Thoughts after listening to Femme Fatale

Or, Cyborg Britney in post-tabloid utopia

These music critics notice that Britney Spears has been fully subsumed by “Britney Spears” but they miss that her tragic (or whatever it is) vapidity is an asset if the point of Femme Fatale is to serve as an industry trade show of incredibly state-of-the-art Dr. Luke beats, which it is.

Britney is breaking new ground in 2011 as the first pop star without a face. 2011-vintage Britney has spun through all the downward-spiral stages of celebrity and emerged in a kind of post-tabloid utopia. Her story and her personality no longer draw eyeballs and for the first time since the ’90s, I guess, no one even seems to want to talk about her body. We don’t really know what is going on with Britney Spears. For all we know she is doing way better. Maybe she’s well.

She isn’t going on talk shows and she isn’t on magazine covers and she isn’t on Twitter (well she is, but her publicist is not fooling anyone with tweets like “Tour’s gonna be hot. I’m excited people” [though I do like that construction: I’m excited people, suggesting plural Britneys]), and still her album debuts at number one and her tour will be among the year’s most profitable. Has there ever been a tabloid star who stopped being interesting and remained a massive star?

And on record she is fully cyborg, her mechanized voice gliding atop $175,000 beats with a serene, chilling emptiness that sounds … kind of good, actually. There is no personality — no persona — to drag against or obscure the technology. Britney exists now as pure sound. This is what many artists say they dream of — it’s supposed to be about the music, man — but no one ever has gotten there by this route, and now that she’s there we find it’s not quite the way we imagined it.