Britney's Videography: 'Born to Make You Happy'

Britney Spears 'Born to Make You Happy' # # # # #
While America was stuck with 'From the Bottom of My Broken Heart' as the fourth single from ...Baby One More Time, the rest of the world got 'Born to Make You Happy,' a much better song and more consistent with Britney's talents as an artist. However, as the video for 'From the Bottom of My Broken Heart' bridged the gap between Britney the innocent and the new Britney soon to emerge, 'Born to Make You Happy''s video is a bit of a dud. The video is simply a bunch of interconnected scenes with no real association to each other or an overall plot/purpose. Scene one involves Britney, lying in her bed, mournfully remembering the good times she had with her now ex-boyfriend. In scene two, we see Britney, wearing an ice blue outfit, posing in a modern-looking ice blue room. And, of course, there is also a choreographed number on this huge platform where Britney, in a nice homage to her persona at this point, wears a particularly chaste floor length skirt slit all the way up to her waist on the sides. The dance sequence is the best part of the video, nicely matching the midtempo feel of the song, an extraordinarily difficult feat to pull off, but it will hardly go down as a memorable sequence in the career of Miss Spears. And that's precisely the problem with 'Born to Make You Happy': nothing in it (besides, possibly, the sexy torso of the hottie ex-boyfriend) is likely to stick with you a couple of hours after watching it. There's no advancement of Britney, no memorable moments, no striking images, just a bunch of bland, mediocre sets filled with Britney moping about. A bit of a stalling point in the course of Britney's videography, but, thankfully, her next video more than made up for it.