Britney Spears

Greatest Hits: My Prerogative

Jive

Greatest Hits: My Prerogative appears at the tail end of a year during which Britney Spears got married twice, divorced once, canceled a tour, and had countless paparazzi shots taken of her drinking booze and making out in public.

Since her debut Britney has been omnipresent in the media as the premiere icon for the teen pop phenomenon. During the several years since her debut, she has continued to turn out products, selling herself with increasingly revealing photographs and all the while being used as an example of everything that’s wrong with pop culture. No wonder that after six years of unceasing fame she wants to abandon her superstar career for a life of marriage and motherhood.

As a time capsule, My Prerogative does its job well. It contains almost all of Britney’s hits save for a few of the less memorable ones, as well as a couple of unreleased tunes, all kicked off by a pointless cover of Bobby Brown’s song “My Prerogative.”

Added together, the pop hits on this album are somewhat less than the sum of their parts. Britney’s thin, squeaky voice and the similarity between the songs becomes increasingly tiresome over the course of the collection. The track listing is annoyingly not in chronological order, resulting in a jumble of her better moments such as “Toxic” and “I’m a Slave 4 U” with the lower point songs such as “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”

Even if it isn’t as great a listen as a cohesive album, My Prerogative does work as a portrait of the time when Britney Spears was the defining figure of American pop culture.

—James Gashinski