Biorhythmic: Britney Spears’ “Inside Out”

KariMarch 19, 2011June 15, 2019Biorhythmic, For Score, Now Playing, Soundtrekking, Vinyl Cut Prose

Somewhere in the middle of Britney Spears’ “most mature and upbeat album yet,” rests the soul comfortably nestled on the album sleeve; “Inside Out,” slated to be the third single, is Femme Fatale‘s unsettlingly brilliant black sheep. Britney… Britney, Britney… – Britney: No one can properly execute your sonic psyche better than you… Opus: Magnumed.

Dr. Luke becomes an aural Darren Aronofsky, producing a sonic landscape where Britney’s voice lingers as the pneuma in a world of perpetual descent, digital raindrops fall between heavy bass and dark ambient sounds… in Spears’ world since celebrity, all she has known is a world flipped upside-down… a life lived inside-out.

BlinkkIt:

A bad romance – heavily damaged but never quite done – between three… it’s a haunting aural love triangle between she, he, and the omnipresent voyeuristic we…

Said you’re gonna be here in a minute
Sitting in the mirror getting pretty

Gotta look my best if we’re gonna break up
Gotta look my best if we’re gonna break up

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The immediate three: Britney and the pair of boys with peaked toxicity

Hit me one more time it’s so amazing
How you shook my world and flipped it upside down…

From the one she knew during baby days…

… to the one who got chaotic

You’re the only one who ever drove me crazy
’cause you know me inside out…

SnappIt:

Easily one of the most telling, chilling, straightforward, visceral, unsound pieces in Spears’ discography. As she calls monotone over the descending escalations, it is a burning blackout, it is a beautifully destructive relationship, le poisson rouge running through sonic vantages and human veins. This is Britney’s Katrina… thunder claps call in the distance, slowly building in intensity and proximity, lightning synth wires break through haunting riffs, tragic conquests made lasting legacies… the catastrophic becoming the defining characteristic of an epic tale, ushered in by an omnipresent echoed ephemeral ambient aspiration – the fairy tale fog turned unnatural disaster… an endless digital deluge… an electronic tsunami of empty tears crescendo to the bridge over river cried.

The chorus is beyond lyricism; it speaks as your élan vital, echoing the beautifully twisted memoirs of Britney Jean Spears – voices as verses of her life since the collective we entered the picture, since her personal space stood as the preeminent public place of judgement, since her life: inside out.

So come on won’t you give me something to remember?
Baby shut your mouth and turn me inside out
Even though we couldn’t last forever, baby
You know what I want right now

Something to remember Britney by… in the midst of the insanity, she left us with a shiner – an unforgettable black-eyed Blackout to capstone American culture 2007. The creation of a celebrity of unreal proportions, an any girl from the Deep South turned Disney kid turned Miss American Dream, the construction of a figurehead a Pop starlet for the sake of destruction before our very eyes, for the sake of our twisted entertainment, the making of pop’s Miss Right Now – a falsely assumed “forever one-hit wonder” for the forever fiends.

Hit me one more time it’s so amazing
How you shook my world and flipped it upside down
You’re the only one who ever drove me crazy
’cause you know me inside out

Spears’ career in four bars… “Hit Me One More Time – it’s so amazing…” which is why we brought her back time and time again… which is what the label undoubtedly said at the brainstorming sessions for albums two through seven – to recreate that Disney magic… “Hit Me One More Time,” the badge and the burden of Britney Jean’s fame: hit after hit after hit, baby kept coming back… “Hit me one more time, it’s so amazing…” which is what Spears says with the release of every new single, video, album to a sea of people who reveled in her every demise… Crazy how those hits hurt so good…

“You’re the only one who ever drove me crazy… ‘cause you know me inside out…” rides along as much a living lyric for Spears, as it is a public revelation – we drove each other to insanity.

Thoughts… just thoughts and preliminary words… but this is by far from over, and well beyond…

The Biography, The Discography – Inside Out:

Through all the babies and boys, Britney was always singing to “you” on her albums, that ever-elusive abstract someone. As her life became her art, and the studio was as much her stage as the sidewalk was, that fourth wall between she and the audience disintegrated. We were now a part of her life as much as she was a part of our daily routine – coffee, cereal, (insert medium of choice here): Britney story. She’s been watching us watching her, and as much as we needed the entertainment and escapism, she needed the reality of being needed by anyone, even as a scapegoat.