A motivational poster for ONTD posters…

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[5.00]

Katherine St Asaph: Britney’s camp has two lines of PR fire. The first is for fans and gossip blogs: Britney’s finally recovered from her tabloid demise (though her conservatorship remains.) The second’s for the industry: Britney’s career has been resuscitated as dying businesses are and is now a micromanaged brand, no big risks on the 10-K. The problem with that is that it’s plainly false; between the last single, written for a C-lister to pad her resume with sonic trends, and this, the more likely truth is that no one has any idea what Britney Spears should be doing in 2013. (And here’s why, maybe: The good-girl-gone-bad narrative is written to end in tragic death: women fainting of consumption, women threshed by celebrity, sexed then wrecked as cautionary tales. But when she doesn’t die? Graceful retirement makes for poor profits; chaste redemption makes for poor pop; saying “screw the narrative” makes you either obscure or Mandy Moore.) “Work Bitch!” is a clusterfuck. Like most clusterfucks, there’s plenty that’s good: the way the intro could segue into Disclosure (no way will.i.am isn’t studying Settle), or the bridge, a melodic oasis among will.i.am’s arid loops. There’s plenty that’s questionable, like everything else Will pastiches, or everything else Britney says. Her accent’s flimsy as a Halloween-store costume; for every “look hot” there’s a “big beat,” classic Britneychirp; or “Party in France,” residual Southerner, or “live fancy,” received swag. It’s as clever as the coinage “Britishney” and not a bit more. Then there’s the plentiful crap; whether you agree with Mykki Blanco that Spears’ camp is harmfully ransacking gay culture, it’s no improvement to add bootstrapping rhetoric from a millionaire. (This is about as pleasant to hear while unemployed as the Black Eyed Peas are to hear while hungover.) The result is intermittently pleasing, frantically intermittent and, paradoxically, safe: no dark dance (damn), no deep feelings, no unauthorized memes. So hey, I’ll play along: you want peak Britney? A legacy past “Legendney”? Just a 360? Whatever works, bitch.
[5]

Will Adams: Fucking will.i.am. His dastardly plan to turn Britney into a meme-bot is right on schedule. Picking up from last time, she’s still confusing a dodgy British accent with personality. Now she’s getting a word in edgewise, but will’s signature is all over it: “Here comes the smashahh!” about a Secondhand House Mafia beat, that faceplant of a middle eight. Unpleasant and hookless, “Work Bitch!” has no aspirations beyond being a deep cut from a spin class playlist. Britney has never sounded so detached. And no one cares, because the beat is banging and LOL she said “bitch.” 
[3]

Alfred Soto: Sounding like RuPaul imitating Julie Andrews, Britney revels in the luxuriance of Bugattis, mansions, parties in France, and terrible English accents, thus earning the exclamation point. The beat is steeped in lukewarm EDM clichés, though.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: It’s pretty funny that Britney Spears demands we “work” to earn millions of dollars while singing over the sort of EDM-by-numbers production that most SoundCloud brosteppers would know to discard. It’s hilarious that she does it in a British accent.
[3]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Work Bitch!” continues to shed Britney’s persona, if there ever was one. There are attempts at English end-level-boss accents, her traditional near-wordless vocal wavering, bottle service mantras. She is on the track but never seems to inhabit it, willowing away into an EDM thump, almost as if she was never there. (Harmony Korine on Britney, not far off: “She’s almost more than a person– she’s like an energy.”) You can place yourself in her shoes, achieve her grocery-list ambition, strut into business meetings in a two-piece, and work on your gag reflex when it comes to Jagerbombing it. There is only work and pleasure here. You didn’t come here for either of those, weren’t touched by the song’s unashamedly corporate ultra-sheen? Brit’s energy didn’t pass onto you, so there’s the door. To like this, to relate to this, you gotta work harder, bitch.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Ah, so Britney’s novelty accent is evidently a fig leaf for the fact that she has no remaining exhortative power whatsoever, something that would be quite helpful in a song called “Work Bitch.”
[4]

Brad Shoup: What do you want? Another song that tells you to party? Carrying a whiff of formative house, that intro is just the thing to push us into cooler weather. That synth figure, restless as tapping fingers, plays bad cop to Spears’ carrot-dangling authority; it’s as dogged as time. 
[9]

David Moore: will.i.am is such a dork, we all knew that, but more importantly Britney Spears is such a dork. I think that is wonderful, that we have such a huge dork in the fifteenth year of her unabated music career still blowing up planets and laughing with a little snort at the end (fun fact: Britney Spears is about as far along in her career now as Madonna was when Britney Spears debuted). But mostly I think this song is wonderful, this bluntest instrument in an era of very blunt instruments, bashing everything up not because it’s better (though it is) or because it’s dorkier (because it isn’t) but because these dorks are the biggest dorks, a distinction they have both earned, damn it.  
[10]

W.B. Swygart: Pitching down the middle here: on the one hand, awful song, wretched lyrics; on the other, as perfect a sonic distillation of the shining fists of capitalism as there’s been in a very long time; on the imaginary third hand, I do like posting this video as often as possible.
[5]

Jessica Doyle: This graph, in song form. (Credit to Katherine.) Britney Spears doesn’t quite humanize it, but that’s appropriate for the era, too.
[4]

Jer Fairall: A sinister enough groove, but Brit, her voice still a rigid, charmless, expressionless thing, sounds like the world’s least convincing dominatrix barking the obnoxious titular command overtop of it.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Runway pop that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without the engine roar of high fashion and immaculately angled bodies. Britney’s gift for personalizing the remoteness of glamour and celebrity — her insistence on being a person where most other pop stars are satisfied with being an imago — is what rescues the deep schlock of the beats, but I’d like to hear her playfulness met with music equally playful.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: For someone who must have been one of, if not the first major popstar to employ gloomwobble in their music, there’s a weird felicitousness in this sounding like the dying throes of “E” “D” so-called “M.” It is a complete and utter mess. Who exactly is she addressing? Is she trying to motivate them or belittle them? What is that accent? Who is this intended to satisfy? If Britney has any designs on remaining a relevant popstar, she’d be wise to note that ATRL is not the world.
[3]

Anthony Easton: I have been loving and writing about Britney since my undergrad days, and she has made work that I wanted to write about for that long. Sometimes it’s difficult to write kind things, but I have never been bored. More importantly, even though her voice has always been processed or shredded, or placed small inside giant songs, I always was interested in how that voice worked in the larger context of whatever production she was working on. There was always an interesting balance between aesthetic choices that maintained her brand and ones that pushed it forward or deconstructed a scandal-tinged tabloid biography. If I was feeling generous, I could make the argument that this kind of does the same thing, and there are places where I can see that history emerge: the intro bit, how she sings “ring the alarm,” how she rhymes “hot body” with Bugatti and Maserati, her view of the Protestant work ethic, the last few seconds. But the last few seconds seem complacent, not completely bonzo. Maybe it is a question of diminishing returns, for both the audience and the performer. Maybe this sounds a little bored and self-satisfied because after a decade of hard work, she has little elsewhere to go.
[5]