Okay, it's time to defend those who have been unnecessarily wronged. And today, everybody's favorite wannabe diva, Britney Spears, is busy getting her drunken marriage annulled, so we here at Planetarium thought we'd do the charitable thing and evxplain why her new album is really good, and the hipster critics are wrong.
Every single uber-pretentious, too cool for school music critic from Village Voice to Spin to Skyscraper has just torn Britney's new record, In the Zone, a new asshole. A typical example would be Minneapolis' CityPages, in which a certain Matthew Wilder uses his review of In the Zone as an excuse to make all sorts of obnoxious comments, most of which seem to center around the fact that he is smarter than most critics. The fuckin' irony here is that, just like every other faux-review, Wilder emphasizes repeatedly how he just wants to focus on the music, and whether it's any good. Unfortunately, aside from a comment about how Wilder doesn't think there is a strong single on the album (a debatable point), the man proceeds to completely ignore the music. No, wait- he does worse. He specifically identifies the fact that having the best producers money can buy is a really good thing- then contradicts his own point in his quest to say that the record sucks.
This seems to be the achilles' heel of every single review Planetarium has read. The Gods of Cred have decided that this album is poo-poo, and all good critics must fall in line. Normally, this is in the form of praise (Planetarium dares you to find a bad Yeah Yeah Yeahs review), but when everybody joins in for a good ol' fashioned dogpile on the diva, well, your roots are showing, folks. The fact is, Britney's record is just dandy. Better than dandy. If Wilder et. al would stop and notice the details, they would see they aren't wrong when they talk about the best producers money can buy. And those producers have crafted a damn fine modern dance-pop record, just like they were paid inordinate amounts of money to do.
All the hip kids love to paint Britney as an empty palette, a blank slate, soulless, on which any image can be crafted and remade to fit the target market mold. If that were true, don't you think Britney'd be a wee bit more popular at the moment? The truth is, Britney is getting dumped on so hard because she ISN'T being restrained enough. If her imagemakers had their way, she be smiling and sexy a lot more of the time, and putting her foot in her mouth a lot less of the time. This is not to be a defense of Britney the person, who may very well suck, but when you see review after review of supposedly independent people saying the same thing (and not just something like "War is bad!", but a convoluted theoretical argument on why you're not allowed to like a pop star any more), hey, something's rotten in Denmark.
So give it a chance. Hell, Planetarium will even burn you a copy. We at the head office have ben shaking our asses to "Toxic" for days.
Tomorrow: back to throwing up our hands in despair at the upcoming Democratic caucas.