Britney Spears's Blackout

Discusses 2007’s Blackout as a transitional album and a crucial bridge between twentieth- and twenty-first-century pop.

Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head, and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst of her public breakdown, she managed to record an album, Blackout. Critics thought it spelled the end of Spears’s career.

But Blackout turned out to be one of the most influential albums of the aughts. It brought glitchy digital noise and dubstep into contemporary hit radio, and it transformed Spears into a new kind of pop star—one who shrugged off mainstream ubiquity in favor of the devotion of smaller groups of fans who worshipped her idiosyncratic sound.

This book returns to the grimy clubs and paparazzi hangouts of Los Angeles in the 2000s and the blogs and forums of the early internet to show how Blackout was a crucial bridge between twentieth- and twenty-first-century pop music.

33 1/3 is a series of short books about popular music, focusing on individual albums that influenced music history.