A few years back, teenagers returned to the pop scene with a vengeance. I had entered my third year of high school then, and spent way too much time mercilessly mocking some of my friends for having fallen prey to the latest crop of teen stars from the House of Mouse: namely, Christina Aguilera, *NSync, and Britney Spears.
After all, we were coming of age post-Nirvana, when rock was ruling the airwaves and hip-hop was officially rocketing toward the shiny suit era. While some of my friends suddenly found themselves wearing fuzzy double scrunchies and mouthing disposable songs like “Tearing Up My Heart,” my other friends stayed true to our darker, Gen-X roots, and a good natured musical battle line was drawn.
Still, I didn’t realize how powerful the teen pop had become until I became a floating camp counselor for my local government. It was part of a “Youth Works” program to make sure underprivileged youth had summer jobs and steady income for at least part of the summer. I worked at three different camps that summer, but one stands out in my mind.
Three weeks before labor day, we were sent to help provide support for another summer camp. The camp was holding a massive talent show for all the parents and the kids were just beginning to plan their routine. The other counselors and I were ready to pitch in and help however we could – we thought we would be helping with magic shows, dance routines, funny skits – something standard.
But oh no.
The kids at the camp ranged in age from nine to twelve and they already had their own ideas of cool.
And cool came in the form of the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson, and Britney Spears.
We begged. We pleaded. We pretended that we wouldn’t help them.
But the kids were having none of it.
They were all going to imitate their favorite pop stars, counselors be damned! We eventually folded and started working on their routines with them.
My charge was a young girl named Jayna – a dark haired little cherub with a perma-tan who was painfully shy. She didn’t get along well with the other kids at camp, and was subsequently doing her routine alone. She was often found hiding in a tree somewhere, and practiced singing away from where other people could hear. I would listen to Jayna play the “Baby One More Time” single over and over again trying to hit each note, watch her try to coax her dark hair into the perfect double pigtail, spend hours and hours convincing her that dying her hair blond was a bad idea.
It was in these moments that my internal monologue kicked into high gear.
Why, I would think to myself, why did you have to choose her to emulate? That’s not someone you want to look up to. You can’t be her – please do not become yet another self-hating brown girl trying to live up to the blond blue eyed standard. Don’t you realize that stuff isn’t real? Please, kid, love yourself more than that!
But she couldn’t have heard my words if she wanted to. Her mind was full of each lyric, each dance move, each twirl, each hair flip. And she was determined to become Britney herself and rock the talent show.
So, I continued sighing to myself, and continued to help her practice, hearing the eager chants of the other kids behind us all busy trying to do the best imitations of manufactured pop idols they could.
This trend continued as I got older. Britney and her ilk continued to dominate the airwaves, and most of the kids I encountered during the late 90s had completely given themselves over to the Cult of Celebrity. I wondered how such a shift has started, how the children I would baby sit for skipped over all my hip-hop, neo-soul, and girl rock and would sit enraptured bobbing their little heads to “Slave 4 You” on repeat. What happened to the strong, ain’t taking no shit women I had on repeat when I was that age? Even the Spice Girls were an improvement as they talked about friendship and girl power, regardless of how much of a marketing ploy it might have been. So, why weren’t teens now responding to those same images, preferring the saccharine-soaked company of the teen queens?
And why did Britney Spears have such a chokehold over them?
I had been banging Britney as gym music, go out music, something bouncy and disposable. So, in search of answers, I finally sat down and listened to Brit-Brit.
After a few hours, I finally got it.
Britney Spears was the soundtrack for girls growing into themselves.
In the beginning, Britney sang songs of new love, of hope, of being boy crazy. Sugary sweetness like “Baby One More Time,” “You Drive Me Crazy,” “Born to Make You Happy,” and “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” made the perfect companion to a pre-teen or teenaged girl learning the ropes of dating for the first time.
When the next album dropped, Brit’s fans had grown up a bit, and so had her lyrics.
Check the lines:
Oops! I Did It Again…
Oops!…I did it again
I played with your heart, got lost in the game
Oh baby, baby
Oops!…You think I’m in love
That I’m sent from above
I’m not that innocent
Stronger
Hush, just stop
There’s nothing you can do or say, baby
I’ve had enough
I’m not your property as from today, baby
You might think that I won’t make it on my own
But now I’m…
[Chorus:]
Stronger than yesterday
Now it’s nothing but my way
My lonliness ain’t killing me no more
I’m stronger
Don’t Go Knocking on My Door…
Finally
I am over you
Totally unblue
And I can hear myself saying
I am better off without you
Stronger than ever and I
I’m tellin’ you now
[CHORUS:]
Don’t go knockin’ on my door
Gotta stay away for sure
You say you miss me like crazy now
But I ain’t buyin’ that
You better get off my back
Don’t go knockin’ on my door
What U See (Is What You Get)…
You used to say that I was special
Everything was right
But now you think I’m wearing too much make-up
That my dress is too tight
You got no reasons to be jealous
I’ve never been untrue
So does it really matter if they’re looking
I’m only looking at you
You should never try to change me
I can be nobody else
And I like the way I am
Lucky…
Lost in an image, in a dream
But there’s no one there to wake her up
And the world is spinning, and she keeps on winning
But tell me what happens when it stops?
They go…
“Isn’t she lovely, this Hollywood girl?”
And they say…
She’s so lucky, she’s a star
But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking
If there’s nothing missing in my life
Then why do these tears come at night
Obviously, *someone* (be it songwriters or Spears herself) was trying to send a message.
By the time the third album dropped, Britney was already deciding to go her own way.
The ultra-sexy video for “Slave 4 U,” and tracks like “Overprotected,” and “Boys” were warring with more traditional Spears tracks like “I’m Not a Girl Not Yet a Woman” and “Bombastic Love.”
The lyrics from “Overprotected” caused a mini-epiphany, as I came to realize why my homegirls in high school had latched on so hard to Britney Spears, even while we were struggling with subjects like pre-Calculus and AP Language and Composition.
I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am
And I don’t wanna be so damn protected
There must be another way
Cause I believe in taking chances
But who am I to say
What a girl is to do
God, I need some answers
What am I to do with my life
(You will find it out don’t worry)
How Am I supposed to know what’s right?
(You just got to do it your way)
I can’t help the way I feel
But my life has been so overprotected
Britney Spears had adolescence on lock – and while I couldn’t relate on a personal level, there were still thousands of girls who grew up overscheduled and sheltered who could.
By the time In The Zone dropped, Britney Spears had claimed her adulthood, wrote songs about touching herself, and basically shot the finger to the person she was back in 1998. In a little over five years, Spears herself traveled from precocious ingénue to a burgeoning femme fatale – a journey that mirrored the same progression in most of her fan base.
Britney Spears was able to pull so many listeners because she spoke her truth about growing up girl.
And girls like Jayna drew their strength from Britney’s lyrics.
Oh, and that reminds me. I never finished Jayna’s story.
So, after two weeks of practicing, Jayna had her Britney act down. She knew the dance routines forwards and backwards. She knew every note in her sleep. She even had the perfect glittery tee shirt, pants/over skirt, and sneakers outfit. (I had talked her out of the school girl uniform and blond dye, thank heavens for small favors.) She sat in her seat and watched the other acts perform before it was her set.
A group of girls performed the choreography for “You Drive Me Crazy,” though one girl crashed into another one, bringing down three of the other girls in the middle of the set. A group of boys sang a ditty from *NSYNC and a band composed of brothers brought the house down by performing a Backstreet Boys song. The nine year old in that group performed two flawless backflips to enthusiastic cheering from the audience.
And then, it was Jayna’s turn.
Walking up to the stage, all the color drained from her face. All the swagger jacking she had done channeling Britney was gone now, had faded as soon as she stepped on the stage. Instead of a the confident pop queen I watched rehearsing behind a tree, I saw a tiny ten year old, near tears. The opening bars of “Baby One More Time swelled,” and she dropped her eyes, stared at the floor, and started whispering the lyrics into the karaoke microphone.
Now, I could veer off here into some tangent about how the power of pop music is generally only in the mind of the consumer – that the images we see, the lyrics we hear, what we process and interpret are carefully calculated for maximum impact. That these stars and the images they promote are shallow representations of a market force, designed to exploit the chaos of the teen years, fill their pockets, and leave us in our twenties, scratching our heads and wondering what we even liked about those bands in the first place.
But that kind of analysis doesn’t really help girls like Jayna now. And it wouldn’t have helped her then.
She was dying under the lights, had gone for her chance at being the star of the talent show and was choking. Her personal humiliation was rolling off her in waves. So, my role was clear. I had to help her get back her inner Britney.
I slipped over to back of the room, standing directly in her line of sight. After waving for most of the first verse, I finally caught her eye. She looked up, and I executed the first dance move she was supposed to do, a double shoulder bounce with a spin. The other camp counselors had figured out what I was doing, and had fallen into riotous laughter on the sidelines, but I didn’t care – Jayna was finally catching the beat.
She watched me do the moves for the entire second verse, venturing a few kicks and turns of her own. I started hamming it up in the back to make her life, dropping to my knees and exaggeratedly mouthing “give me a siiiiii-iiii-iiign.”
She laughed, and it came back on the breakdown.
Rocking out like a little superstar, her voice matched Britney, crooning
“I must confess/
that my loneliness/
Is killing me now”
We both went in big. Grapevining through “Don’t you know I still believe,” I managed to point at Jayna during the “That *you* will be here” part and she launched one back at me before stepping fully back into her routine, belting out the last lines to the parents in the front row and and ending on a fiercest pose I ever saw her do over the weeks of practice.
The parents cheered, and a jubilant smile lit up her face. She had done it. She pulled it off.
And she ran off the stage to give me a hug.
I still think of Jayna often. I wonder how she turned out, and I wonder about the woman she ended up becoming. I have to laugh when I wonder if she’s still a Britney Spears fan, or if she grew out of her idol worship after she hit puberty. Thanks to little Jayna, “Baby One More Time” still has a permanent spot on my MP3 player.
It reminds me that confidence can come from strange places.
—
Baby One More Time (Sims Version) – Britney Spears