Album review: Britney Spears, 'Femme Fatale'
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.
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