Our Britneys, Ourselves
When I was 14 years old, I had a lot of problems with Britney Spears. I was mad that she sounded like a sexy robot baby, mad (maybe) that she made being a sexy robot baby sound so good. …Baby One More Time was released my freshman year of high school, a time I kept logs tracking the relative numbers of male and female artists played on the radio, and got into fights with my brother about whether it was ok to play “Bitches Ain’t Shit” in the car as he drove me to school in suburban Virginia. Never would I have imagined then all the feelings I would come to have about Britney over the years, much less how those feelings rather than passing like waves would accumulate and amplify, echoing resonances. Britney has made me cry so many times. No other person has done more to help me understand what it means to be a woman in 21st century America.
A Britney Feelings Playlist Timeline
I’m a Slave 4 U: eerily prescient (2001)
tbh I didn’t really clock this one at the time except to roll my eyes & loudly sigh, and say to someone (prob myself): it’s SO OFFENSIVE and sad… The fact that somewhere in Las Vegas Britney prob goes out and performs this song every night, while literally not having legal freedom over her own choices blows my damn mind. But also, wtf a white woman saying this in a nation founded on the literal enslavement of people of color.
Lately I’ve been reading Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis (check that shit out btw, there is like some really crucial info in there that I didn’t know before even tho I should have had plenty of time to educate myself since it came out in 1983). Anyway, there is some really fascinating stuff about the women’s movement’s origins in the abolitionist movement, and the problematic and yet fruitful identification some early and mid 19th century white women felt with slaves of African descent. Like fruitful when it comes to solidarity organizing but also like… no, just no. Then later Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were extra mad that black men would get the vote before white women, as tho it were a zero sum game, and then on top of that they were just racist af like “even the [racist nonsense adjectives] black man gets to vote when the genteel, super respectable rich white lady doesn’t” and hoo boy. But another cool thing was that Frederick Douglass was like THROWING DOWN for women’s suffrage. Could Britney be knowingly engaging with the historic appropriation by white women of the figure of the slave as a sign of their abjection here?
Also good inspo for resisting patriarchal enlightenment notions of meaning:
What’s practical is logical. What the hell, who cares?
Me Against the Music: gay counterfactual & baton-passing (2003)
when this video came out I think I finally started to feel actually interested in Britney, for obvious reasons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clwLKJ294u4
I love how Britney and Madonna ask each other if they’re ready at the start of the song… such a different approach to consent than Britney usually gets! I’d like to think this is about offering an alternative to the inherent oppressions of compulsory heterosexuality. In retrospect, I feel like this was a moment of culturally switching from Madonna’s message of the false freedoms of apparent consumer and sexual choice, compared to Britney, who is all about taking pleasure in losing control because it’s the only choice left under hetero-patriarchal capitalism.
Toxic: learning to enjoy environmental catastrophe (2003)
The frantic pace of this song and esp lines like
With a taste of a poison paradise/ I’m addicted to you / Don’t you know that you’re toxic?
sum up so well the feeling of cruising by on overconsumption while destroying the planet that characterizes our catastrophic times! Really the meaning of the song only started coming through to me after thinking a lot about eco-feminism.
Gimme More: sexy baby robot turns Fury (2007)
This is the Britney song I identify with the most, which prob makes sense because this is the Britney I identify with most:
image source: https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/537561/britney-meltdown/
Just like the catchy dread of the heavy beat, Britney’s angry-creepy laugh at the start and most of all the switch from the breathless, high sexy “Gimme Gimme” to that low synth hulk roar “MORE” encapsulates the monstrous nature of desire like whoa. Also, on a personal note, I feel like if my gender identity could talk, this is what it would sound like.
Piece of Me: self-aware Britney holds a mirror to America (2007)
Britney just really tells us who she is here, and in that way holds up a mirror to all of the United States. When I think about America, I picture this song blasting out of a tank speeding across the Iraqi desert full of heavily armed clueless dudes with a mix of good or bad intentions and zero ideas what they’re doing. This was also the beginning of Britney clearly stating that she is trapped, the situation she remains in today:
I’m Miss American Dream since I was seventeen/ Don’t matter if I step on the scene/ Or sneak away to the Philippines/ They still gon’ put pictures of my derriere in the magazine/ You want a piece of me?/ You want a piece of me.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence this was the same time Britney went under conservatorship, LITERALLY UNDER CONTROL OF HER MALE RELATIVES. The world wasn’t ready for the transcendent, furious Britney rising up from the cuttings of her weave to drop some truth bombs on us, and, so like over 2 million incarcerated Americans, Britney‘s freedom was taken from her (supposed legal freedom, obvs none of the rest of us are actually free living under this carceral regime, either).
Till the World Ends: it’s not my apocalypse if I can’t dance (2011)
A true anthem for life in apocalyptic times, and Britney’s ultimate thesis statement:
If you feel it let it happen: keep on dancin’ till the world ends.
Look, we all know the world is ending. Doesn’t it feel good to just let it happen?
Make Me…: corporate S&M (2016)
After “Till the World Ends” distilled her message so perfectly, I wasn’t sure if there could be any more for Britney to tell us. But then she returns with this nuanced take on one of her central themes, consent (lack of).
Just want you to make me (move)/ Like it ain’t a choice for you / Like you got a job to do
Here is Britney asking for it, once again. Like so many of her songs, this one’s got some seriously rape-y top notes. There are a few things I think are interesting. First, saying “please make me” comes across kind of like a sub setting a scene, but I really think it’s about the fact that the only choice that can be made in our times is to say yes to subjection. It’s going to happen anyway, so you might as well pretend like it was your idea. What I think is so interesting about this song is that it flips the lack of agency back onto the very agent taking Britney’s agency away “like it ain’t a choice for you” either. It’s not a choice for you to force someone do something against their will. This so perfectly sums up the role of corporations in speeding us on the path toward our mutual destruction: they have to do it. All these people working for corporations who are required to serve only the profit incentive, destroying communities and our environment “like they got a job to do.” Because they do got a job to do! These days a corporate job, pretty much by definition, forces you to work against your own moral judgment and intuition. And there is almost no job that is not corporate: not in the business-modeled university, not in the nonprofit industrial complex, not as a multinational pop star. So we are the ones begging for our own annihilation because we don’t have another choice, and at the same time, spreading non-consensual destruction like we got a job to do. Britney gets it.
