Thinking About Britney
Britney Spears has a great laugh: warm and deep. While watching the new New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears, I couldn’t help but be taken aback by it. When she laughs, she sounds like the teen girl she used to be and the person many of us loved.
Framing Britney Spears details the case for her unusually long conservatorship, but it also shows us what Britney represented in the early parts of her career, especially to the people who looked up to her: a new understanding of what it means to be a young woman.
Most pop stars of the 90s were grown women like Madonna or Mariah Carey. At the time of Britney’s rise, boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC ruled the charts. There was no pop star quite like Britney—young, athletic, Southern, sexual, down-to-earth—at least not publicly. Janet Jackson, the star she most closely resembled, was a little bit different, for she had a family in the industry. As a black woman (who are often hypersexualized), Janet was also allowed to explore her sexuality and transition into an adult career. But Britney was all alone, facing pressure from all sides.
All of this wasn’t apparent at first, of course.