|
 Britney
Jean Spears was born Dec. 2, 1981 in the small
Southern town of Kentwood, Louisiana (population:
1,200), where she has lived most of her life.
She started performing at a very young age,
first in local stage productions and church
choirs, later in national commercials and off-Broadway
plays, and finally, starting at age 11, in two
seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club TV show
alongside future 'NSYNC members Joshua "JC"
Chasez and Justin Timberlake. After leaving
MMC in '94, she au'ditioned
for an all-girl singing group but instead
wound up with a solo recording deal with Jive
Records, home to similarly-minded teen-pop
sensations the Backstreet Boys
Jive
savvily and aggressively marketed Britney to
the Backstreet crowd, by including her songs
on a Backstreet Boys CD sampler, offering free
previews of her video (which features the pop
starlet doing her best Lolita impression in a
very short plaid Catholic schoolgirl skirt and
skintight baby tee) to anyone who requested
the Backstreet Boys' "I'll Never Break
Your Heart" video on cable music channel
the Box, getting her a slot alongside the Boys
on the Sabrina The Teenage With Soundtrack,
and landing her generous coverage in
teenybopper mags like Superteen, Bop, Teen
Machine and Teen People--all this before her
debut album, the somewhat suggestively titled
Baby One More Time even came out! (Rumors of
Britney's romances with 'N Sync's Timberlake
and Backstreet's Nick Carter--which Britney
has denied, though she admits that Justin gave
her her first kiss back in the MMC days--probably
helped generate interest as well.) The boy-band
connections didn't end there, either; Britney
toured with 'N Sync, and also enlisted the
management team of Johnny and Donna Wright,
the Backstreet Boys' former managers and the
current managers of--you guessed it--'N Sync.
All
this cross-marketing obviously paid off, as
...Baby One More Time's first single (the
title track) went to No. 1, and the album also
debuted in the top spot on the Billboard
charts, making Britney the youngest female
artist in Billboard history to have her first
single and first album go to No. 1 in the same
week.
With
cutesy song titles like "Soda Pop,"
"Email My Heart" and "Born To
Make You Happy"--not to mention
appearances in McDonald's commercials and
Tommy Hilfiger print ads--it's easy to dismiss
Britney Spears as a pretty puppet whose sole
purpose in the mega-marketing food chain is to
push products of any kind, be they record
albums, Big Macs, or various pieces of
merchandise bearing her perky blonde likeness.
And truthfully, it'll take the 19-year-old
"baby diva" at least a couple more
albums to prove herself as a somewhat lasting
and credible artist, not just a Backstreet
Girl.
But
there are signs of, for lack of a better word,
growth: The slightly subversive yet still
wholesome sexy-schoolgirl image Spears
cultivated during the promotion of her first
album has made way for a more brazen bombshell
persona (as anyone who saw her strutting her
nearly naked stuff on the 2000 MTV Video Music
Awards will attest to!), which either
indicates that she is evolving into a more
mature woman or that she is once again
pandering to lowest-common-denominator
interests by flashing some always-popular
T&A. Whether or not her impressionable
young fans will relate to the more grown-up
Britney in the long run remains to be seen,
but so far it certainly hasn't hurt sales of
her second album or made even the slightest
dent in her popularity. And we all know little
girls grow up fast, so it's possible that
Britney's fans will grow up right along with
her, just like the Madonnabes of that bygone
era known as the '80s. |
