This is the moment for all 'Britney' stans here: MTV examines the album and finally gives the praise it always deserved

[DignifiedLove]

We stan her second best album.

[DignifiedLove]

10 minutes ago, Blackout2006 said:

Periodt. Issa moment in pop culture

Her second best album after Oops

[ElenaB]

yasssss slayyyy  perfect album perfect era  she was starting to get so much hate back then while serving iconic moments in pop history, we didn’t deserve her 

[Blackout2006]

5 minutes ago, SUCCESSICA IS A QUEEN said:

Her second best album after Oops

Her third best but ok

[DignifiedLove]

4 minutes ago, Blackout2006 said:

Her third best but ok

Fine you’re right ITZ may have a slight edge depending on the vibe you’re going for  

And none for OVERRATEDOUT 

[GlitterSlayDExhaleHI]

3 hours ago, Goten21 said:

Glory Remaster, Glory re-release the remix, Glory gay pride edition, Glory c-zant remix, Glory extended mix

All coming to you soon on vinyl at your local urban outfitters

Lmaoooo it’s such a ******* circus being a Britney fan 

[Goten21]

1 hour ago, PokemonSpears said:

not only that, but I've always thought there's a bit of implicit ***ism in the narrative of "rock > pop" with rock symbolizing masculinity, aggressiveness, strength, power and the latter representing femininity, weakness, softness, thus being inherently worse than anything else.

Pop is always deemed as plastic, prefabricated, simple, lacking of talent and complexity, but if that was the case, anyone would be releasing smash hits, but that wasn't the case. How many Britney lookalikes were there? How many artists tried to mimic that formula of Max Martin + Britney and failed?

I've always thought that desire of Britney to move away from Max for ITZ, that craving for "more urban" stuff was in part for that general public's perception of pop being lame. Yes, she needed to evolve, and tbh, everything that she does is magical, but the thing is there was nothing wrong with her doing pop in the first place, especially when it's done as good as what Britney did.

yeees so freaking true. It's also perpetuated by pop music being called pop. Going against the grain is seen as a good thing because it "shows personality", but when your entire personality is that you're going against the grain... How much value does that truly hold? Having to show personality etc instead of being "perfect" and "bubbly", but if your personality truly is perfect and bubbly, wouldn't you lose your integrity by showing some sort of fake "against the grain" personality? That doesn't mean you don't have artistry and integrity, it's just different.

It's so funny that by trying to be inclusive of what isn't normal, they became exclusive in several ways. 

 

True rock values are about doing as you please and doing what you personally want, and if anyone had those values it was Britney Spears lol

[NewDisplayName]

2 hours ago, britney_rocks said:

Don’t come kissing Britney’s *** now MTV. She gave you iconic performances, and you guys didn’t give her a moon man until 10 years later into her career. 

and that was because of the online voting! 
Britney was unreachable in every category : )) 

we all know that every award would go to Britney if they did online votings before 

about Album Britney - it deserves all the praise that can be done/told/showed etc.. it’s the most personal album from her to my opinion and the presence of Britney on it is massive.. record title is really accurate

[migeal]

6 hours ago, Bundy said:

BRITNEY OFFERED POP SUPERSTARDOM — BUT IT ALSO SENT A MESSAGE WE IGNORED

TWENTY YEARS LATER, BRITNEY SPEARS'S SELF-TITLED 2001 ALBUM REMAINS A PLEA FOR AUTONOMY AND RESPECT

An eponymous album marks a major moment in an artist's career. For women, owning one's work, body, and artistry can be especially powerful, even political. Throughout Women's History Month, MTV News is highlighting some of these iconic statements from some of the biggest artists on the globe. This is Self-Titled.

Several images have defined Britney Spears throughout her career: debuting distressed in a (then) controversial, edgy Catholic school-girl outfit about how her loneliness is killing her; steamy in white, kissing Madonna at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards; distraught and battling her mental health and tabloid culture as she beat a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella a few years later.

But one particular scene stands out as a cultural reset for the star: when Spears performed her raunchy hit “I’m a Slave 4 U” at the 2001 VMAs with an albino Burmese python named Banana draped around her neck. It could’ve been just another awards show performance, but it became pop-music history. The set was striking — a jungle of Spears’s own making — featuring the singer and her washboard abs scantily clad in a green chiffon scarf-bra and gem-encrusted boy shorts that eventually helped fund the Halloween costume industry.

As the lead single of her self-titled album Britney, “I’m a Slave 4 U” was a hypnotic, hip-hop-infused anthem that touted a more mature sound than listeners had heard before. But it wasn’t just a single: It symbolized a new era. Her VMAs rendition further solidified it. The performance, like the song, had power. Gone were the pink-ribbon pigtails and cardigans: Spears was embracing her raw ***uality and also making a declarative response to the criticism she received for being too risqué. Whether the public liked it or not, the pop icon was growing up, and her liberated sound and provocative performances were now going to match.

Spears’s MTV performance came just two months before she’d release Britney, her boundary-pushing third album that served as a primer for pop longevity. Britney pushed genre boundaries and found the artist toying with everything from rock and R&B to hip-hop and disco. For Spears, Britney was emblematic of her pop potential, and its coming-of-age narrative paralleled Janet Jackson’s 1986 reset Control. The 12-track record flaunted her versatility via the retro-futuristic, R&B-laced “I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Boys”; the electro-ballad “That’s Where You Take Me”; the defiant dance-pop jaunt “Overprotected”; and the fiery cover of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’s anthemic “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Britney also allowed Spears to be seen as more than a performer. While they weren’t singles, Spears co-wrote five of the album’s tracks: “Lonely,” “Anticipating,” “Cinderella,” “Let Me Be,” and “That’s Where You Take Me.” She partnered once again with hit producers Max Martin and partner Rami Yacoub, who helped her transition from her first two records to a more mature phase. It also proved she wasn’t afraid of edgier production, enlisting The Neptunes to help produce what would be two of the album’s hit singles (“I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Boys”).

While Britney was contemporaneously written off as “a concept record about herself,” 20 years later, the album scans as an earnest depiction of a young star coming of age under a microscope and trying to experience life on her own terms. If 1999’s debut ...Baby One More Time touted innocence and 2000’s follow-up Oops!...I Did It Again tackled the loneliness of fame, Britney grappled with wanting to have autonomy — over her body, life, and choices. Her feelings about the desire to live freely and without judgment were in plain sight. “All you people look at me like I’m a little girl / Well, did you ever think it'd be OK for me to step into this world?” Spears declares on “I’m a Slave 4 U.” “Overprotected” reflected the crushing weight of fame and Spears’s desire for normality — due in part to the overwhelming paparazzi. The Martin- and Dido-penned “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” reflected the in-between state Spears found herself in and the space she needed to explore it.

But Spears was never really given that space. The New York Times’s recent Hulu documentary Framing Britney Spears — which re-examines her career, the cruelty of the media, and contextualizes her conservatorship — recalled how Spears, not quite 20 years old when this album dropped, was met repeatedly with questions about her virginity and *** life. And Britney was a statement that required no further questioning — a portrait of a young girl reckoning with both adulthood and her ***uality. Yet this self-actualization was ignored, and Spears was not only plagued endlessly by intimate questions but christened one of pop culture’s “Lolitas,” alongside Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Lindsay Lohan, and Christina Aguilera. Unfortunately, that gross sentiment overshadowed the pop star’s own story and haunted her career during her journey of self-discovery.

The narrative and release of Britney also lent itself to a visual component. In early 2001, Spears and her team helped craft a script for a film where the singer would make her debut in a starring role. That script became 2002’s teen drama Crossroads, which followed three childhood friends Lucy (Spears), Kit (Zoe Saldana), and Mimi (Taryn Manning), as they embarked on a road trip where Mimi could audition for a record label. The film was somewhat reflective of Spears’s own journey of growing up and pursuing her pop-star dreams. It was also shaped by tracks from Britney that shaped a blossoming narrative. “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” can seem like a schmaltzy ballad, but it was a formative moment for Spears and her onscreen character who read the song as a poem and later performed it. It remains a metaphor about a young woman at the peak of stardom who was bending and could break without the breathing room to grow up.

Twenty years since the release of Britney, the album is representative of the complexities of young stardom. For the past 13 years, Spears has been stuck in an in-between state that recalls the sentiment of Britney, in a conservatorship that has controlled her life in ways she perhaps couldn’t have imagined back in 2001. In the context of the recent Spears renaissance, the record is simultaneously a pop masterpiece, a plea for autonomy and respect, and a statement to the media. Her loneliness wasn’t killing her anymore, but the scrutiny surrounding her life and image was. While Britney helped establish a foundation for Spears’s pop superstardom, it also reflected the harrowing state of early 2000s media culture, ****-shaming, and the way it suffocated young women. Britney was a message we ignored, and we should have known better.

 

 

Source MTV

Can't  wait for when In the Zone gets the acclaim  it deserves 

[Blackout2006]

4 hours ago, SUCCESSICA IS A QUEEN said:

Fine you’re right ITZ may have a slight edge depending on the vibe you’re going for  

And none for OVERRATEDOUT 

No

OIDIA is @ #4, Britney is at #3 and In The zone is #1 whereas layout comes in #1 purrrT

[MasterMindz]

This is an amazing album, and Cinderella is the hit video that we never got 

[Isla]

AS IT SHOULD. It's my third fave Britney album behind Blackout and Glory and deserves all the recognition, it's such a good coming of age record. Couldn't be more appropriate seeing as the album's 10th anniversary is later this year.

[MissSpearsSaysSo]

This album is such a pop classic and it often-times doesn’t get the credit it deserves.  

[Applejack]

When they're gonna do this with In the Zone, Blackout and Oops (and Impossible Princess) and realize they're all masterpieces?

[Applejack]

9 hours ago, PokemonSpears said:

not only that, but I've always thought there's a bit of implicit ***ism in the narrative of "rock > pop" with rock symbolizing masculinity, aggressiveness, strength, power and the latter representing femininity, weakness, softness, thus being inherently worse than anything else.

Pop is always deemed as plastic, prefabricated, simple, lacking of talent and complexity, but if that was the case, anyone would be releasing smash hits, but that wasn't the case. How many Britney lookalikes were there? How many artists tried to mimic that formula of Max Martin + Britney and failed?

I've always thought that desire of Britney to move away from Max for ITZ, that craving for "more urban" stuff was in part for that general public's perception of pop being lame. Yes, she needed to evolve, and tbh, everything that she does is magical, but the thing is there was nothing wrong with her doing pop in the first place, especially when it's done as good as what Britney did.

Idk, Beatles is pop, Beach Boys is pure pop, David Bowie has lots of pop songs even his works can step into different genres. They weren't taken seriously back then, especially Bowie.

 

It's ***ism and ageism, yes. But maybe in the same way MJ the King of Pop has only a Moon man for Best R&B Song (Scream). And we're just starting to discuss this barrier between pop and R&B for black artists.

 

[filmandstage13]

YESSS part of her holy trinity (heyyy Blackout and In the Zone )

Is it too late to release Cinderella as a single? 

[PickleSpears]

Great read, thanks for posting. I enjoy looking back at Britney's earlier albums and dissecting them like this. I was young when they came out so I was just enjoying the songs and sometimes didn't think about what her albums represented as a whole. This gives me a lot more respect for the Britney album. I need to listen to that today!

[filmandstage13]

9 hours ago, PokemonSpears said:

not only that, but I've always thought there's a bit of implicit ***ism in the narrative of "rock > pop" with rock symbolizing masculinity, aggressiveness, strength, power and the latter representing femininity, weakness, softness, thus being inherently worse than anything else.

Pop is always deemed as plastic, prefabricated, simple, lacking of talent and complexity, but if that was the case, anyone would be releasing smash hits, but that wasn't the case. How many Britney lookalikes were there? How many artists tried to mimic that formula of Max Martin + Britney and failed?

I've always thought that desire of Britney to move away from Max for ITZ, that craving for "more urban" stuff was in part for that general public's perception of pop being lame. Yes, she needed to evolve, and tbh, everything that she does is magical, but the thing is there was nothing wrong with her doing pop in the first place, especially when it's done as good as what Britney did.

This is so on point!   Around the Britney era, I felt like there a reactionary movement where female artists were trying to distance themselves from the popstar model and imagery that Britney pioneered.  I'm thinking Avril Lavigne, Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, etc.  All women who sought to project their own sense of power through rock-oriented music, an emphasis on being songwriters & instrumentalists, and all made some comments about not feeling the need to "dress ****."  Granted, a lot of this was media-driven, pitting women against each other, but all felt the need to speak out against or at least respond to ***uality in pop.  There's literally a 2002 article called "The Anti-Britneys" that features all of them: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-anti-britneys/

But it's not lost on me that there's a definite masculine bend to this projection of power.  Avril was literally wearing ties.  The subtext (or sometimes it was explicitly stated) that women who dressed **** were somehow victims of culture or that it was a gimmick to obscure a lack of talent.

I think the revolutionary thing about Britney (and specifically the album Britney) is that she was projecting power while embracing both her ***uality and her femininity. And this was not appreciated by critics/commentators at the time, but is finally getting the appreciation and respect it deserves. You don't have to act like a dude to be powerful, important, or interesting.

Legend 

[DignifiedLove]

8 hours ago, Blackout2006 said:

No

OIDIA is @ #4, Britney is at #3 and In The zone is #1 whereas layout comes in #1 purrrT

You’re a dreamer

You dream a loT 

[Hooked-On-Knee]

 

29 minutes ago, filmandstage13 said:

(heyyy Oops!...I Did It Again and In the Zone )

Fixed.

 

29 minutes ago, filmandstage13 said:

Is it too late to release Cinderella as a single? 

B10 deserves to be just Cinderella on loop.