Britney Spears Is Overproduced Garbage

Spears is corporate garbage for the masses. In fact, she is the very epitome of corporate garbage targeted to the lowest (of the lowest) common denominator.
The Nickelback of pop music, along with Avril Lavigne, who also sucks. I’ve said it. She might have sold over 150 million records worldwide, but that doesn’t excuse the fact the only thing she’s remotely done for music is make it embarrassing.

Consider this: would the world be any different today with Spears? Probably not. She didn’t invent pop music as we know and hate it today–that would be Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Eartha Kitt and Chet Baker–nor can it be argued that pop music was broken into the mainstream by Spears.

All she did was have Max Martin, Moby, The Matrix, R. Kelly, Mark Taylor, Trixster and Kristian Lundin polish and refine her heavy dance/electronic sound until it became sickeningly sterile. You could possibly insist that the glossy overproduction on her records would define post-1980s pop music, and to some extent, this is true. Many pop acts in the ‘90s, whether before or after Spears’ rise to staredom, started beefing up their sound because of the numbers that …Baby One More Time sold (14 million units in the United States, for those wondering)–but the polished, artificial production style that became more and more prevalent in the 2000s was already presenting itself in more mainstream pop albums before Spears hit it big. If Spears hadn’t existed, there’d still be a solid chance that ‘90s white music would be defined by gated reverb, white funk riffs, hip hop-oriented production and slick, over-processed synths. When used in abundance, the music is more likely to suffer and become a product of its time. This was most certainly the case of what happened with a handful of pop acts—such as The Backstreet Boys, Boyz II Men (partly because they were R&B), R. Kelly (same reason as Boyz II Men) and N Sync—being able to pull off the sickly, sugar-coated gloss that came out of engineers such as Martin, Timmy Allen, Lundin, Peter Mokran and Rami.

If we believe that Spears was the most prominent act to influence the sound of pop music from the 1990s to the present day, then it’s safe to say that she’s responsible for why so much of the music sounds dated, hard to engage with. If we believe the more nuanced tale of her, Pink, Taylor Swift and Lavigne the poser “punk” being pop acts riding the coattails of superstar producers and audio engineers during the 21st century, then their place in history is insignificant. Either way, none of them deserve to be part of music history or in any Hall of Fame.

Another roundabout way of saying, fuck you, Britney Spears. R. Kelly sucks too; he made the second worst music video of 1998.