Britney’s currently in the running for the 2009 GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards! She’s nominated for International Musician/Solo Artist, so be sure to go HERE and vote today!
Britney currently holds the #1 spot on the MTV European most wanted list, with “If U Seek Amy”! Here’s the top ten:
1. (7724) Britney Spears – If You Seek Amy
2. (4879) Taylor Swift – Love Story
3. (4054) Beyonce – Halo
4. (3761) T.I. – Dead And Gone
5. (3191) Lady Gaga – Poker Face
6. (2716) Flo-Rida – Right Round
7. (2646) T.I. – Live Your Life
8. (2392) Katy Perry – Thinking Of You
9. (1982) Akon – Beautiful
10. (1159) Kelly Clarkson – My Life Would Suck Without You
AMP 97.1 radio is giving away free tickets to four of Britney’s concerts:
4/16: Thursday- Los Angeles, Staples Center 8pm
+ chance to sit in AMP Suite w/Stryker! 4/17: Friday – Los Angeles, Staples Center 8pm
4/19: Sunday – Anaheim, Honda Center 8pm
4/20: Monday – Anaheim Honda Center 8pm
Get details on how to win tickets at AMP 97.1!
Okay, so tour reviews haven’t been looking so great for the past few days, but here’s a review for the San Jose show, if anybody’s interested. It’s titled “Britney’s ‘Circus’ misses the mark”, so don’t expect it to be too pretty:
“Britney Spears’ “Circus” tour, which hit San Jose’s HP Pavilion on Easter Sunday, was an exercise in excess. There was Perez Hilton in drag (on video) and acrobats in S&M garb (for real), talented dancers and countless costume changes, magicians and clowns and the occasional little person, all packed into a three-ring setup befitting the tour’s name.
But oddly the show left us wanting more — more Britney.
Sure, we saw her, looking sexy and fit, and that was a thrill for a while.
But if you pay big bucks to see an entertainer — the average ticket on this night topped $100 — you’re looking for a connection that you can’t get through your TV screen or your iPod. You want to feel that your support is fueling the performance, that together the artist and the audience are creating something special that will never happen again.
Instead, on this night, it was 40 minutes into the set — the same set she moved her lips to at every other tour stop — before Spears finally addressed the crowd, with this heartfelt sentiment: “What’s up, Sacramento?!”
It’s a shame the show didn’t have more heart and soul, because a lot of the spectacle was, well, pretty spectacular.
After a campy video introduction from Hilton, projected on a circular curtain around the center ring, Spears descended from the ceiling in two interlocking hoops, a la Cirque du Soleil, to perform “Circus” and “Piece of Me.” “Ooh Ooh Baby” featured some fun old-school magic tricks, and the acrobatics on “Touch of My Hand” actually put our heroine into a death-defying, or at least broken-bone-defying, situation.
Too often, though, Spears and her dancers fell back into an air of masked erotic nonsense, kind of like “Eyes Wide Shut” except not as funny.
To Spears’ credit, the 27-year-old mother of two has left her teeny-bopper roots behind. This is no nostalgia act. Though the two CDs she recorded as a teen are among the biggest sellers of all time, only “… Baby One More Time” from that era made the cut here.
That means that instead of charming teen trifles like “Oops — I Did It Again” we got a lot of dark, erotically charged 21st-century dance music like “Hot as Ice” and “Get Naked.” (In this context, “If U Seek Amy,” Spears’ cheekily naughty current single, came across as a pop gem.) So if you only knew Spears’ music from the radio, there wasn’t a lot to sing along with.
Not that there was much live singing going on anyway. At this point in her career, Spears doesn’t really try to disguise her lip-syncing, and her fans know what to expect. (For the most part, the instrumentalists labored anonymously in the shadows beneath the stages.) As a dancer, she was adequate, moving nimbly on high heels, though she left the serious moves to the professionals.
One noticeable flaw in the otherwise first-rate production was the absence of video screens broadcasting Britney to the back row. Spears had them removed after a recent “wardrobe malfunction” in Tampa. That left a lot of the magic and clown business during the many costume changes basically unintelligible from the upper deck.
After almost 90 minutes, Spears and her troupe left the stage. She returned minutes later in a sexy police outfit to perform her comeback hit “Womanizer,” and this time she even thanked San Jose.
Based on the piercing, deafening screams throughout the night, many people love Britney just for being Britney. For now, she can get by with that. But it wouldn’t hurt for her to give her fans a little more anyway.”
Britney did say, “What’s up Sacramento?!” right before her “Everytime” performance, though. Here’s a video of that, if anybody’s interested:
A Britney “fan” from Vancouver created a petition online, in an attempt to receive a refund because Britney walked off the stage, basically saying that, “because she doesn’t sing live, the smoke doesn’t make a difference”. Here’s what the fan wrote on petitionspot.com:
“Those who attended the Britney Spears gong-show show in Vancouver on Wednesday, April 8th 2009 at GM Place (and those around the world, for that matter) know what went down that evening. If not, let me refresh your memory. Britney opened the show that night with Circus. Roaring, cheering crowed, looked like it was going to be a GREAT night. Three songs into the set, however, Britney leaves the stage. We’re led to believe it was for a costume change, prop set-up, etcetera. Five minutes pass of fans being left sitting in the dark – nothing. Ten minutes – nothing. Twenty minutes of waiting, a woman comes over the PA system stating that the building had become very smoke-infested and that it was dangerous for “Ms. Spears” and her dancers. Hold on just a minute. Where was the scent of smoke?! And you had to wait TWENTY minutes before making this announcement? The building only became smokey once that announcement was made and the fans had lit cigarettes in protest. Keep in mind that “Ms. Spears”, herself, is a heavy smoker – and does NOT. I repeat. DOES NOT SING LIVE. If you think she does, you’re delusional. Therefor the smoke would not affect her vocal cords. There have been plenty of shows at GM Place (Justin Timberlake, for example) for the stench of smoke was almost unbearable and not ONCE did he comment on it nor did he ever leave the stage. Maybe because he has a tad bit more class and is much, much more professional than “Ms. Spears” these days. After fourty minutes (total) of waiting, Britney returned to the stage and resumed the show with little to no energy, at the end saying, “Don’t smoke weed” and “Peace out, mother****ers!” Great way to show fans your appreciation. GM Place and Britney’s management also seem to have conflicting statements – Britney’s website stating it was workers above the stage complaining (when, as said, the woman over the PA said it was Britney and her dancers) and GM Place saying there was no smoke. Some fans paid up to $500 to see this ***** perform live, to see her comeback, and she calls us MOTHER****ERS? As a Britney fan, delay in the show or no delay, I can say I am extremely disappointed and I’m sure there are many who share the same opinion as I do. An apology from Britney, herself, would have been nice. But we won’t be getting that, so what’s the next best thing? A REFUND.”
Since there’s only one supporter of the petition so far (the creator), I’m just going to laugh and say that this “fan” needs to stop smoking weed.
Yes, “If U Seek Amy” is censored on radios, but most stations didn’t change that much, and just turned the “seek” into a “see”. Understandable.
BBC Radio 1, on the other hand, supposedly removed the whole “All of the boys and all of the girls and begging to if you seek Amy” line from the song.
Here’s the version that BBC Radio 1 is rumored to have been playing:
…Might as well censor the rest of the song and just play the instrumental, if you’re going to take out half of the chorus.
It wasn’t the train wreck that some had predicted. And it wasn’t the victory march that others had longed to see.
In the end, Britney Spears’ concert at Arco Arena in Sacramento on Saturday night – her first of three Northern California dates this month – fell somewhere between the two extremes.
On the Brit-Brit scale, “The Circus Starring Britney Spears 2009 Tour” was better than the star’s last major trek, 2004’s “The Onyx Hotel,” but below her best tours, including 2000’s “Oops . . . I Did It Again” and 2002’s “Dream Within a Dream” – the latter being one of the best pure pop spectacles that this critic has ever seen. Longtime fans can judge for themselves when the “Circus” returns to town tonight (Sunday) at the HP Pavilion in San Jose and on April 22, for a date at Oracle Arena in Oakland.
Given everything Spears has been through in the last five years, a period of time that saw her become the ultimate tabloid queen, this uneven, though enjoyable outing was still more than what should have been reasonably expected of this fallen princess of pop in the midst of a comeback.
The capacity crowd of 18,000 fans that turned out in Sacramento to see the 27-year-old star was rewarded with a flashy, big-budget spectacle that nearly matched the hefty ticket prices, which topped out at $750.
The theme was the “Circus,” the title of Spears’ most-recent album, and the action took place at the center of the arena, in what’s known in the biz as an “in-the-round” setting. There was one large stage that connected to two smaller ones, creating a true “three-ring” affair. A band of musicians was hidden from plain sight in a pit that surrounded the three stages, thus assuring that at least some of the music we’d hear on this night would be live.
After an opening set by the Pussycat Dolls, which did absolutely nothing to change the perception that these ladies are little more than the poor man’s Spice Girls, Spears kicked off her 80-minute set in dramatic fashion as the curtain rose on center stage and she appeared dressed as a ringmaster. She jumped right into the new album’s terrific title track, and then followed up with the hit single from 2007’s “Blackout,” “Piece of Me,” which is by far the best tune Spears has ever recorded.
It was hard not to be swept up in the sheer star power of the moment. Even after the many all-too-human moments we’ve seen from Spears over the last five years – the relationship woes, the childhood custody battles, the breakdowns, etc. – she still is able to make a crowd gasp simply by appearing onstage, as if 18,000 fans are saying in unison, “OMG! It’s Britney!” None of her contemporaries, women like Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera and Beyonce, can produce quite the same effect.
Those other performers, however, top Britney in many other ways. For one, Spears can no longer be considered among the elite dancers in show business. The decision-makers (i.e., her father and tour director Jamie King, who has worked with Madonna in the past) seem to know this and have constructed a show that cleverly sidesteps the need for Britney to do much hoofing around.
A crowd, for the most part, just wants there to be plenty of movement onstage, and King fulfills that wish in many cases by simply having other “Circus” cast members wheeling Britney around on cool contraptions. During “Piece of Me,” for example, Britney rode atop a lion’s cage, doing basic “Vogue”-style hand gestures and some basic body writhing, while being pushed around the stage by guys dressed like they were on their way to the next bondage ball.
It’s worth noting that, while there were some risque outfits, this is not a sexed-up show in the fashion of “Onyx Hotel,” which featured a “bathing” sequence that fans still mention. This time around, this former Mouseketeer, who is now a mother of two, is putting on a fairly family-friendly affair, although one that isn’t trying to compete for the “Hannah Montana” crowd.
For the first part of the concert, the “Circus” motif was particularly well-handled. The cast included plenty of clowns and weirdoes, guys playing with fire, curious characters performing slight-of-hand trickery and even one bodybuilder – in other words, it closely resembled what’s regularly seen right down the street at the State Capital.
At one point, a magician even made Spears disappear, a feat that her detractors have been unable to accomplish thus far. Yet, that wasn’t the most startling disappearing act of the night. For some unknown reason – perhaps, King ran out of ideas? – the “Circus” motif suddenly vanished toward the end of the show and Spears has left to rummage through Madonna’s closet during the last numbers.
She did save some of her best songs for last, including “Toxic” and “. . . Baby One More Time” (but, unfortunately, no “ . . . Baby One More Time.”) The encore should have marked a return to the “Circus” theme as Spears belted out the obvious closer, “Womanizer,” but instead fans received an utterly too-cliché sexy cop routine.
Again, given just how far Britney had fallen, this comeback show represented a pretty impressive outing. Yet, Spears will have up to up her game for the next tour – especially if she wants to sell those $750 tickets.
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