FEATURE:
…Baby One More Time
Exploring the Legacy of Britney Spears
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YOU can’t blame…
Britney Spears for not wanting to perform in the U.S. again. Although she has millions of fans in her country, especially under Donald Trump, there are a lot of artists reluctant to perform there. Also, in terms of press intrusion and the media in the U.S., there would be this spotlight on Spears. They have not been supportive and kind to her and I feel like they have done a lot of damage. There is no denying the impact and legacy of Britney Spears. Artists like Taylor Swift owe a huge debt to her. I feel like her early career and her work at the end of the 1990s was hugely important. There had never been a Pop artist like her. Such a tremendously talented artist, her entire career has helped change and shape Pop. So many artists today (including Charli xcx) you can tie to Britney Spears. I will move to that in a minute. Attitude recently wrote about a Britney Spears post, where she hinted that she may well be coming to the U.K. to perform:
“Britney Spears has suggested her next public performance could take place in the UK, after revealing she does not plan to perform in the US again.
The singer made the comments in an Instagram post shared yesterday (8 January), in which she spoke about her life since being released from the conservatorship imposed by her father Jamie Spears in 2008. The arrangement was formally lifted in 2021.
Alongside a throwback photo of herself seated at a piano, Spears told fans she is preparing to gift the instrument to one of her sons.
“Sending this piano to my son this year!!!” she wrote.
She also addressed her Instagram dance videos, explaining: “Interestingly enough, I dance on IG to heal things in my body that people have no idea about,” adding that “it’s embarrassing sometimes”.
She added in the same post, “But I walked through the fire to save my life… I will never perform in the U.S. again because of extremely sensitive reasons but I hope to be sitting on a stool with a red rose in my hair, in a bun, performing with my son… in the UK and AUSTRALIA very soon. He’s a huge star and I’m so humbled to be in his presence!!! God speed, little man!!!”
Spears shares two sons with her ex-husband Kevin Federline – Jayden, 19, and Preston, 20 – though she did not specify which son she was referring to. The ‘Gimme More’ songstress was married to the DJ from 2004 to 2007.
In his memoir, entitled You Thought You Knew, Federline shared details about the Grammy Award-winner, claiming his then-teen sons were scared to stay at their mother’s house.
Since then, Spears has spoken out on social media, labelling her ex-husband as “gaslighting,” adding she is exhausted by his claims.
When did Spears last perform live?
She has not performed live on stage since 2018. Her most recent tour was the Piece of Me Tour, which ran across North America and Europe in 2018 and included UK dates in London and Manchester.
The tour followed her hugely successful Las Vegas residency Britney: Piece of Me, which ran at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino from 2013 to 2017 and saw her perform 248 shows. The residency was later adapted into international touring productions in 2017 and 2018.
Her final documented live performance took place in Austin, Texas on 21 October 2018. Since then, Spears has not returned to the stage, despite her conservatorship ending in 2021”.
Britney Spears is helping bring her son Jayden into music. t would be awesome to see them both perform together. However, I feel like there is this desire for fans to see Spears perform. In December, this enormously loved artist turns forty-five. There will be celebration around that. Her third album, Britney, turn’s twenty-five in October. One of her most underrated albums, 2011’s Femme Fatale, turns fifteen in March. Earlier this month, we marked twenty-seven years since her debut album, ..Baby One More Time, was released. Its title track (her debut single) was released the year before. I remember it coming out in 1998 and being thrilled by Britney Spears. I was new to her work and was not aware of her U.S. T.V. work. At the end of the 1990s, there were these incredible U.S. Pop artists coming through.
It was a really exciting time. Also, it was one perhaps where these very young women were being overly-sexualised and exploited by the press. Right from the off, Britney Spears had this confidence and strength. The video for ..Baby One More Time was her idea. She added elements to the song and was this incredible hard-working artist who was spending a lot of hours in the studio. I think there was a lot of re-examination of Britney Spears’ legacy and work around 2021 and 2022. Britney Spears' conservatorship began in February 2008. It was initiated by her father, Jamie Spears, following mental health struggles, granting him legal authority over her finances and personal life for over thirteen years until its termination in November 2021. That meant a Los Angeles judge gave Britney Spears autonomy and granting her sole access to her $60 million estate for the first time since 1st February, 2008. I guess there is another anniversary this year. On 26th August, it will be ten years since Spears released her most recent album, Glory.
I am not sure if it will be her final album. However, given Spears legacy today and how many artists you can draw to her – Addison Rae is another that comes to mind -, you would like to think that she has another album in her. Spears has also recently been discussing her ongoing admiration for Madonna. The Queen of Pop follows up 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor this year. I wonder whether Spears will maybe revisit older work and follow it up with a modern-day sequel. It would be exciting! Before looking at her legacy today in terms of artists inspired by her, I want to get to a couple of articles. The first is from TIME in 2021. They reframed Britney Spears’ legacy in terms of going beyond her music: “One thing that Spears voiced objection to in her Instagram post was the way she had been ignored by her team while “begging to put my new music in my show for MY fans.” While this plea for agency highlights recent revelations of her utter lack of it, both in her conservatorship hearings and this year’s documentary Framing Britney Spears, it also brings up a compelling question about Spears’ career and artistic legacy. Spears was the biggest pop star of the Y2K teen pop era, and she still looms large today, with artists as varied as the nightmare-conjuring Billie Eilish and the alt-rock doyenne Courtney Love spotlighting her impact on the pop world through interviews and cover songs. If the Britney Spears catalog turns out to be complete as it stands today, how will we look back on her career?”. I do think that we need toms new articles where her contemporary impact and influence is explored. Think about other artists, like maybe Madison Beer and Slayyyter who you can trace a line through to Britney Spears:
“That full-length project, released in 1999, wasn’t a full-spectrum showcase of those “qualities,” but it did offer listeners a crash course in her strengths. Chief among them is her voice, which balances the husky, knowing qualities it displays on the title track and other upbeat songs like “(You Drive Me) Crazy” with the wounded, searching emotionalism heard on ballads like the sparkling “Sometimes” and the pleading “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart.”
Pop songwriting is more laden with mythology than most entertainment products; credits can include people charged with writing toplines (vocal melodies), snatches of melody, or even bits that sound like already-existing hits (a la Right Said Fred’s credit for a borrowed cadence on Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do”). Run down the credits of Spears’ albums and you’ll see her name pop up under the lists of songwriters. What that actually might mean is fairly opaque; she could have written an entire song or just a line.
Still, Britney Spears wouldn’t be Britney Spears without the outsized, appealing personality at the megastar’s nucleus. Martin was onto something when he said he would “use [Spears’] qualities appropriately,” even if the phrasing does give one pause in the context of her present life under conservatorship. Over the years, her catalog has been studded with songs that reflect the facets of the singular traits at which she’s offered glimpses. Her 2011 comeback single “Hold It Against Me” pivots on a pickup line that sounded dated in the swingers’ era four decades prior–”If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?”–but her attitude, half-winking, half-serious, makes it work. Tracks like the defiant “Stronger” and the hip-shaking “Overprotected,” meanwhile, showed off her inner strength, presaging her recent courage in speaking out against her current situation. And other pieces of her catalog, particularly in the depths of special-edition bonus tracks, show off her personality’s quirks and depth, from the loopy 2016 track “If I’m Dancing” to the chilling video for her 2004 single “Everytime.”
This was why her performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, during which she sleepwalked through the brooding Blackout opener “Gimme More,” was such a blow for fans. That show, which followed a string of highly publicized personal challenges exacerbated by the cruel tabloid landscape of the era—felt like a sign that Spears’ spirit, which had propelled her into the American mainstream, had been if not snuffed out, at least misplaced.
Blackout, which contained production and songwriting contributions from the likes of Pharrell Williams (with his duo The Neptunes) and “Toxic” hitmakers Bloodshy & Avant, was hailed upon its release, presaging the synth-heavier, moodier sounds embraced by the likes of Kanye West on 808s & Heartbreak and Lady Gaga on The Fame. While Spears was reportedly more in control on that record than any other, Blackout succeeds in part because she’s a mysterious presence at its core, her signature wail refracted by effects and shrouded in synths. The shadowy vibe reflects the atmosphere surrounding her at the time, with songs like the glitchy paparazzi rebuke “Piece of Me” and the spare synth pop banger “Radar” feeling of the always-on digital age.
Since Blackout, Spears has released four albums, all of which have sold well; their reception, though, seems to parallel just how weird she can get on them. The lead single from 2013’s Britney Jean, the brittle “Work Bitch,” was shrug-worthy upon release, and lyrics like “You want a hot body, you want a Bugatti/ you want a Maserati? You better work, bitch” land uncomfortably after her conservatorship hearings. In contrast, her most recent full-length, 2016’s Glory, was hailed for its explorations of post-millennial pop’s fringes. It concludes with “Coupure Électrique,” an icily minimalist track in which Spears whisper-sings, in broken French, of love in the dark, a throwback to the Blackout era that also lets her display her playful side.
More than two decades after her debut, Spears’ legacy as a pop artist is complex, made up of dazzling musical heights and music-business-borne lows. This year, Olivia Rodrigo’s path from Disney stardom to pop-chart domination bears broad similarities to Spears’. The “drivers license” singer was born a few years into Spears’ era of TRL superiority, though, and in a recent interview with Nylon, her response to a question about Framing Britney Spears indicated that she sees the treatment of the elder pop supernova as a sign of how easily pop stardom can be undermined by supposed allies. “I just hope that this next generation of women don’t get asked [invasive] questions…. I hope reporters don’t think that that’s OK. It’s just disgusting,” she said in the interview.
The twists and turns in Spears’ story over recent years have fundamentally altered the dream of becoming a pop star, even as the appeal of finding one artist who can make a song that changes the world for five minutes remains. While Spears’ catalog is part of the canon that defines the first 20 years of this millennium, one hopes that her public struggles, and the strength she’s shown while enduring them, will lead to her cementing her true legacy: Reshaping the machine that turns those songs into cultural touchstones”.
The BBC ran an article in 2022 that seemed like a watershed moment. A sense of freedom and liberation or Britney Spears, it was a time to reconsider her legacy. Huge artists such as Lady Gaga and Charli xcx shouting her out and very much channelling her work, I do think there needs to be a 2026 update. Given how there is a mix of huge and established artists who owe a debt to her and these newer and innovative Pop artists that are reminiscent of Spears:
“She has been hailed as an inspiration by everyone from Lady Gaga, who in 2009 described her as "the most provocative performer of my time", to Lana Del Rey. "There is something about Britney that compelled me," Del Rey said in 2012, "the way she sings and just the way she looks." More recently, the highly acclaimed Japanese-British singer-songwriter Rina Sawayama said Spears was the first artist she fell in love with. She recalled watching her music videos as a child and thinking: "I want her as an older sister". Spears' videos could be high-concept affairs where she played a lonely Hollywood actress (Lucky) or a vampish flight attendant (Toxic), but with 2000 single Stronger, she showed she could hold our full attention with nothing but her dance moves and simple props like a chair and a cane. Swedish singer-songwriter Tove Styrke is equally effusive when asked how Spears has influenced her as a musician. "Oh my, how hasn't she?" she tells BBC Culture. "She has inspired a maybe delusional strive for pop stardom [in me], wanting to be a pop princess with a pure heart. Her voice, her dancing, her blonde hair… all of it has been influential."
No fear
Spears is also a long-time LGBTQ icon who has influenced the contemporary drag scene with her high-octane dance routines. Jonbers Blonde, a Northern Irish drag performer who was a finalist on the latest series of RuPaul's Drag Race UK, says she was particularly fascinated by two audacious performances Spears gave at the MTV Video Music Awards. In 2000, Spears delivered an inventive medley of (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction and Oops!... I Did It Again that really showed off her commanding stage presence and precision-tooled dance moves. Then the following year, she sang I'm A Slave 4 U with a live python draped over her shoulders. "I think it was the fearlessness that she portrayed in those MTV performances that inspired me," Blonde says. "Doing drag, you need to be fearless – even to leave the house in drag is brave – and that's something that Britney definitely is."
So why, given all this praise from performers who've followed in her wake, is Spears still slightly underrated? Partly it's a result of what we might call her "origin story". As a child growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, a small town in the US Bible Belt, Spears displayed a preternatural flair for performance. "I was in my own world. I found out what I'm supposed to do at an early age," she recalled in a 1999 Rolling Stone cover story. At 12, having already appeared on the talent show Star Search and in several TV adverts, Spears was cast in The Mickey Mouse Club, a wholesome Disney variety show on which she sang and danced with fellow future A-listers Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Ryan Gosling. But when she launched her music career in 1998, four years after the show was axed, the "Mouseketeer" tag seemed to cling a little more closely to Spears than it did to her peers.
It could be argued that Spears' rise in the late 1990s was so meteoric that the media of the time had trouble processing it. Written and produced by Max Martin, the Swedish songwriting genius who has now penned more Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers than anyone bar John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Spears' irresistible 1998 debut single ...Baby One More Time wasn't just a hit but a pop culture phenomenon. Helped by a memorable music video in which Spears chose to wear a schoolgirl outfit – a look often interpreted as suggestive, but which also reflected her age – it became one of the best-selling singles of all time. Her debut album, also called ...Baby One More Time, ended up selling 26 million copies worldwide after spawning further huge hits with Sometimes and (You Drive Me) Crazy. "When ...Baby One More Time came out, the market, particularly in America, was saturated by boy bands," notes Alim Kheraj, a music, culture and LGBTQ journalist. "I don't think since Madonna had there been a female artist that had really skyrocketed in pop that way."
By 1999, Spears was already successful enough to embark on the Baby One More Time Tour, a 56-date criss-cross of North America, but her popularity came laced with a certain amount of disdain. Because she was so young and didn't write any of the songs on her debut album, it was all too easy to dismiss and dehumanise her as a mere "pop puppet". "I don't doubt that, initially, Max Martin had a large role to play in how ...Baby One More Time sounded," Kheraj counters, "but ultimately the delivery, the timbre and the performance of the song is all Britney. She is in control of the song." For Kheraj, this minimisation of Spears' creative input was intensified by a toxic combination of sexism and classism. "From the off, Britney was dubbed 'stupid' and 'trailer trash' by the media," he says. Sometimes this snobbery was a little more thinly veiled, complete with patronising misogyny: Rolling Stone's review of her debut album said that Baby One More Time [the song] had succeeded in "effectively transforming this ex-Mouseketeer born in a tiny Louisiana town into a growling jailbait dynamo".
Because she broke through in the late 1990s, at the tail end of an era dominated by powerhouse vocalists like Celine Dion and Mariah Carey, Spears' distinctive singing voice was often woefully undervalued. Kheraj points to her more mature third album, 2001's Britney, which saw her embrace R&B on I'm A Slave 4 U and soft rock on I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman, as the point at which she really honed her vocal style. "She pushes her voice into more whispery textures, playing with the different sounds that she's able to create in order to elevate a song," Kheraj says, comparing her to Kylie Minogue and Janet Jackson in this respect. "Though in my opinion," he adds, "Spears' ability to be an actress with her own voice, taking on different tones, timbres and vibrations, is second to none." This assessment of Spears' vocal technique is echoed by Andrew Watt, a producer who worked with her on this year's Elton John duet Hold Me Closer. "She's unbelievable at layering her voice and doubling, which is one of the hardest things to do," he told The Guardian in August, adding: "She's so good at knowing when she got the right take. She took complete control."
Finding her voice
As Spears' career progressed, she also took more control of her music from the very start of the creative process. Kheraj says she had a predilection for finding collaborators who "would disrupt the status quo of pop" – like envelope-pushing R&B duo the Neptunes, who produced her early 2000s hits I'm a Slave 4 U and Boys, and Moby, who worked on her trance-influenced track Early Mornin'. The latter appeared on Spears' 2003 album In the Zone, her fourth, on which she co-wrote eight of 12 songs including the beautifully subdued ballad Everytime. "The video was always on MTV when I was about 11, and I remember feeling so sad for her," says Styrke, referring to the song's regretful lyrics as well as its video depicting the dark side of fame. "Hearing it [now] still makes me really feel for her."
In the Zone was another step up for Spears, but her magnum opus came four years later with 2007's Blackout, an incredibly innovative album that she executive produced. Home to the huge hits Gimme More and Piece of Me, Blackout didn't just feature cutting-edge production blending elements of techno, EDM and dubstep (then a very new genre); it also underlined Spears' fearlessness. Piece of Me, a song that savagely sends up negative perceptions of her at the time, is as self-referential as pop music gets. "Guess I can't see the harm in working and being a mama," Spears sings. "And with a kid on my arm, I'm still an exceptional earner." It doesn't matter that Spears didn't write it; she said everything she needed to just by putting it out. Blackout was a high-water mark, but Spears has displayed a knack for picking winning material throughout her career. "Have you heard her albums? They're so intelligent," avant-garde singer-songwriter Charli XCX said in 2014. "The way her songs are crafted is really amazing. I think that [her] music is really interesting and clever."
In terms of new artists controlling their visuals, videos and songs. Talking openly about their lives and that incredible stagecraft. Think about the raft of artists today like Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpneter, Tate McRae, Dua Lipa, Rina Swayama, Billie Eilish and so many other artists who have cited Britney Spears or been influenced by some aspect of her career. Especially interesting seeing powerful Generation Z artists who are carrying the torch. Even if Britney Spears has not released an album in almost a decade and there has been little in the way of performance, I feel this year is a hugely important one. There are some important album anniversaries and that tailoring prospect that she may perform in the U.K. The fact she could bring on to stage some of these artists that name her as an influence. A career-spanning set. I am ending this feature with a selection of her best hits and those deeper cuts that show what a consistent and innovative artist she is. Over twenty-five years since she broke through, she is still impacting the mainstream and fringes. I have been a fan since the very start and I follow her Instagram. She is someone who is thinking about her son and a possible music career, though she is also looking at where she heads next. This year could be a massive one. With many similar artists to Britney Spears releasing the boldest and best Pop of today, the original is very much in our midst! For that, we have to show love and salute…
A peerless superstar.