Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 04/25/2011 at 2:55 PM News

The Popdust Files: britney spears, kesha, nicki minaj, remixes, Till The World Ends

If the Miami Heat have taught us anything this NBA season, it’s that in the 2010s, one superstar alone isn’t gonna cut it—you need three, at least. Britney Spears heeds this lesson in the recently leaked remix to her top ten hit ‘Till the World Ends,” featuring both tourmate Nicki Minaj and collaborator Ke$ha, who co-wrote the original song. The three megastars celebrated their team-up, as pop stars are wont to do these days, by spending much of the day twit-flirting:

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/britneyspears/status/62544393516748800"]

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/keshasuxx/status/62285048832995328"]

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/NICKIMINAJ/status/62280643756826625"]

Cute. Like the Miami Heat when they got out their rocky 9-8 start to begin the season, however, the trio don’t necessarily mesh that well on the remix. Nicki’s verse gets the song off on odd footing, repeatedly switching up accents and rhythms over a screwed-down version of the song’s beat and spewing bizarre lyrics like “I ain’t talkin’ poultry when I say this chicken’s friiiiieeeeed” and “Anyway, burn bradow / What’s that? / I dunno, but Femme Fatale.” Nicki sticks around long enough to introduce Ke$ha, who sings the song’s “I can’t take it, take it no more” hook, before Britney takes back over, with the rest of the song basically following the script of the original. As the Yahoo! Amplifier blog points out, it’s always amusing to hear Ke$ha over-enunciate her R’s, but besides that, her contributions are largely negligible.

There was probably never a way to get these three on the same page for the same song, but you still can’t help feeling like this was a somewhat wasted opportunity. Nicki’s verse would have been far better-suited for the remix’s dubstep bridge than its intro, and it would have been much cooler to hear Ke$ha trade off new lines with the ones she’d already written for Britney on one of the verses or choruses. But putting that together would probably have taken time and effort, whereas you get the feeling that this was thrown together in a couple days for the sole purposes of jolting the song’s iTunes sales and maybe building some further buzz for the Femme Fatale tour. It worked well enough for Rihanna when Brit showed up on her “S&M” redux—will Ke$ha and Nicki be able to repay Ms. Spears the karmic favor?

For lots more pics, videos and up-to-the-second dish on Britney, be sure to check out her Popdust Artist Page.