This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, register here.
I don’t want to shock anyone, so maybe make sure you’re sitting down when you read this, or at least have something to hold on to and hold on to. Here it is: This flaming gay geriatric millennial (may God smite the person who came up with the term “geriatric millennial”) who is looking for a career writing about pop culture is a huge Britney Spears fan.
I remember going to her concert (my first!) and seeing groups of grown men there and thinking it was weird and creepy. I realize now that (many of) these men were the future versions of me and all my Britney-obsessed gays—and, oh, how obsessed I was.
I choreographed dances to her songs in my bedroom; some were attempts to meticulously recreate the routines from her music videos, and others were, shall we say, “interpretive.” (You should have seen my “Sometimes” number.) I had posters on my wall under the guise of her being “so hot”. When people first started uploading videos to this new site called YouTube, one of the first things I looked up was Britney’s 2000 appearance. The Rosie O’Donnell Show, billed as a backstage pass for her concert tour. (I remember this episode because I treated it like my personal Super Bowl when it first aired.)
This is a preamble to not only selfishly take every opportunity to gush about my pop queen, but also to give context to why this is such a big week for me. (Selfish again!) Spears’ memoir The woman in me was released this week, becoming an instant hit and finally giving the world something to talk about besides Taylor Swift and that soccer player.
The sites have been dug, caved, selected, cleaned and [insert other synonym here] for juicy revelations about Spears’ conservatism, her relationship with Justin Timberlake and all sorts of celebrity gossip. Cynically, this is to be expected, continuing the exploitation of Spears’ life for tabloid sensation. Frankly, there’s an argument to be made that this vulture-like charm is refreshing: hearing Spears’ own voice and perspective after so long.
If you actually read The woman in me— and you’re forgiven for thinking there can’t be anything left in it that hasn’t been leaked and reported — you’ll find something clever about the book. By addressing all of these headlines directly, Spears frees herself from them as well. My biggest takeaway from reading the memoir was her voice. Like, literally. The woman in me is a great reminder that Spears’ music was and is a cultural force. Maybe now we can get back to focusing on that.
After two decades spent ready to launch into an impassioned, flawless “well, actually…” monologue every time someone dismissed her music or criticized her vocal skills, it was a treat to read the stories behind some of Spears’ most pivotal moments. career.
You learn how she fights for certain elections. Her label did not want to release “Me Against the Music” as a single from In the Zone, for example, but she was so keen on it that she personally asked Madonna to make a guest appearance on the track to convince them. The evolution of her sound was purposeful and set musical trends, whether it was the strum she introduced on “…Baby One More Time” or the decision to work with the Neptunes in 2001. Britney. On songs like “I’m a Slave 4 U,” she left behind the glow of a future pop vocalist for the low-key whispering that became the album’s identity. In doing so, she steered the Swedish pop confection she was known for into more R&B territory, a move repeated by countless pop stars then and now.
It should be pretty obvious that an artist with such astronomical success has approached his sound with quite a bit of inventiveness. But even as her songs became inescapable and changed the musical landscape, Spears was not recognized. Because of her image and performance style, her music was not taken seriously and instead the conversation was dominated by her looks, her sexuality and everything else that went into the business of being Britney Spears. in The woman in mewe can read how Spears herself has come to terms with it.
“I’ve never been quite sure what all these critics think I should be doing—a Bob Dylan impression?” she writes. “I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like me dangerous?”
And the preoccupation with her body and whether or not she was a virgin was not only misogynistic and demeaning, but it was also weaponized to discredit her work as an artist and a game-changing industry.
“Yes, as a teenager I acted in that image because everyone made such a big deal out of it. But if you think about it, it was pretty stupid for people to describe my body like that, to point at me and say, “Look! Virgin!” she wrote. “It didn’t affect anyone at all. And it took the focus off of me as a musician and a performer. I worked so hard on my music and on my stage shows. But all some reporters could think to ask me was if my breasts were real (in fact they were) and if my hymen was intact or not.
Part of the power of the confessional as The woman in me is in shame. We Must shame on you. We also need to reexamine the way we viewed then, and how we view now, the person who has been abused. And in the case of Britney Spears, play some of her damn good music.
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