(Vega)
Album: Tom’s Diner – Single / Déjà Vu
Spears had an eagerly anticipated duet with Iggy Azalea on the horizon in 2015, but this electro-disco gem leaked a couple weeks prior and has since eclipsed “Pretty Girls” as the vastly superior of the two collaborations. Britney doesn’t always get remakes right, but what makes this particular song so brilliant is how fantastically detached the lyrical content is from her own reality. Suzanne Vega’s saga of an anonymous patron at a coffee shop is downright unbelievable as sung by one of the most famous beings to ever walk our planet. So Moroder’s chose to double her vocals with a slightly delayed, vocoder-treated echo that evokes an other-worldly sound. The duet was apparently Spears’s idea, and in this alternate universe, Britney is an unknown, unnoticed observer of everyday life. Moroder’s almost demonic vocals during the middle eight make it doubly apparent that we are living in the Upside Down and there is something unsettling about it all. The cherry on top of this excellent track is the stripped-down final verse that finds Britney “turning to the horoscope/Looking for the funnies/When I'm feeling someone watching me/And so I raise my head.” What does she see? Who is watching her?? Vega’s original version hashes out the plot more explicitly with additional lyrics, but Spears and Moroder add an element of mystery and leave the listener wondering. The track is excellently produced with a blend of electropop and a blaring electric guitar. Though it eventually received the single treatment nearly six months after it was initially leaked to the web, it never received a video and remains unjustifiably obscure in the Britney canon. Still, the song received widespread praise upon its initial release.
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