Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

It takes a village to keep Britney Spears doing what she does best: Selling stuff.

No fewer than 28 songwriters and 13 producers manicured the 12 songs on “Femme Fatale” (Jive), Spears’ seventh studio album. In that respect, it is scarcely different from most of her previous albums, committee efforts that position Spears as a brand rather than an artist with potentially dangerous thoughts of her own.

In a world where Lady Gaga aspires to turn dance-pop “entertainment” into an art form, Spears is perfectly happy to let her collaborators do the heavy lifting and the heavy thinking.

To her credit, she has never pretended to approach it any other way and it has turned her into a very wealthy icon, with more than 100 million album sales worldwide since her 1999 debut. On “Femme Fatale” she doesn’t even bother to shake down a songwriting credit, preferring to let the highly paid professionals do it instead. If nothing else it only adds to her aura: That of a teen-pop heiress entrusting the hired guns to do her bidding – or to use her any way they choose so long as they keep her in the Top 10.

    Usher did a lot of role-playing Friday at the packed-to-the-rafters Allstate Arena, changing costumes about eight times as if trying to figure out exactly who he wanted to be: bungee-jumping ninja, space traveler, leather-clad club marauder, wet T-shirt contest winner.

    But when things got a little slow, as they inevitably did in an unevenly paced two-hour concert, he kept returning to one sure-fire move that was guaranteed to get the predominantly female audience back on point: He lifted his shirt and showed off his gleaming abdomen. It was emblematic of his stud-next-door appeal. Not crassly explicit, but just suggestive enough to elicit screams. Call it six-pack R&B.

    Even at 32, Usher suggests a mannish-boy more than a classic soul man who has been in the business for nearly two-thirds of his life. In comparison to past arena tours, when his dancing exploded into moves more suited for a gymnastics competition, he has toned down the acrobatics. But he still places an emphasis on the physical over the musical; this was about sweat and athleticism more than nuance or songcraft.

Usher: The R&B star shifted to a more mature, ballad-oriented sound a couple years ago, but when that approach was met with indifference, he revved up the libido-charged sound of his youth and returned to the charts with his latest album, “Raymond v. Raymond,” 8 p.m. Friday with Trey Songz at Allstate Arena, 6920 N. Mannheim Rd., Rosemont, Ill., $29.50, $49.50, $65, $85, $125; ticketmaster.com.

Roots: Despite their regular gig as house band on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” the Philadelphia hip-hop juggernaut has put out two studio albums this year -- a solid collection of soul covers with John Legend (“Wake Up!”) and the terrific “How I Got Over,” one of the best releases in their two-decade career, 7 p.m. Saturday at House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn, $50, $65, $80; livenation.com.

Skatalites: A legendary force in Jamaican music and pioneers of ska – a precursor to reggae -- this ensemble still delivers a first-rate horn-fueled dance party. It should be a great way to conclude the three-day Chicago Bluegrass and Blues Festival, 6 p.m. Sunday with Daphne Willis, Go Long Mule and others at Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Av., $15; lincolnhallchicago.com.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

    It’s sometimes easy to overlook given Kanye West’s notoriety as a celebrity who can’t seem to go three months without being portrayed as a jerk, but he has made some of the last decade’s most resonant, ambitious pop music.

    On his fifth studio album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam), he owns his contradictions. What makes him so off-putting – his almost pathological allegiance to expressing his emotions, unfiltered – is also what makes him so compelling, a curious mix of bravado and vulnerability. Because of West’s let-it-blurt bluntness, he is definitely not getting a Christmas card this year from either Taylor Swift or former President George Bush. But that same transparency makes “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” a terrific album.

    Only West perhaps could turn all the hatred that has been directed at him into “Runaway,” a surreal nine-minute anthem. In an elaborate video for the song, West positions himself at an upright piano between an opulent banquet table filled with guests dressed in white and a group of ballet dancers in black tutus. He hammers out a few notes, then stands teetering atop the piano, while asking his guests to raise a glass: “Let's have a toast for the douchebags … Let's have a toast for the scumbags,” he sings, before advising, “Run away as fast as you can.”

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

As Lee DeWyze discovers on his first album after winning “American Idol,” his career is no longer entirely his own. That’s the case with every would-be artist who survives the annual popularity contest. They are inevitably squeezed through a music-industry processor that weeds out all the quirks and eccentricities that once might’ve made a singer compelling. So even a potential radical such as 2009 runner-up Adam Lambert ended up sounding more like Taylor Hicks than Freddie Mercury on his “Idol”-curated major-label debut.

DeWyze, 24, grew up in a blue-collar family in Mt. Prospect, Ill., and worked as a paint salesman. Though not nearly as flamboyant as Lambert, he demonstrated on “Idol” that he has a knack for earnest folk-soul, credibly covering Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” and the Cornelius Brothers’ “Treat Her Like a Lady.” Windowdressing’s not his thing. He’s best in coffeehouse mode, simple and direct.

Two locally released DeWyze albums, “So I’m Told” (2007) and “Slumberland” (2010), were nothing special. But the better tracks had a brooding, introspective quality that demonstrated a willingness to push beyond pat, pop formula. What he needed is someone to coax that out even more, to further develop the relationship between his acoustic guitar and the hint of sandpaper grit in his everyman voice.

But “Live it Up” (RCA) sounds like it was created in a laboratory; it’s designed to be inoffensive, clinically precise, airless, as if those were virtues that would entice radio programmers to buy in, and fans to prolong the “Idol” lovefest. “Live it Up” is less the national debut of an emerging artist than a cautionary tale about how an industry takes over a career and makes it conform to  successful formulas.

There’s a slice of Jack Johnson’s just-ambling-barefoot-in-the-sand mellowness, a splash of Jason Mraz’s pleading sensitivity. DeWyze’s breathy accents could’ve been lifted from the latest John Mayer ballad. The production gives the music a compressed, unnatural brightness. Though DeWyze is listed as a songwriter on most of the tracks, they’re committee efforts with lyrics that evoke Facebook-page poetry. Consider the chorus to the album’s first single, “Sweet Serendipity”: “I’m always landing on my feet/In the nick of time/By the skin of my teeth”

“Dear Isabelle” moves closer to finger-picked intimacy, but in general DeWyze never moves beyond journeyman competence. With the relentlessly bland “Live It Up,” he becomes the latest in a long line of folk-pop singers air-brushed to melt into the pack, not rise above it.

greg@gregkot.com

    The singer Robyn, born Robin Miriam Carlsson in Sweden 31 years ago, grew up loving pop music from America. She heard not just joy and release, great dance beats and escapism, but art and experimentation, passion and vulnerability. For her, pop represented limitless possibility, the promise that music could communicate on several levels at once.

    Over the last decade she’s lived up to that promise on a string of releases, culminating this year with a three-part series of extraordinary “Body Talk” albums.

    “From the beginning, I always thought pop and substance were not mutually exclusive,” she says in an interview before beginning her latest tour of America, which brings her to Metro on Saturday for a sold-out concert. “I grew up with parents who were doing experimental theater, so I gravitated toward artistic expression, pop music on a weird, arty tip, but mixed with club culture, lounge music, dance beats. That shaped the way I wanted to be, and it stimulated me as an artist. When I started (as a teenager) I expected to do that, but it wasn’t my time. That way of looking at pop was not widely accepted, especially when I was starting out. So I had to wait.”