Britney Spears' Wrong Kind Of Circus

I actually used to admire the Britney machine.

There was something downright awe-inspiring about the sheer audacity of everyone involved in the project. Long after the woman-child at the heart of it all had been exposed as simple, talentless and lacking even the most basic interest in her "art," her people forged on and continued to produce material under the Britney brand.

People would write songs for her, she'd come in and croak out a few notes before going back to her Cheetos, and then someone would ProTool the hell out of the whole thing. Soon enough, the world would have another collection of easily digestible, thoroughly disposable and somewhat amusing commercial pop music with barely any input from Brit Bot.

I appreciated the twisted honesty of the whole situation: Britney wasn't an "artist" and no one was really trying that hard to pretend she was. In fact, there wasn't much effort being put into the pretense that she was a necessary part of the process at all. It was almost like a performance art piece on the superficiality of modern mainstream pop music and tabloid fame.

As Britney's mental issues became more and more apparent, though, the spectacle became a lot less entertaining. It's one thing to laugh at a woman who spends all of her time hanging out at Taco Bell drive-ins being half-assedly propped up as a pop princess. It's an entirely different thing to watch her go through a very public breakdown and then have her dragged through the entire process again.

On the surface, Circus is a lot like the Britney albums that I found so perversely entertaining. It's still full of the guilty pleasure, aural-equivalent-of-McDonald's-food kind of songs that made her so popular in the first place. But upon further listens, there seems to be something more mean-spirited going on this time around. The joke's no longer on the record-buying population; it's now on Britney herself.

This is most apparent in "Blur," a track about waking up in a stranger's bed and not knowing what she's done the night before. If Britney had actually recovered and written the thing herself, it might have been a cheeky, self-aware take on the past few years of her life. Seeing as it was written for her and she's obviously not all there, it just comes off as terribly exploitational and creepy.

There's also a cruel irony that runs through the title track. At best, it's painfully clueless to have a 27-year-old woman who's under conservatorship to her father sing about being in the middle of the ring and being in control. At worst, it's an outright mockery.

Most of the other tracks are pretty innocuous. There are the usual songs about boys ("MMM Papi, "Unusual You"), fame ("Kill The Lights") and single entendres ("If U Seek Amy"), but even their substance-free fun can't distract from the ugliness of the greater picture.

Britney's definitely in a circus. It's just a shame that no one is willing to tell her she's not the ringmaster, she's the freak show.

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