Britney Spears: Revolutionary
Britney Spears is Special, and probably not for the reasons you are thinking.
I don’t often write about such pure, unadulterated pop music on this blog. There’s a reason for this: I believe it is mass produced and formulaic, and generally, I think a good portion of it is garbage. The best practitioners of pop are often mere technicians, who outsource the creative aspects of their song writing to secretive pop culture svengalis who have one job: that is to create stuff which will sell as many copies in as short a period of time as possible. The musicians, then become vehicles: means to the end of making record producers and investors incredibly wealthy.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
Often, the pop musician may have talent and may have artistic integrity, but it is buried under an entirely manufactured image and entirely invented and unnatural sound so that it is incredibly difficult for the musician, if they so choose, to break out of the pop game. They either have to play it and sell their souls, or they do something wild and are forsaken by their paymasters. Their career generally suffers in exchange for their freedom. Many of them are unable to deal with the sudden loss of fame which was created FOR them (rarely by them), and which is as ephemeral as the attitudes about fashion: they may spiral into addiction and oblivion, or they may become like the dude from Oklahoma City R&B group Color Me Badd, who opened a tire store and is making a modest living, while “what ever happened to…” shows and journalists occasionally come out looking for them.
Others occasionally make something new for themselves and thrive, much less popular, but much more comfortable doing what suits them. I am thinking of Miley Cyrus, who as, as I recently mentioned, attached herself to GenX, working with The Flaming Lips and giving an excellent performance of “Say Hello 2 Heaven” with Pearl Jam after Chris Cornell died. Say what you like about her pop stuff, and her past as Hannah Montana might keep her from ever being officially welcomed into our Generation (we’ll see what we can do about that), but nonetheless, she seems happy, and she earns respect because she does her, and she don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about it.
But to turn to the topic of this article, we have to also freely give credit and respect to Ms. Britney Spears. Spears has been through all the ups and downs of pop stardom. She has been under the public eye for almost her entire life, where people have both worshiped her and ridiculed her. She is just 38 years old now, and it is hard to believe that it was 21 years ago that she broke out into the world of ultrafame, with pigtails and a bare midriff. If you do the math, that means that she made more money by the time she was 18 than most of us will ever make in our entire life.
But while we can admire Spears’ extreme success — she has one of the most recognizeable voices in all of pop music history — one aspect of her story is often overlooked. I just wrote above about how pop music is tripe: lowest common denominator nonsense which displays technical ability and cheap tricks to addict millions of uninformed and disinterested consumers, but lacks much in the way of artistry or enlightenment. But this particular track, this particular artist is special. Yes: She was an expert technician, there can be no doubt. She is an excellent dancer, she sells tickets and makes teenagers scream as they are buying her music, and she still draws all attention to her when she steps into a room. How can she not, after all. But dozens of others also do that… Katy Perry does, Rihanna does, Beyonce does. For all the same reasons.
But Britney, she’s special. I say this because she was the vanguard of her entire generation. She is it, the point of the Spear(s, see what I did there?) that finally relegated Generation X to the nostalgia circuit. There are not too many artists you can say that about, but if you say that about Britney, you put her in Beatles territory. So much more important than all the others around her, who were basically trying to do the same thing she was doing at about the same time, but will be long forgotten while people are still searching for Britney on the internet.
There are not too many points in music when you can say “Everything changed here.” But Britney Spears’ rise with that one song, that literally changed everything for music, and essentially drove guitar music first out of the mainstream, and then (with a few exceptions, like the Fu Fighters, which survived the seismic shift that was her massive hit, but generally predated her) entirely underground, where it resides today. Music was not the same after her debut: In fact, her hit was the crack of thunder than announced the arrival of the Millennials to cultural hegemony, and ended Gen X’s short but brilliant time in the sun once and for all.
You might object to this: “But what about the Spice Girls?” you might ask? I answer “What about them?” In and around 1994, as Cobain was offing himself, Britpop was about to burst forward, and Alternative started only just mellowing out after like a 6 year heroin binge that killed off a number of Gen X’s most influential musicians, women enjoyed a brief period of Alternative radio attention. We listened to all sorts of women-fronted bands and artists who made rock and punk, from Hole to Alanis Morissette to Sheryl Crow to Tracy Bonham to Four Non Blondes to Bikini Kill to That Dog to The Geraldine Fibbers. These women made rock for women, but recorded songs in such a way that men could buy in too — Let’s face it, these female artists, and a host of others like them often made a lot of the aggressive music following the decline of grunge, and their rage was righteous. There was a lot of empowerment in their music, and it really was a great time for music in general.
This explosion of a more female oriented music was capped off with the beginning of the Lilith Fair in 1997. Organizer Sarah MacLaughlin apparently did not appreciate the fact that, even though women were achieving massive success on the radio and playing live, concert promoters and radio stations did not play two women artists back to back. Men still dominated the radio stations, and women still had a difficult time getting booked to big name shows. So she put together her own festival, which celebrated women in music. The first Lilith Fair had a huge number of female acts from all over the rock and folk-pop spectrum, including Fiona Apple, Jewell, Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls and India Irie. One of our favorite bands, The Cardigans also played the first Lilith Fair. The second Lilith Fair was even bigger than the first.
Against this backdrop, in 1996, Britain launched the Spice Girls on the world. Yes, their music was catchy. Yes, they were attractive and had British accents. Yes, they generically repped “girl power”. And they owned the pop chart in the second half of 1996, beginning with their huge success “Wannbe.” They had all the attitude of Oasis — well… Maybe half of it, but to their credit, that’s still a lot — and they really made music look very fun. They jumped around, they sang, they had some questionable lyrics (such as this gem: “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends,” which even then meant, you have to hook up with all her friends first? I don’t know…) and they were unapologetically British.
But they predated Britney Spears by three years. So why aren’t they considered the vanguard? Certainly, the type of music that the Spice Girls did must have informed Britney Spears. If you are skilled enough with a computer, you could probably make a pretty convincing mashup between Spice’s follow up “Say You will Be There” and Spears’ “Baby One More Time”— the beat and instrumentation is actually quite similar. There can be no denying the influence of the Spice Girls on Spears’ music.
But Spice Girls was the trail end of the female powered music of the mid 90s. Their music leveraged and recycled even older sounds from the early 80s and 90s. There are some nods to Michael Jackson and to Dr. Dre in “Say you Will Be There.” Their tunes are more akin to the R&B being made by earlier Xer pop artists like TLC and Mariah Carey than what came later. Music fans who heard them were instantly familiar with those types of musical references. The Spice Girls were cuter, more approachable representatives of both the snotty Britpop bands from England like Oasis and Elastica AND the angry riot grrrl inspired hard rock led by female artists in the US. Their videos look like they were made by and for graduates of the early 90s. But at the end of the day, the Spice Girls might have been Gen X’s last pop group.
The single most important reason why Spice should be considered the rearguard of Gen X rather than the Vanguard of the Millennials was that their music ultimately did not change the music scene. Yes, they sold a lot of records. The people who bought their music were the youngest Xers and the oldest Millennials, often called the Bridge or “Xennial” generation — It is entirely possible that Britney Spears was a Spice Girls’ fan before she made a serious run at music herself. But Lilith Fair was still a year off from the release of “Wannabe” and the Spice Girls never played Lilith Fair. Neither did countless other pop bands of the time. The Spice Girls were more correctly echos of 80s dance pop, refreshed and sufficiently “empowered” with Spice Power. But nobody else attempted to sound like Spice: They had their sound all to themselves, and in fact, could be seen as a discrete phenomenon in music.
And at any rate, by late 1998, a year before Spears wasted the musical landscape with her paradigm shifting debut record, the Spice Girls were writing Christmas Songs, and Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell had already been out of the group for a half a year. And the Spice Girls were history, in that short period of time, quickly eclipsed by rapidly changing attitudes in popular music.
But then, “What about the Backstreet Boys and other Boy Bands” which came out right before Britney? It is correct that Spears, for her part, was part of a growing movement which could be seen as a reaction to guitar driven hard rock of the 1990s. Just after the last performance of the first Lilith Fair tour, a pop group which was pretty important in their own right, Backstreet Boys released their debut song, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back, alright?)” The band had gotten big in Japan along with a bunch of other boy bands like 98 Degrees and NSync, which acted as a proving ground for these “Boy Bands”.
But like the Spice Girls, all but one member of Backstreet were themselves Xers: While Nick Carter was born in 1981, three of the five are older than me. The music they were making might have been closer related to Spears’ music than the Spice Girls, and might have paved the way for Spears, but its 14 million copies sold pales in comparison to Spears’ debut album, which sold more than 25 million copies world wide, and her debut song which sold 10 million copies alone. And their music was also backward looking, referring more to older trends in music, including New Jack Swing and synthopop of the 80s and early 90s. Color Me Badd could have easily made “Everybody” and it would have sounded about the same as it did.
Now Britney, on the other hand, was different. When her debut came out in 1999, it became instantly ubiquitous. Britney was such an amazing success, that her music singlehandedly changed the way music on the radio sounded. The righteous rage of the mid-1990s female rockers gave way almost overnight to a saucy r&b/pop made by teenaged girls. Britney inspired a host of soundalikes, which we called “The Britneys” at the time, most of which are not making music really at all anymore. Overnight, the voice of female music on the radio went from belonging to this gritty, very mature grown ass woman, to a squeaky, highly produced young woman voice which also adopted a weird telephone effect, and some weird sexualized moaning: It was no longer Sarah MacLaughlin and Courtney Love’s game anymore. The radio now belonged to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilara, Jessica Simpson and Mandy Moore (AKA, Amanda Moore, the actress, who you might have forgotten started out as one of the Britneys back in the late 90s.)
And the fact that her music was for millennials, at least sung BY millennials, and aimed at leaving even younger Xers homeless on the radio, really made her stand head and shoulders above the rest of the pop revolution she led. In the face of her and her generation’s sudden dominance, we refugees fled to Alternative Hip hop and garage revival music, which to date was the last gasp of guitar driven rock.
Meanwhile, Britney and her squad tore up the charts and proceeded to kick open all the doors which had been the hallmarks of the “scene” cliques we had in the 90s. Everyone was welcomed to Britney’s party, while previously, who we listened to was an important part of our identity. She really was the first, and by far the most important of her new ascendant generation, which we later discovered was both the largest generation as well as the one with the most disposable wealth of all generations when they were growing up (though the Great Recession kinds fixed that second part, at any rate.) This meant that, with Britney in its Vanguard, a new generation would be setting the cultural tastes from now on. Our music had survived both the Spice Girls and “The Macarenna” pretty easily. We had our last real glimpses of greatness at the Lilith Fair, and our swan song in the White Stripes, the Strokes and the Killers.
But by the time Baby One More time came out, we Xers were done. That was the Beginning of the New, the moment everything changed. And to date, music is still more influenced by Britney Spears than it is by Kurt Cobain. Cobain is long dead, but Britney is still playing Vegas, and making records, and creating new perfumes. She still acts, and she still performs. She maintains an extremely rigorous work ethic and she is still constantly searched on the internet, apparently topping the internet searches for 7 of the last 12 years. And she is, in turn credited for inspiring younger Millennials and Gen Zers, who have followed in her footsteps, and who have become massive superstars in their own right — Current pop superstars like Selena Gomez and Ariana Granda draw direct inspiration from her.
Britney Spears is, in short, a revolutionary when it comes to music, one of the originals that loads of others have attempted to copy with more or less success, but could never duplicate.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
