17 June 2004
We’re still a few years from public head-shaving and private conservatorship, but already by 2004 the Britney story was becoming uncomfortable viewing. I had the impression that ‘Everytime’ leant into that mood by design, so it didn’t appeal to me greatly then and I haven’t looked forward to revisiting it now. On a slight digression, I wasn’t familiar with its icky, garish cover image (above) that looks more like a graphic from some sweaty basement geek’s swords-and-busty-Amazonians computer game.
The video is uncomfortable viewing too, with its feeding-frenzy paparazzi, toxic masculinity (in the post-‘Toxic’ sense), self-harm, male-gaze leering, melodramatic mawkishness, and an unsubtle blurring of the real-fictional Britney divide. Few tracks could fend for themselves amid all that foofaraw, and ‘Everytime’ certainly isn’t that strong or compelling. Lyrically, it has little relationship to the video’s storyline: if lines like “my weakness caused you pain / And this song’s my sorry” have any continuity, it’s less with the Britney celebrity circus and more with the Britney back catalogue of passive, apologetic statements like ‘Born To Make You Happy’ and ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’. Vocally, Britney is understated, perhaps because her talent for gulping, desolated, committed delivery would have overpowered this slight song. The dinky kindergarten piano aims for fairytale-gone-wrong slo-mo poignancy, but it’s so try-hard.
Ultimately, ‘Everytime’ just feels like a convenient big-ballad opportunity to drop a celebrity-biopic music video that feeds into and off the Britney public hoopla, leaving us with a recursive loop of manipulative discomfort. It’s not Britney’s fault; ’00s pop culture really was that baseline problematic. But has it improved any since then?
