Britney Offered Pop Superstardom — But It Also Sent a Message We Ignored

By Ilana Kaplan


An eponymous album marks a major moment in an artist's career. For ladies, owning one's work, body, and artistry can be especially powerful, even political. During Women's History Month, MTV News is highlighting some of those iconic statements from some of the largest artists on the globe. This is Self-Titled.


A few images have defined Britney Spears while in her career: debuting distressed in a (then) controversial, edgy Catholic school-girl outfit about how her loneliness is killing her; steamy in white, kissing Madonna at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards; distraught and battling her mental health and tabloid culture as she beat a paparazzo’s vehicle with a umbrella several years later.


Although one particular scene stands out as a cultural reset for the star: as soon as Spears performed her raunchy hit “I’m a Slave 4 U” at the 2001 VMAs with an albino Burmese python named Banana draped around her neck. It could’ve been just another awards show efficiency, however it became pop-music history. The set was striking — a jungle of Spears’s own making — featuring the singer and her washboard abs scantily clad in a green chiffon scarf-bra and gem-encrusted boy shorts that eventually helped fund the Halloween costume industry.


because the lead single of her self-titled album Britney, “I’m a Slave 4 U” was a hypnotic, hip-hop-infused anthem that touted a more mature sound than listeners had heard before. Nevertheless it wasn’t just a single: It symbolized a new era. Her VMAs rendition further solidified it. The efficiency, like the song, had power. Gone were the pink-ribbon pigtails and cardigans: Spears was embracing her raw sexuality as well as creating a declarative response to the criticism she derived for being also risqué. Whether the public admired it or not, the pop icon was growing up, and her liberated sound and provocative performances were right now going to match.


Spears’s MTV efficiency came just two months before she’d release Britney, her boundary-pushing third album that served as a primer for pop longevity. Britney pushed genre boundaries and noticed the artist toying with everything from rock and R&B to hip-hop and disco. For Spears, Britney was emblematic of her pop potential, and its coming-of-age narrative paralleled Janet Jackson’s 1986 reset Control. The 12-track record flaunted her versatility by way of the the retro-futuristic, R&B-laced “I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Boys”; the electro-ballad “That’s Where You Take Me”; the defiant dance-pop jaunt “Overprotected”; and the fiery cover of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’s anthemic “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.”


Britney also allowed Spears to be seen as more than a performer. Once they weren’t singles, Spears co-wrote five of the album’s tracks: “Lonely,” “Anticipating,” “Cinderella,” “Let Me Be,” and “That’s Where You Take Me.” She partnered once again with hit producers Max Martin and partner Rami Yacoub, who helped her transition from her first two records to a more mature phase. It also proved she wasn’t afraid of edgier production, enlisting The Neptunes to help produce what could be two of the album’s hit singles (“I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Boys”).


While Britney was contemporaneously written off as “a concept record about herself,” 20 years later, the album scans as an earnest depiction of a young star coming of age under a microscope and attempting to experience life on her own terms. If 1999’s debut ...Baby One More Time touted innocence and 2000’s follow-up Oops!...I Did It Again tackled the loneliness of fame, Britney grappled with wanting to have autonomy — over her body, life, and choices. Her feelings about the aspire to live freely and without judgment were in plain sight. “All you people look at me like I’m a little bit girl / Well, did you ever think it'd be OK for me to step into this world?” Spears declares on “I’m a Slave 4 U.” “Overprotected” reflected the crushing weight of fame and Spears’s desire for normality — due in part to the overwhelming paparazzi. The Martin- and Dido-penned “I’m Not a Girl, Not However a Woman” reflected the in-between state Spears noticed herself in and the space she needed to explore it.


But Spears was never really given that space. The New York Times’s recent Hulu documentary Framing Britney Spears — which re-examines her career, the cruelty of the media, and contextualizes her conservatorship — recalled how Spears, not quite 20 years old any time this album dropped, was met repeatedly with questions about her virginity and sex life. And Britney was a statement that required no further questioning — a portrait of a young girl reckoning with both adulthood and her sexuality. Nevertheless this self-actualization was disregarded, and Spears was not only plagued endlessly by intimate questions although christened one of pop culture’s “Lolitas,” alongside Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Lindsay Lohan, and Christina Aguilera. Unfortunately, that gross sentiment overshadowed the pop star’s own story and haunted her career while in her journey of self-discovery.


The narrative and release of Britney also lent itself to a visual component. In early 2001, Spears and her team helped craft a script for a film where the singer could make her debut in a starring role. That script became 2002’s teen drama Crossroads, which followed three childhood companions Lucy (Spears), Kit (Zoe Saldana), and Mimi (Taryn Manning), as they embarked on a road trip where Mimi could audition for a record label. The film was somewhat reflective of Spears’s own journey of growing up and pursuing her pop-star dreams. It was also shaped by tracks from Britney that shaped a blossoming narrative. “I’m Not a Girl, Not However a Woman” can seem like a schmaltzy ballad, nevertheless it was a formative moment for Spears and her onscreen character who read the song as a poem and later performed it. It remains a metaphor about a young woman at the peak of stardom who was bending and might break without the breathing room to grow up.


Twenty years since the release of Britney, the album is representative of the complexities of young stardom. For the past 13 years, Spears has been stuck in an in-between state that recalls the sentiment of Britney, in a conservatorship that has controlled her life in ways she perhaps couldn’t have believed back in 2001. In the content of the recent Spears renaissance, the record is simultaneously a pop masterpiece, a plea for autonomy respect, along with a statement to the media. Her loneliness wasn’t killing her anymore, however the scrutiny surrounding her life and image was. While Britney helped establish a foundation for Spears’s pop superstardom, it also reflected the harrowing state of early 2000s media culture, slut-shaming, and the way it suffocated young girls. Britney was a message we didn't think about, and we should have known better.