I know I may be young, but I've got feelings too

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

11/11/01 : Britney - Britney Spears

We move from an artist successfully managing a transition, to one managing it not quite so successfully (and yes, I know things are never quite that simple). I'm expecting to find this tolerable but tiresome for a whole album. 

Well, some of the lyrics here are certainly interesting with the benefit of hindsight because there's a lot of complaining about how she's not allowed to do what she wants - and we all know how that ended up (although it sounds very "whiny teenager" without the benefit of hindsight). Musically, it's not dreadful but it's not great - it's interesting to compare it with Kylie's offering because it just feels like they put so much less effort into this. My suspicion is that "they" thought they were on to a winner here and so didn't have to work too hard - and they were both right and wrong. 

Don't get me started on her cover of "I Love Rock 'N' Roll" though - it's so tame it should be retitled "One Day I Might Be Allowed To Listen To Rock 'N' Roll". However, it did serve some purpose because I learned it wasn't originally done by Joan Jett, so you can have ten points if you know who did it first. Overall, "tiresome for a whole album" is very much on the money, with both her "ooh, I'm so sexy now" posturing and tiresome electro-beats resulting in much eye-rolling and making it feel like a very long 40 minutes. It also features a lot less high points than I was expecting, being very average throughout. 

We're at #4 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a frankly unbelievable 33 week run - what were people thinking?!? The rest of the top five were best-ofs from Steps (seriously?) and Pink Floyd (a new entry), a live album from Sting (another new entry) and Michael Jackson with the next highest new entry being a best-of from The Corrs (#6) - there's a whole lotta "hmmm" going on there.

Wikipedia has a huge amount on the album (366 milliPeppers) and it tells us that it's her third album and she was "looking to transition from the teen pop styles of her first two studio albums" (a fact I just about managed to pick up on). I certainly didn't bother reading most of it, but I was intrigued by the fact that she promoted the album over here with an appearance on The Frank Skinner Show - I can only begin to imagine what they made of each other. I was somewhat surprised they only used 13 writers across 12 songs, but there are some interesting names in there including Pharell Williams, Max Martin, Dido and Justin Timberlake. 

Critically, quite a few people were surprisingly nice about it but the most amusing comments are negative with Slant saying "it's time for Spears to quit being such a cock-tease" and The AV Club noting "though neither a girl nor a woman, Spears inspires grown-up anger on her own". Not that any of that made any difference to the commercial performance, with it getting to #1 in Austria, Canada, Germany, Israel, Switzerland and the US, selling five million copies in the US and ten million copies globally. How peculiar.

discogs.com tells us that, for some weird reason, this is a relatively expensive album for the year because a decent copy is going to set you back £1.50 but if you want the clear vinyl with yellow and blue splatter reissue from '20 then it's going to set you back £142.50. No, no, no, no - NO! I'm sure you don't need me to tell you but this is a very tiresome and wholly average album which is best avoided.

And you get ten points if you knew "I Love Rock 'N' Roll" was originally done by Arrows, a British glam rock band - it's pretty decent, but just sounds wrong because of the male vocal. Apparently, Joan Jett became aware of the song when she was touring the UK and saw them play it on their TV show, which ran for TWO 14 week series on Granada in the 70s. Things were very different back then!

18/11/01 - A pretty decent album