Happy 15th Anniversary to Britney Spears’ fifth studio album Blackout, originally released October 30, 2007.
In 2007, Britney Spears flew too close to the sun. While up there, she finished recording and released Blackout—forever cemented in her discography as the most badass let’s-do-shots / you can’t hang with us / whose-bed-did-I-just-wake-up-in? album of her career.
If you line up all nine of Spears’ studio albums—from 1999’s ...Baby, One More Time to 2016’s Glory—planted firmly in the middle is 2007’s Blackout. It’s the outlier. The wild child. The truth teller. It stands out in the center of her discography for a trio of reasons.
One, it’s giving a middle finger to the studio albums that preceded it—albums where Spears increasingly wrestled with her good girl image as she recorded more adult-oriented fare. On Blackout, there were no sweet ballads, no covers of old songs to appease parents, and no songs that could double as amusement park ride music. Spears had shed her good girl image after 2004, and Blackout wanted no part of its return.
Two, it was the last album she made before being locked down in a long, traumatic and allegedly abusive conservatorship. Blackout soundtracked a precarious era of Spears’ life—where she sought emancipation from her marriage, her management, and the relentless media. When you line all these albums up, it’s clear now, fifteen years since its release, that Blackout is the soundtrack of the unvarnished freedom she sought for herself in between two controlling periods of her career.
Three, Blackout possesses an aura of surprising authenticity that the rest of Spears’ albums have always lacked. Unlike her previous studio releases, Blackout had a theme, told a story, and committed to that journey from beginning to end. It was also the first time a Britney Spears album felt like it reflected where her life was at that moment…and for good reason.
During Blackout’s creation that started in 2006, Spears was juggling a tumultuous personal life full of well-documented changes, challenges and upheavals. She was firing and rehiring management, raising a toddler, fighting off photographers (and sometimes tipping them off), partying with Paris Hilton, dating models and scrubs, giving birth, filing for divorce, hosting parties in Vegas, navigating court battles, beating parked cars, getting into fender benders, performing low-brow DIY shows under a mysterious moniker, shaving her head, selling perfume, and going to rehab. “We serialize Britney Spears,” TMZ’s Harvey Levin said in 2008, “She’s our President Bush.”
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Somehow in the midst of this mayhem, Spears got into studios on both coasts and recorded a sexy, decadent, and rebellious dive bar/dance-pop concept album about being super famous, extremely fuckable, and totally free to do whatever you want—whenever you want. Featuring a dozen songs (on the American standard release), the genius of Blackout was that it ignored the hefty problems Spears was dealing with. Instead, it focused on the relentless curiosity and fictionalized the juicy narratives surrounding her meticulously documented party girl exploits, romantic relationships and high-voltage celebrity life in Los Angeles.
Spears and her label locked in a wildly talented gang of diverse producers, engineers and songwriters for the album like Nathaniel “Danja” Hills, Keri Hilson, Farid “FredWreck” Nassar, Jim Beanz, Pharrell, T-Pain, Kara DioGuardi, Marcella “Ms. Lago” Araica, Sean Garrett, electronic music duo Freescha, and the Swedish team responsible for her mega hit “Toxic,” Bloodshy & Avant.
They were an “Avengers”-like crew of creators and collaborators from a variety of musical backgrounds that criss-crossed continents and cultures—all working with Spears (whenever she was available) to craft a pop album that didn't sound like other mainstream pop music on American radio or MTV at the time.
It pinballs between hedonistic beats, crunchy synths, icy electronics, hard bass, and relentless sex, swagger and celebrity. It’s the first time a Britney album was cohesive and looked forward in its sound—introducing into mainstream pop a sweaty combo of electropunk, hip pop, Euro-disco, dubstep and electronic house music.
Let’s put it this way, if it was a Tuesday night in the mid aughts and Fischerspooner, Benny Benassi, Robyn, Peaches, Timbaland, Annie, Miss Kittin, Felix Da Housecat, Tiësto and Kylie Minogue all met up at Jumbo’s Clown Room on Hollywood Boulevard with a wad of cash and a dealer on speed dial, the result would be Blackout. It’s the perfect album to soundtrack a sex tape that’ll hopefully launch your reality TV career.
Spears’ collaborators were instructed to avoid penning songs that specifically homed in on what was going on with her wild life. Instead, they mostly created a fantasy world into which Spears could escape when she came to “work.”
Sometimes she could only give a few hours in the studio, sometimes she didn’t make it, and sometimes she arrived and then disappeared. “She was queen of the ghost moves,” recalled Hilson (who co-wrote and did backup vocals for “Gimme More” in addition to other songs on the album). “She’d be in the booth one second and then security would come get her, and we wouldn’t know she was gone.”
As executive producer of the album, Spears kept the Blackout train running—even during some of the most challenging periods of her life. The day after announcing her divorce from Kevin Federline, she recorded vocals for “Radar” in New York. In the wake of shaving her head in Tarzana, she recorded “Hot As Ice” with T-Pain. "She came in there, shook my hand and went right into the booth,” he told MTV News. “She was about her business.” In her eighth month of pregnancy, she laid down vocals for “Break The Ice” and “Perfect Lover” in her home studio. “She was standing up in the vocal booth, just banging it out,” Hilson revealed at the time. “Three weeks later, she had the baby.”
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Spears could have made an album about the pitfalls of fame, the horrors of a very public divorce, or the distrust of the media and shady industry individuals. Thankfully, she left those very un-danceable topics at home and kept Blackout a very amped up, very horny affair. Ten out of the twelve songs on the album are about sex. She’s wanting it (“Break The Ice”), lining it up (“Radar”) or on “Get Naked (I Got A Plan),” doing it after breathlessly promising “If I get on top / You’re gonna lose your mind.” Spears has never sounded as aligned with her albums’ content as she does on Blackout. I mean, when you marry a man with the nickname “Meat Pole,” you’re gonna be able to sell sex on an album and lordy did Spears deliver on this record.
Even the two love songs on Blackout have boning as their backbone. On paper, “Heaven on Earth” (produced by DioGuardi and Freescha) looks like a sweet song about waking up next to the lover whom you can’t get enough of (“My favorite kiss / Your perfect skin / Your perfect smile”). But when Spears’ afterglow vocals rub against a thrusting beat and sonic shadows of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” the song’s setting transforms into a night of dark, humid dance floor shenanigans where you’re high and grinding with someone super hot (“Your touch, your taste / Your breath, your face”).
Or in the galloping schaffel of “Ooh Ooh Baby” (produced by Nassar and DioGuardi), lyrics about being vulnerable (“In your arms I finally breathe / Wrap me up in all your love / That's the oxygen I need, yeah”) sidle up with pulsating sexual innuendo set to a glam rock-esque stomping beat (“You're fillin’ me up / You're fillin’ me up / You're fillin’ me up with your love”).
Nassar came up with the beat for “Ooh Ooh Baby” while he was at a Lakers game. “[I] saw the Laker Girls doing routines,” he told me recently. “And that night I went home and made the beat, thinking of [Spears] dancing with the Laker Girls.” He said Spears was pregnant when she recorded the vocals for “Ooh Ooh Baby” as well. “I just remember she wanted a bowl of ice to chew on while we were recording,” he recalled. “So in between takes I had to go on and delete the sounds of her chewing ice. And her label told me not to push her too much because she was pregnant, but Britney wanted to keep going and we knocked out all her vocals in one night at Conway Studios.”
Nassar also said that he recorded two other songs for Blackout, but they didn’t make the cut and were recorded by Hilary Duff during the sessions for her 2007 album, Dignity.
What makes so many of Blackout’s sexy songs even more interesting is the swagger with which Spears delivers them. We had glimpses of it on her previous albums, but never the level of genuine swagger we hear on Blackout. Outside the studio, her world was spiraling out of control. Inside each song’s story, though, Spears was the one in command.
She declared her superstar superiority in the album’s lead single and throbbing exhibitionist anthem, “Gimme More,” with her iconic opening line, “It’s Britney, Bitch.” In “Freakshow” Spears brags about how easy it is to pick up guys like six packs when you’re hot and famous (“Me and my girls like to get it on / Grab us a couple boys and go”). Or on the rowdy Federline diss track, “Toy Soldier,” Spears tips her Von Dutch hat to the side as she snarl-sings about being happily single again (“Hit the scene in my new wagon / Bet he gon’ wish he knew / The type of fun I’m getting into”).
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On “Piece Of Me,” the only Blackout song that directly addressed her shocking headlines, Spears combined all of what makes Blackout a standout in her discography—swagger, sex and celebrity—into one sleek and pounding robot orgy-sounding song that served as the second single off the album.
With vocals deliberately flattened of any emotion as if to not evoke any victim vibes (none to be found anywhere on Blackout), Spears boasts about her star power (“I’m Mrs. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous / I’m Mrs. Oh My God That Britney’s Shameless”) and reminds us all that she’s so popular that “You want a piece of me.” Moments later, she turns the same phrase into a threat to the media (“You want a piece of me?”), asking them to fuck around with her some more and find out.
Some music critics at the time took issue with how electronically processed or monotonal her voice was on “Piece of Me,” but it makes total sense to me. The media, paparazzi, and bloggers had reduced Spears to digital content they monetized daily. She was no longer a human to them. Spears was a flattened image or video they could capture and sell advertising against, so that’s what she sounds like in the track.
It’s this marrying of real-life drama into song composition that makes “Piece Of Me” such a legendary Spears record—one whose lyrics (“Another day another drama”) would be nicked a decade later by a big Spears fan, Taylor Swift, for her hit, “Look What You Made Me Do.” And while we’re talking Spears + Swift, am I the only one who thinks “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” is about Britney and Kevin’s relationship?
Only two songs on Blackout feature writing credits from Spears. But, really, given the state of her life during this time, it’s no surprise she didn’t have hours on end to spend writing with teams or sitting at the board crafting sonics with the various creative teams she and Jive Records enlisted for the album.
On the flipside, though, it gave the producers and definitely the engineers—who really shine on this album—time to invent, mold, and refine the supercharged and shapeshifting soundscapes and vocals that mirrored the ever-changing energy and people that spin in and out of your orbit during a night of clubbing. The beats are thick and persistent. The synths and 808’s are strident. At times a multiverse of Spears’ layered, lacquered, pitched and processed vocals showcase the malleability of her signature vocal style (while deftly shrouding its shortcomings) as they pivot between focused center pans and doubled-up stereo wraps.
It’s pretty amazing that in the midst of how dark Spears’ 2007 would turn, she continued to work on songs that were pretty much all about having a good time. Maybe in that clamorous period of intense personal turbulence, trials and tribulations regarding her health, her children and her future, making a fun and ferocious dance album would be a way to escape it all for a while. It’s what dancing does for a lot of us.
Dancing has always been a life force for Spears. “It’s like something that my spirit just has to do. I’d be dead without dancing,” she revealed in her intimate 2008 documentary film Britney: For The Record. You only have to go to her Instagram and start scrolling to see how, over the past few years, dancing has been her tool of communication, exaltation, and liberation.
Dancing for herself, and maybe for us, probably saved her life. I have a feeling that making Blackout did the same.
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