I just read Ann Powers's scorching LA Times review of the new Britney album wherein she begins by comparing said mogul to a designer drug and then after citing the evidence, suggest we attempt to kick the habit.

One of the many provocative thoughts the piece sets up is the Madonna/Brit comparision of dance music's origins within a community, and Powers seems to be arguing that Madonna was successful for tying her dance persona to the underground house movement from which she came (and from which she continually returned/stole, for more on that hear Junior Vasquez's "If Madonna Calls") wheras Britney, sprung from the mid-90s pop nowhere (yes, I mean pop-utopia, but maybe also I am being very Adorno) and has no local/cultural referent and thus has come completely wayward and unhinged.

But Madonna's libertinism was always tied to a community -- an underground of self-identified queers and other sexual outlaws who saw erotic freedom as part of a larger movement toward gay and women's liberation. In comparison, the mood of "Blackout" is oppressively retrograde.

I am suspicious of blaming origins for subsequent mistakes, and think Brit's problems stem less from the origin of her pop spectacle than from the current conditions of the pop spectacle itself: it seems to no longer require a musical object, it is pure celebrity. This is the line a skeptical poptimist like myself cannot cross - I cannot entirely cross the bridge to delight in the postmodern end of craft, feeling, intent, communication, empathy, effort even while I can celebrate and welcome industrially produced work, pleasurable listening, functionality, nowness, disposibility. What a frustration!