4 November 2004
Here’s Britney’s third Irish number one of 2004, making this in chart-topping terms her most successful year to date. This cover of ‘My Prerogative’, the new track (and title track) from her greatest hits album, feels of a piece with its predecessor ‘Everytime’ in that the main event here is the video rather than the song, and is another self-informing loop with the tabloid Internet’s crass, aggressive obsession with Britney. The whole ’00s pop cultural paradigm was chewing up and spitting out the most famous young woman on the planet, her own attempts to control the narrative only seemed to perpetuate this, and it was all fairly dispiriting.
The unsavoury Bobby Brown’s original new-jack-Prince ‘My Prerogative’ wasn’t a classic to begin with, and despite Britney gleefully sinking her teeth into lines like “They say I’m nasty!” this iteration doesn’t kick on much from there. R&B-pop’s latest hotshot Scandi producer team, Bloodshy & Avant, make this sound so much like an old-school Cheiron goodie, ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’, that you’d be forgiven for assuming the “Tell me why!” response lines were sung by the Backstreet Boys themselves. Between its Cheiron trail-following and its status as makeweight greatest-hits newie, ‘My Prerogative’ sounds badly like rote work whose creative capital was spent entirely on the real priority of the latest Britney-celeb-biopic event video. Britney’s next Irish number one, around three chart-years from now, comes as a welcome and surprising return to form, which is a mark of how low her stock had fallen after stuff like this.
