Britney Spears lands her 10th top 10 hit as "Till The World Ends" jumps from #20 to #9 in its second week on the Hot 100. Remarkably, Spears has amassed more top 10 hits in the past four years than she did in the first eight years of her career (when she was at her peak) as a record-seller and pop-culture icon.

Many people wrote Spears off in 2007 when she was going through a hard time in her personal life. In September of that year, after a much mocked performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story: "Oh, The Horror! Is Britney's Comeback Already Over? Or Does She Have A Prayer?" The headline inside was even worse: "Down For The Count?"

But a funny thing happened on the way to her predicted demise. Spears proceeded to land one of her biggest hits, "Gimme More," which reached #3 in October 2007. And she has since amassed five more top 10 hits: "Womanizer," "Circus," "3," "Hold It Against Me" and now "Till The World Ends."

By contrast, from 1998 to 2006, Spears notched just four top 10 hits: "...Baby One More Time," "(You Drive Me) Crazy," "Oops!...I Did It Again," and "Toxic."

How to explain this? It may be that fans' relationship with Spears deepened when she went through her troubles. They have seen her through highs and lows; triumphs and humiliations. This is a shift from the way things used to be, when stars when to great lengths to sanitize their images. Karen Carpenter never went public with her battle with anorexia, which made her death in 1983 such a shock to fans. Freddie Mercury finally acknowledged that he had AIDS just one day before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1991.

Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" tops the Hot 100 for the fifth straight week. It's the first song to debut at #1 and remain on top for five or more weeks since Elton John's "Candle In The Wind 1997"/"Something About The Way You Look Tonight" achieved the feat in 1997. (It held the top spot for its first 14 weeks.) Gaga and Elton teamed to open the 52nd annual Grammy Awards in February 2010. And of course Gaga has the most gay-friendly hit of all time and Elton is the biggest gay star of all time. So there you go.

Katy Perry's "E.T." (featuring Kanye West) jumps from #8 to #3. It's vying to become the fourth #1 hit from Perry's Teenage Dream album. The song is already #1 on Hot Digital Songs. It sold 216,000 copies this week. Perry previously topped that chart with "I Kissed A Girl," "California Gurls" (featuring Snoop Dogg)," "Teenage Dream" and "Firework."

Rihanna's "S&M" dips from #3 to #4. This isn't the first time that "S&M" has been high on the charts. Metallica hit #2 in 1999 with a live album by that title, on which it was backed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Metallica's S&M music video collection headed the Top Music Videos chart for four weeks in 2000.

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