Still, the hunger for information about what’s happening behind the scenes with Spears - by both her supporters and onlookers - has not ceased. Her struggles have made it possible for others to be more open about their own. There is much more awareness and discussion today about the damaging effects of fame on the mental health of artists. “I want to say it’s my decisions or the career choices I made, but it felt very arbitrary.”įrom out of her darkness, Spears has actually shone a bright light. “What if the media had decided I was something else? I would be in a totally different position,” Witherspoon said. Witherspoon said that while she also had her run-ins with paparazzi, she and fellow actor Jennifer Garner were labeled “good” by the media, while Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and others were portrayed negatively. Reese Witherspoon told Time magazine in April that the “Framing Britney Spears” documentary made her reflect on the disparity in the treatment she received around the same time as Spears. It went viral, ( Crocker reportedly sold it as a NFT for more than $41,000 in April) became one of the first memes and started a conversation about fandom, celebrities, the media and mental health that continues today. He screamed “She’s a human” and took the media to task with a tearful “Leave Britney alone!” In 2007, a young man named Chris Crocker uploaded a video on YouTube in which he emotionally defended Spears after she was criticized for her MTV Video Music Awards performance that was deemed by some as lackluster. 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 12 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.
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