(Briscoe, Akinyemi) Album: Womanizer – Single / Circus
Spears hates the term “comeback” – and it is admittedly a very pecular term to use less than a year after releasing arguably her most celebrated body of work – but despite her artistic achievements, 2007 to early 2008 was a period of media-induced chaos and trauma on a magnitude that has rarely (if ever) been seen in celebrity culture. Cue the electro-sirens in “Womanizer’s” intro: this is a pop emergency. Britney, like a phoenix, has risen from the ashes of the dumpster fire that was her previous year with a bold, brash, and colorful follow-up to the sleek yet ominous grooves of Blackout. “Womanizer” as a single was everything Spears needed at the moment: it was flashy, fun, and a catchy-as-hell anthem for women who have been wronged everywhere. Sonically, it feels like an evolution of her previous Blackout track “Ooh Ooh Baby” and has a hook that is impossible to escape. At the hands of up-and-coming producers The Outsyders, the song is both vibrant and playful. Coupled with its “Toxic”-esque video treatment where Spears plays multiple roles to expose and taunt her cheating lover, the song rocketed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for her second (!) number 1 hit nearly a decade after her debut single. (For those shocked and confused by this statistic, I would briefly note that Billboard’s formula struggled to keep up with a rapidly evolving music industry increasingly dominated by digital downloads and streaming, so many of Spears’s singles that didn’t include a physical release – a clever ploy to boost sales of the more expensive album – relied on radio play alone to contribute to their charting success, which for the most part vastly underrates the popularity of some of these tracks). Less of a comeback and more of a rebirth, Spears heavily promoted “Womanizer” and the upcoming album Circus which became an unexpected runaway success, achieving one of pop music’s most effective and most needed re-brandings.
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