Copycatting

How to tell Britney from Mandy

by Sean Richardson

Britney Spears

For fans of unabashedly larger-than-life pop music, it's a collaboration made in heaven: of-the-minute teen queen Britney Spears singing a brand new song, written especially for her, by arena-country husband-and-wife phenoms "Mutt" Lange and Shania Twain. Teen pop isn't entirely unknown territory to famed AC/DC and Def Leppard producer Mutt, who's also worked with the Backstreet Boys, but writing for Britney is the farthest he's strayed from the highway to hell yet. The song in question, "Don't Let Me Be the Last To Know," is one of Shania's classic girlish pleas, with Mutt working his usual arsenal of synths and heavily processed background vocals around Britney's sweet cooing. On the scale of Mutt ballads, it falls short of the Shania blockbuster "You're Still the One" (or "Love Bites," for that matter), but it sure makes 'N Sync look stupid for settling for Richard Marx on their latest.

The Mutt/Shania collaboration is the only thing remotely surprising about Oops! . . . I Did It Again, the by-the-numbers follow-up to Britney's 12-million-selling debut, . . . Baby One More Time (both Jive). Britney's been cloned so many times since . . . Baby came out last year that she's earned the right to clone herself. But with Britney clones coming on rather strongly now, it wouldn't have been a bad idea for the genuine article to raise the stakes a little. There's Christina Aguilera, of course, the talented über-hoochie who stole the Grammy for Best New Artist right out from underneath Britney. And now Mandy Moore, the youngest of the clones at sweet 16, has a new disc of her own in stores just six months after the release of her platinum-selling debut, So Real. Featuring the title single and four other new songs along with several selections from So Real, Moore's I Wanna Be with You (both 550 Music/Sony) isn't a proper follow-up. Still, the "special edition" banner across the top of the CD cover should be more than enough to entice the rabid teen-pop hordes.

More than any of the clones -- and despite her superstardom -- Britney comes across as your average American teenage girl on disc. She giggles with her girlfriends about the boys in her life between songs on Oops!; once an audacious guy even calls her a "nerd" on her answering machine. The song that follows that amusing bit of dialogue, "Lucky," is Britney's meditation on the loneliness of fame, but otherwise the disc bursts with youthful energy. Credit goes to teen-pop guru Max Martin and the gang of like-minded European producers who worked on the majority of the album. They're as fond of the Timbaland bounce as everyone else making urban pop records, but Martin and crew also bring that classic sense of Euro uplift to the hard-charging choruses of songs like the ubiquitous title track, "Stronger," and "Can't Make You Love Me." The heightened drama of the Swedes' layered synth breakdowns even threatens to beat Mutt at his own game. Against such stiff competition, Diane Warren's contribution and a silly new-jill cover of the Stones' "Satisfaction" by the guy who did Brandy & Monica's "The Boy Is Mine" don't stand a chance.

Defiant assertions of "I'm not that innocent!" aside, good-girl Britney wins out over bad-girl Britney on Oops! Rather than seducing the guys she sings about, she obsesses over them, and that frumpy brown tanktop she wears on the cover of the CD is more form-fitting than anything she wears in the pictures inside the booklet. Mandy Moore looks equally demure on the cover of her new disc. Done up a little more than girl-next-door Britney, she displays a casual glamor far beyond her years, though it certainly befits a "national spokeswoman for Neutrogena products" like herself.

According to my mom, my 11-year-old sister thinks Moore's music is a little too "suggestive" for a 16-year-old, but "I Wanna Be with You" might change her mind. Moore seems to be aiming for my mom's CD player rather than my sister's with the breathy ballad, which was produced by former Amy Grant guy Keith Thomas and cops its trip-hop beats from Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn." Moore's vocals are both stronger and more understated than Britney's, but her material has far less personality: in place of Britney's age-specific skits, she favors faceless diva club anthems. Things do get a little suggestive on a remix of "So Real," where an anonymous rapper shouts, "Everybody want a piece of Mandy Moore!" That kind of thing is atypical of the album, which is as pretty and sanitized as your average make-up commercial. Mandy's got the looks and the voice to compete with Britney; it's the girlish charm that's lacking. But that's nothing a few refinements in the cloning process can't fix.