Updating How We Feel About Britney Spears
Words: Hannah Raine
In the year 2000, Britney Spears released the breakup track, “Stronger”. It’s the kind of song you yell out with your girlfriends over white wine, as you prepare your exit from the cocoon of heartbreak, “You may think that I can’t make it on my own - but now I’m stronger than yesterday!” Generic empowerment anthems such as this are a requisite entry in the catalogue of any pop princess. What sets "Stronger” apart, of course, is that Britney Spears isn’t just any pop princess, and the specifics of her personal life over the past quarter century have retroactively transformed the meaning of these lyrics.
They became a rallying cry in 2021, as the #FreeBritney movement advocated against her abusive, 13 year long, conservatorship. And now that an emancipated Britney continues to struggle publicly, you can see them quoted in the comments of Reddit threads about her current rehab stint. It’s as though they’re a message left from 19 year old Britney to her most devout fans. A promise: I will rise again.
You’d be heartless to possess even a cursory knowledge of what Britney Spears endured and not feel some degree of empathy. But for those of us who grew up with her, who watched Britney’s fall from grace with impressionable eyes, it runs deeper. I recently reflected on the lessons that I took away from Britney in a talk with the artist Elleanna Chapman, as part of the exhibition Mood Swings at London’s Norito Gallery. In her practice, Chapman experiments with the ways that pop divas can be utilised in the dissemination of political messaging. During our talk, she called young Britney an “aspirational mascot” of America. A sexy “virgin” with rock hard abs, she perfectly embodied the values of her era. But when Britney took a break from work to start a family and her body, after two consecutive pregnancies, got soft, the country turned its back on her.
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“Since learning the harrowing details of her conservatorship, the public is desperate to atone. We’ve practically canonised Britney in the process: the patron saint of girls and gays who suffered under the oppressive hand of the 2000’s. Now that she’s free, we’re waiting for her to fulfill the prophecy, to truly emerge stronger than yesterday.”
The public crucified Britney for those supposed sins. At one point, she seemed preordained for the same fate that met the likes of Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin. But to lose Britney in such a manner would mean that she’d have to be afforded a degree of humanity she never received. Those other women were vulnerable, and they sang openly of the demons they believed fame could exorcise. Britney was a pop star. And in the landscape of pop music, vulnerability appears only as a mirage. It is mediated, used sparingly, as a point of comparison against their overall projections of strength. Yes, there were occasional cracks in the armour - and interestingly, these often correlated with the moments that Britney was the most involved as an artist. The first song she ever wrote, the ballad Everytime, is an admission of weakness. It stands as a stark contrast to a song like Stronger, “Everytime I try to fly, I fall, without my wings,” she sings in a delicate vibrato. Her magnum opus, the hip-hop inspired dance album Blackout, was recorded in the midst of her 2007 meltdown. Although she was in pain, Britney says this was the most creatively fulfilled she ever felt.
Her entire career, Britney Spears was criticised for being inauthentic. And yet, each time she tried to tell us who she really was, how she really felt, we shut her up. We didn’t like weak Britney, we wanted strong Britney. And so she came back. Kind of. By 2008, she appeared to have undergone a factory reset. She looked like an older version of the girl we once knew: blonde hair, fit body, cheerleader smile. She went right back to work, releasing Circus - a return to the classic pop sound that made her famous. The powers behind her conservatorship sold us a narrative and, for many years, we bought it. We were happy to see her remerge as a palatable, simulacrum of her former self. With Britney seemingly alive and well, we could sleep at night in gleeful ignorance.
Now we know better. Since learning the harrowing details of her conservatorship, the public is desperate to atone. We’ve practically canonised Britney in the process: the patron saint of girls and gays who suffered under the oppressive hand of the 2000’s. Now that she’s free, we’re waiting for her to fulfill the prophecy, to truly emerge stronger than yesterday. The intentions are good, but somewhat self serving. Such is the paradox of the comeback; it’s a performance of triumph by the fallen artist before the very public that pushed them down. We expect our popstars to resemble a phoenix, perpetually in a cycle of rebirth.
Britney is breaking that cycle. There are no plans for a comeback. Her current behaviour is concerning and erratic, much like it was in 2007, but beyond understandable given everything she’s endured. While we should all hope that she receives the help she needs to heal, the public should not be privy to that process. Britney deserves the space to finally be weak, to cope with her trauma without mediation. In refusing to unburden us of our collective guilt, Britney Spears is, in a sense, free.
