Sasha Frere-Jones: Britney Spears Enters the Club: The New Yorker When Forbes writes that you were the highest-paid female performer of 2012, it's hard to call your new album a comeback. If you're Britney Spears, you were also the biggest-selling female artist of the aughts. So her new record, "Britney Jean," which was released last week, isn't a comeback album as much as it is a clever repositioning. Spears is a durable idol, but the former child star has long faced the spectre of becoming old in pop years, and she now has formidable competition. Pop: come for the sexism, stay for the ageism. In the nineties, when Spears débuted alongside her fellow Mickey Mouse Club members Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, dancing was central to her appeal. Trained by the manager Lou Pearlman's teen-pop empire, which operated simultaneously out of Orlando (operations) and Stockholm (melodies), Spears and her peers in "N Sync and the Backstreet Boys were equally committed to synchronized dancing and to singing. R. & B. acts of the time, like TLC and, later, Destiny's Child, were not so different in their reliance on innovative, coördinated dance routines. In this world, Spears has always been the jock among the divas, a fresh-faced student who wants to get it right. The problem is that both she and pop have changed their relationship to dancing. During her public meltdown, in 2007 and 2008, when she lost custody of her children to their father, the professional footnote Kevin Federline, Spears also lost her fastball as a dancer. She was never a singer with much detail or power, and so her body often stood in for her voice: it was defined, fast, and firm. Though Spears cites Madonna as her hero and blueprint, she has always reminded me more of Nadia Comaneci, a child with preternatural physical skills. And also someone you couldn't imagine doing anything else. . . .