lambasted appearance on the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards and a very public custody battle with Federline worked against her, but her concurrent album release BLACKOUT bought her some credibility with the fickle music press.