With that power came plenty of criticism.ĭuring the dark days of constant headlines about Spears spiraling, an event occurred that would itself help shape pop culture. Spears walked in her sexual energy in songs like “Oops!… I Did It Again,” “Toxic” and “Gimme More,” so that later stars like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande and Camila Cabello could run. “It has also put a perky new beat on the pop charts, where the devotional vaporings of boy bands have vanquished the roiling rock angst of the early to mid-Nineties.”Īnd she kept showing up – in magazines, on the charts and in provocative music videos. Teen spending power is reshaping pop culture, filling our TV screens with teen dramas and our multiplexes with teen movies,” the article read. “In a distant demographic echo of the postwar baby boom, the American teen population has reached the kind of critical mass that makes the culture industry sit up and listen. These days young women owning their sexuality and their agency is common place, but back then it was a scandal – made even more so by a now famous 1999 Rolling Stone magazine cover featuring Spears.Īccording to that Rolling Stone interview, the singer showed up on the scene at just the right time, writing “Welcome to the new Teen Age.” And while girl groups like Destiny’s Child and TLC were also running up the charts, Spears brought something different with her girl next door who’s unafraid to be a little edgy image. It was the year of the boy bands with 98 Degrees, Backstreet Boys and N’Sync scoring hits. When Spears donned a school girl uniform for the music video for her hit “Baby One More Time” in 1999 she was very quickly dubbed “The Princess of Pop.” It’s those millions that are now at the center of her nearly 13 years and counting court-ordered conservatorship, which once again has Spears in the headlines. She ascended from child star on “The All-New Mickey Mouse Club” to teen superstar singer, who then had to manage a transition into an adulthood that included marriage, divorce, and motherhood in quick succession, along the way pulling in millions. That comparison may feel like a stretch to some, until you realize what a commodity Spears was and was to become. Young Americans kept gobbling her up, a sign of things to come when savings rates would hit rock bottom a decade or so later.” Then, oops, she did it again! And so did we. “She started out as a cutesy, innocent little girl, playing it fast and loose by asking for us to hit her baby, one more time. “As disturbing as it may be, the saga of Britney Spears’s downfall serves pretty well as a cautionary tale for young American consumers, Warners wrote. It compared a then-troubled Spears with an also then-troubled US economy. In 2008 then Huffington Post contributor Morgan Warners penned a piece about Spears headlined “Britney’s Downfall as Metaphor.” In the process, she’s paved a path for young women in entertainment who came after her, and shown the public we can do better.īritney Spears with her son, Sean Preston, in 2006 Mel Bouzad/FilmMagic/Getty Images ‘A cautionary tale’ In the years that have passed, Spears faced other struggles and has gone on to new professional and personal success – all under a blindingly bright spotlight. That image of a distraught young mother tugs deeper in the wake of the documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” which debuted in February and shed light on some of the struggles Spears faced as the result of such intense – and often dangerous and sexist – media scrutiny. It was a moment many headlines overlooked to instead focus on the fact that Spears almost dropped her infant child while trying to avoid aggressive photographers. She stumbled in the process and a later photo, taken through a window, shows her in tears as she holds her son, seemingly trying to shield the world from seeing her visibly upset. The time was May 2006 and Spears has been descended upon by photographers outside of a Manhattan hotel as she struggled to juggle a cup in one hand with her then 8-month-old son Sean Preston in her arms. When the world thinks “troubled” Britney Spears, the paparazzi captured images of her with a shaved head, attacking a photographer’s vehicle with an umbrella in 2007 probably come to mind.īut there was another moment, again captured by a crush of photographers, that is, perhaps, more troubling.
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