POP MUSIC REVIEW
Britney's 'Zone': Brains, clothing optional
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040304/news_1w4britney.html
By George Varga
POP MUSIC CRITIC
March 4, 2004
Britney Spears is singing – or is it lip-syncing? – a new tune.
At 22, the former Louisiana Lolita is (to paraphrase a song from her third album, 2001's "Britney") not a girl, not yet a porn star. But that could soon change, as she demonstrated with several highly suggestive numbers Tuesday night at the San Diego Sports Arena.
It was the opening of what was originally billed as her "In the Zone Tour 2004" but is now called "The Onyx Hotel Tour." According to Spears' Web site, the tour's new monicker reflects "a unique, mysterious hotel powered by an onyx stone," where "fantasies come to life" . . . "a vibrant, whimsical place where wondrous dreams are realized and the darkest of secrets are revealed."
By any name, the 90-minute "more adult"-themed show is a conceptual mishmash that was purportedly modeled after Tommy Tune's Broadway musical "Grand Hotel." Unfortunately, the grandeur Tune achieved has been replaced by contrived attempts at tawdry sensationalism that suggested what might happen if Penthouse magazine were edited by Beavis & Butt-head.
It was also a carefully calculated vehicle for Spears to promote her commercially and artistically tepid fourth album, "In the Zone," while trying to disguise her glaring musical limitations and distance herself from her first two albums and the pubescent audience that made her a pop-culture sensation. The sold-out crowd of approximately 11,500 consisted mostly of teen girls who loudly cheered Spears' apparently irony-free message of self-empowerment through bimbo-ism.
Appearing before an audience that also included newspaper and magazine reviewers from across the nation and Europe, Spears did her best to stir things up. But the result was a curiously hollow experience, as devoid of personality and meaning as the generic dance-pop tunes on "In the Zone."
From her opening number, "Toxic," to her lone encore of the anticlimactic "Me Against the Music," Spears rarely delivered any palpable emotion beyond self-absorption. And she offered only empty platitudes when addressing her recent, self-generated controversies.
"There's been a lot of ups and a lot of downs, but I think that's made me who I am right now," Spears said, introducing the ballad "Everyone." "We know how to laugh, we know how to cry . . . and we all know heartache. But the world keeps on turning and we turn with it, and we realize how beautiful life can be."
Her only notable deviations came with "Oops! ... I Did It Again" and "...Baby One More Time," performed in a faux lounge-jazz fashion that merits no further comment. Otherwise, comparing her "live" performances Tuesday to her album recordings was pointless, since they were essentially one and the same.
The thin-voiced Spears was too often overwhelmed by her five-man band, a four-woman/four-man dance troupe and a tiresome master of ceremonies, who seemed like an unfortunate cross between "Alice in Wonderland's" Mad Hatter and a gay-friendly W.C. Fields. As on her previous tours, there were lots of costume changes and enough eye-popping visual stimuli – both live on stage and on multiple video screens – to fuel several commercials for Spears' favorite non-alcoholic drink, Red Bull.
The lavish yet empty show also allowed her to market her budding adulthood via her barely there stage attire, rote bump-and-grind routines and enough pseudo-orgasmic moans to suggest a bright future as a phone-sex operator.
Of course, this former teen-pop queen is no stranger when it comes to creating superficial controversy, be it her lip-lock with Madonna at last year's MTV Video Music Awards, skin-baring magazine cover photos or abortive, hours-long Las Vegas wedding in January.
Unfortunately for Spears, the only real controversy came not from her calculated attempts to shock or titillate, but from her inability to do so with even a hint of originality or imagination.
During "Breathe On Me," she cavorted in a brass bed, just as Madonna did while singing "Like a Virgin" during her 1990 "Blonde Ambition" tour. The only difference is Spears wore a nearly transparent body stocking and was joined by an undulating male dancer clad only in his underpants.
The no-longer virginal Spears evoked both Madonna and Janet Jackson during the masturbation-celebrating "Touch of My Hand," which earned loud cheers for her gratuitous gyrations and self-fondling.
Sadly, what Spears is marketing is a shallow form of sexuality even more threadbare than her skimpiest outfits. Too bad.
George Varga: (619) 293-2253; george.varga@uniontrib.com