Britney Spears - Brit CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

as everyone around her is feverishly constructing "Britney" the product.

Just as Abdul was a choreographer who sang and Madonna is a performance artist who makes music, this former Mouseketeer is a nice actress playing the part of a bubblegum icon intent on being teasingly naughty. Never has a female star courted the preteen and trench-coat crowds so simultaneously and shamelessly. Although she at first appeared to be choking back psychological pain while executing coy dance moves and signature guttural gasps, Spears now seems like she's in on and enjoying the joke scripted for her.And just as Janet Jackson claimed Control while aspiring to adulthood, Spears aches to put her own authorial stamp on the "Britney" story. Despite Britney's five co-songwriting credits, her music is ultimately driven by producers who must work around her vocal limitations. But an identity is now asserting itself: Britney is by far her most personable album, the most consistently playful and the least wince-inducing. Producer Rodney Jerkins' hip-hop blaspheming of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" doesn't go as far as it should (is a Limp Bizkit remix in its future?), but it certainly beats what her earlier studio architects did to those Sonny and Cher and Stones songs.

Although they're not the album's most melodious cuts, the Neptunes' "I'm a Slave 4 U" and "Boys" could be Britney's most important. This ultra-hot hip-hop duo feeds Prince's girl group Vanity 6 ("Nasty Girl"), Rick James' female foursome the Mary Jane Girls ("Boys"), and Jam and Lewis' pivotal Janet production ("Nasty") into their own studio machine. The resulting montage of 1980s-R&B male fantasies clings bizarrely close to its sources while feeding Spears avant-soul beats designed to carry her into twenty-first-century urban adulthood. It works: The "get it, get it" chant of "Slave" delivers classic "Britney"-ness, while "Boys" whips out a surprisingly tuneful bridge that dramatically rescues an estrogen-dripping but otherwise negligible song.

Swedish teen-pop pioneer Max Martin and partner Rami reunite for tracks that link the international, kid-friendly sound of Spears' previous album, Oops! . . . I Did It Again, to her recent American R&B update. "Overprotected," "Cinderella" and "Bombastic Love" bear the expected monster choruses, familiar modulations and emotionally impulsive lyrical themes. Yet their grooves are sharper and their arrangements have more sonic twinkle. Once you get beyond its cringeworthy title, "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" supplies the weighty ballad Spears has craved and can n

Married and a mother -- officially all grown up -- Britney now sings about either the husband or the kid. (Sorry, people. It's a sad day for the middle-aged American male sicko.) For everyone else, these bonus tracks further Spears' upward path of totally bangin' production and almost uncanny Prince-channeling.