My Journey With Britney Spears Part 7: Circus
The Blackout era of Britney coincided with my senior year of college and it was one of the best years of my life even though it was one of the worst years for Britney on a personal level. At college I had come out of the closet, dated boys, made lifelong friendships, had my own weekly radio show where I played 90s alternative, wrote reviews for the school newspaper every week, studied abroad in London, done multiple radio internships and had lived on my own. Then after graduation I was back at my parent’s house in the bedroom I had in high school, working the same job I had had since high school and with none of my friends near by at all. I was right back at square one and college felt like this wonderful dream that I just woke up from and now I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. On top of that the economy crashed that summer. I don’t want to sound ungrateful though because I had a steady job, a roof over my head and supportive parents who really cared about me. It wasn’t a terrible situation by any means but it was a kind of shock to my system. I felt like I had really carved out an identity and sense of purpose for myself in college and now I had to start all over again except with student debt. In a lot of ways I consider the summer of 2008 through the summer of 2009 as kind of my lost year between school and adulthood and looking back I do have some nostalgia for that year even if I am much happier with where I am now.
Britney meanwhile was put under a conservatorship with her father and it seemed like all would be well again for Britney. It wouldn’t be until later that we would all start to question the ramifications of this conservatorship. I just felt that as long as we didn’t see another 2007 meltdown then all was good. In the mean time it looked like Britney was already working on another album to unveil. Like Blackout demos started leaking on YouTube from Circus and I remember it was Alana this time who was searching for them online. She sent me an early version of Womanizer which sounded amazing! I couldn’t wait for it to be released as a single because it had smash hit written all over it. I also remember Alana’s excitement when she shared Kill the Lights with me because it sounded like a continuation of the style and production of Blackout. From what I was hearing it felt like we were about to get another pop masterpiece from Britney just one year after Blackout.
Before Circus came out though Britney appeared on the 2008 VMAs. This time she wouldn’t be performing though. I ended up watching the whole thing which was the last time I ever did that with the VMAs as I have a real distaste for MTV after 2001. Britney ended up sweeping the show winning all 3 awards she was nominated for including video of the year. She had been nominated 17 times before this on the VMAs and she had not won a single award. It felt like a moment of vindication for her and her fans that she finally did win and was getting respect from a network that had benefitted immensely from her music videos for a decade by that point. Also the audience reception was a lot different that night than it had been in 2003 or even 2007. Everyone stood up and clapped for her. The sea of cheers and emotion thrown her way was the exact opposite of the cold stares she had received in 2003 and the mocking at the 2007 VMAs. Britney was not just an icon but a survivor and this marked the beginning of people not tearing into Britney every chance they got. Another reason Britney was so warmly received at the 2008 VMAs was because she was now 10 years into her career and many of the younger stars at the ceremony that night had grown up on her music. I remember one of the Jonas brothers said Baby One More Time was the first CD he ever bought when interviewed on the red carpet.
I remember not long after the VMAs MTV did an a special called Britney for the record where they followed Britney around as she prepped for the release of circus. I remember the scene where she goes to the bar and tries to give a guy her number and she talked about how she has no self confidence anymore. She felt sad, lonely and unsure of herself. I remember she started crying at one point during the doc which made me cry and this is when I still didn’t cry that much. My heart really went out to her and it was obvious that she was not 100% back to normal and more importantly you could see she felt a deep sense of sadness. I also liked the part where we see her perform with Madonna. The doc also interviews Madonna too and something Madonna said struck me. Madonna talks about how living in New York before she became famous was a blessing because she was allowed to make mistakes and grow as a person in her early 20s without the whole world watching and criticizing her every move whereas Britney has never had that. That really rang true.
In the lead up to Circus’s release she did some interviews and performances and she felt very quiet and stiff most of the time. She wasn’t her old bubbly self and it felt like she was going through the motions in a lot of her dancing. The music videos were another matter though because there it seemed like she had the fire back. Womanizer showed Britney at her most confident and fierce since the Toxic music video. The song dominated MTV, VH1 and radio and it was easily her biggest hit since Toxic 5 years prior.
The follow up single Circus was just as catchy. I remember liking it instantly when I heard it on YouTube and like Womanzier it too dominated radio. Before the album dropped it felt like Britney was back in a way she hadn’t been with Blackout. Blackout was a great album of course but Britney herself seemed to be missing at the center of Blackout’s promotional rollout. As I said last time Blackout’s music had to stand on its own and it do so brilliantly but it was nice to see Britney herself starting to get back out there even if it sometimes led to real stiff interviews.
The day Circus dropped I drove to Best Buy and bought the deluxe edition and I’m glad I did because Rock Me In and especially Phonography were catchy bops that were bonus tracks on the deluxe edition. I remember I loved the album instantly. Some fans think Circus is a few big highlights and the rest is filler but I disagree. Circus for me completes her best trilogy of albums which started with In the Zone, peaked with Blackout and concluded with Circus. Yes a lot of the deep cuts on Circus never could have been singles but I was alright with that because they were still catchy but different from what you normally hear on radio. I loved the beat in Shattered Glass, the funky slap bass on Lace & Leather, the atmospheric hypnotic beats of Unusual You and even the ridiculousness of Mmmm Papi. Mmmm Papi was silly but I still love it because only Britney can pull off something that silly and make it fun and endearing anyway. Again the song made me laugh but as I keep saying I was not laughing at Britney I was laughing with Britney who is obviously having a fun time just being silly on this track. Yes it’s not high art but it makes me happy and it puts a smile on my face and honestly that’s sometimes all you want from pop music.
Kill the Lights though felt like the track that had to be the 3rd single. Even All Music Guide declared it the best song on the album and one of her best singles ever despite the fact that it was not released as a single yet and as it turned out it never would be. Just like Breathe On Me, Kill the Lights is one of the great hidden gems in the Britney catalogue that should have been a huge hit. Instead we got If You Seek Amy which of course is infamous now for the fact that the chorus was coded in a way that Britney could sing “If You Fuck Me” on the radio. I think the song is fine but it’s really not one of my favorites off the album honestly.
The only really weak song for me is My Baby. My Baby is Britney’s ode to her children which is really sweet but feels jarring in the context of the album and isn’t something I want to listen to much. So like Blackout which ended on a low note so did Circus though the bonus tracks on the Deluxe Edition helped end things on a stronger note. My Baby was further confirmation that memorable ballads were not going to be a staple for Britney anymore unless you count Unusual You but that one has more of mid-tempo dance beat going for it.
Blackout reminds me of my senior year of college and all my friends, Circus reminds me of Batman and comic book stores. As I was saying earlier I was living at home saving money and putting money away. My friends were all scattered across the country now and I wasn’t dating or meeting boys like I had been in college. Summer 2008 was also the year of The Dark Knight. I had been a big Batman fan since I can remember. I watched the Animated Series every day after school and on Saturday mornings growing up in the 90s. I had all the movies on VHS and I had collected action figures for Batman as a kid too. Hell I even wrote a paper on Batman for a college course on writing for pop culture. That said besides comics based on the animated series I had never really read the Batman comics as a kid. Well after the Dark Knight that all changed. Not only had the movie made me want to become an even bigger Batman fan but it helped me dive into something that could occupy my time now that I only had my parents for company. My mom and I btw watched all of Moonlighting that year together too because I had that much time on my hands when I wasn’t working. Good show btw!
So I ordered a few Batman graphic novels off amazon and I was hooked. Soon I started finding every comic book store I could in Rhode Island and they were definitely interesting. I found one that was in a trailer, one that was basically in a huge storage unit facility, one that was half book store half comic book store run by a husband and wife and one that was really dusty but had some really great finds. I also found one store called The Time Capsule that was not just comics, but movies, music and video games and they had older video games for cheap too! While I was driving all over the state of Rhode Island I had Circus on in my car 9 times out 10 (Sometimes I broke it up with Blackout or In the Zone 😉). Listening to Circus now it reminds me of long drives by myself discovering parts of the state I had not been to and going into interesting looking comic book stores. It also reminds me of first reading Batman comics like Year 1, The Long Halloween, Hush, Knightfall, No Man’s Land, The Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum, Strange Apparitions, A Death in the Family, and the concurrent runs on Batman by Grant Morrison and Detective comics by Paul Dini which were new around that time. Fall of 2008 I was all about the 2 Bs, Britney and Batman, and collecting Batman comics would become my second biggest obsession after music. Trust me if I wanted to I could run a whole separate blog about Batman alone. Here are all the Batman Graphic Novels I own and this doesn’t include the closet full of long boxes of single issue comics I own.
Anyway Britney announced she was going on tour again and Alana, Jen and I had made the pact to see her live. We got the special pre-sale code and I bought tickets for all 3 of us to see Britney in Boston. Alana fly in from Texas and hung out with me at my parent’s house for a few days and then we drove up to Boston to meet Jen. Before the show we went to a bar that was filled with people waiting to see Britney. When girls next to us asked how the venue was I said I had been there before to see Pearl Jam in 2006 and it was excellent. I really threw these girls for a loop because they didn’t expect me to name drop Pearl Jam and didn’t know how to talk to me after that. They definitely felt like mean girls to be honest. The kind of girls who would of made fun of me in middle school. They obviously didn’t understand the Dougystyle transition either.
When we got into the arena I saw lots of girls dressed up as different Britneys. In particular I remember one girl dressed up as Britney from Me Against the Music and one girl in the see-through jewel body suit from Toxic! The show was fun and it was obvious my friends and I knew the deep cuts off Blackout much more than the crowd around us because we were the only ones singing along to every word on songs like Freakshow and Toy Soldier.
We were also the only ones who seemed to love the interlude that was a music video of Britney lip syncing to Marilyn Manson’s cover of Sweet Dreams. My friends and I all liked Marilyn Manson and we listened to him a few times in college together. I also remember Britney mentioning in the past that she liked Marilyn Manson and I think she had a shirt with him on it at one point in an interview I saw. Still the fact that my friends and I were on the same wavelength as Britney on her deep cuts from Blackout and that Marilyn Manson moment when everyone around us so was not made me feel pretty special. We understood and got Britney in a way these fans obviously didn’t.
In a lot of ways that concert was the epilogue to my college years. We have not hung out the 3 of us since then though I’ve seen Jen lots of times since. I also look back on the years 2003-2008 as my favorite now for Britney. While her personal life was spinning out of control the 3 albums she released during that era not only got me back into her but made me a bigger fan than I was before. Those albums soundtracked times of great change for me and listening to them brings back a lot of good memories. Still lots more changes were on the horizon and Britney would still be there for them but those 5 years were pretty special. Britney was there for me at a crucial time even when she wasn’t all there herself. Also besides Confessions on a Dancefloor by Madonna, Britney felt like the only current pop star I really connected with during that time though that was starting to change. In fact it was around this time that Katy Perry and Lady Gaga arrived on the scene and they would soon become my 2 favorite pop divas since Britney. I was also about to meet my future husband too.
Hanging out with the girls at 2009 Gay Pride in Providence Fesitival in Rhode Island exactly one month before I met my future husband Cory. Debbie Gibson performed!
