LAS VEGAS – If anyone has the right to say, “Don’t call it a comeback,” it’s Britney Spears, whose every public appearance since she bottomed out in 2007 has been labeled as the Possible Return to Form With Which She Might Finally Silence All Doubters. But however well or poorly you think she fared in any of those post-2007 appearances, none of them marked a return to the scene of the crime — the MTV Video Music Awards, site of her highest highs and single lowest low — until now.
On Sunday night, Spears will perform live at the VMAs for the first time since the great debacle of nine years ago. Will it be the definitively redemptive moment she’s been working toward for almost a decade… or just another night in Vegas, uneventfully transplanted to Madison Square Garden?
In recent years, she’s avoided the sacred or cursed ground that is the VMAs for the slightly less glaring spotlight of the Billboard Music Awards. In the spring of 2015, her duet on that show with Iggy Azalea, “Pretty Girls,” was largely seen as a chemistry-free whiff, but she came back to the BBMAs this year with a solo greatest-hits medley that went over far better. Clearly, she’d been in training, in the form of a Caesars Palace residency that began in 2013, and a nimble backflip in that performance three years ago made up for a multitude of lip-synching among some grouches who were expecting a lazier Britney
But expectations aren’t so low now, and VMAs viewers may be less primed to settle for something that seems snipped right out of her nightly Nevada set.
MTV’s producers have their work cut out for them in coming up with visual production elements that will compare with the snake, or Sapphic Madonna kiss, or schoolgirl outfit of yore. Because Spears goes into Sunday with one inherent handicap already on her scorecard: She’ll be performing “Make Me” — the song she was supposed to do on the Billboard Awards in May, before it was scratched in favor of the hits medley. Since then, it’s been unleashed on the public and already been found wanting, at least if the charts are any indication. “Make Me” currently sits at #51 on the Billboard Hot 100 in its fifth week, down from #43 last week and way down from its peak of #17. She might have a better shot at wowing the crowd if she already had a second single from her new album,Glory, teed up.
By Sunday night, fans will have already had two days to absorb Glory (or longer, if you factor in leaks). Early critical notices for the Aug. 26 have fallen in a middle ground between fabulosity and flop, as they have for most of Spears’s latter-day releases.
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