NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) – Britney Spears was at a crossroads — not just because the movie “Crossroads” was set to hit theaters soon, but it also marked her acting debut.
The year was 2001. Spears, then just 19 years old, was one of the most famous people on the planet; It was championed as the ultimate teenage dream by fan bases and the malevolent celebrity industry around the world. That year, she performed at the Super Bowl halftime show and changed the course of fashion forever; He first appeared at the American Music Awards in matching jeans with the beautiful Justin Timberlake, and then during his performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, he appeared with an albino python around his neck.
After enjoying a meteoric rise with her first two albums, 1999’s “… Baby One More Time” and 2000’s “Oops!… I Did It Again,” she was entering adulthood in full swing. Her third album, “Britney,” was released just before her 20th birthday and would prove transformative.
On Friday, Legacy Recordings is releasing “Britney (25th Anniversary Edition),” an expanded reissue of her landmark record that went quadruple platinum in less than two months. The collection includes two remixes and five previously unreleased songs from that period; It’s his first new (or old?) music since announcing he would “never return to the music industry” in a 2024 Instagram post.
This album is an opportunity to reflect on the album and Spears’ unique place in the popular culture imagination, especially after the news of the last few years. In 2021, she was released from court custody, which controlled the pop singer’s life and money for nearly 14 years. And in February, it was announced that he had sold the rights to his music catalog to Primary Wave for an undisclosed sum.
The album opens with a spoken statement. In 2001 this was seen as a provocation; as is often the case when a young woman expresses her own privilege.
Spears seduces wavy R: “I know I can be young” & Made in B, courtesy of The Neptunes, the award-winning duo of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo. “But I have feelings too.”
The song is the single “I’m A Slave 4 U”, in which Spears makes it clear that the bubblegum pop of her previous albums has been replaced with something decidedly more mature. This even applies to the album’s songs, written and produced by previous collaborators Max Martin and Rami Yacoub; Tracks like “Bombastic Love” still sparkle, but with a newfound edge.
If Spears was borrowing from the adolescence-to-adult pop star trajectory laid out in “Britney” by ancestors like Madonna or Janet Jackson, she did so by keeping it PG-13; it hinted at enhanced emotionality as a way of self-definition while remaining accessible and palatable to younger audiences. In other words, she toes the line: as in the single “I’m not a girl, I’m not a woman yet.”
That’s all the declarations of autonomy in sexual and other matters in the album. “Say hello to the girl I am,” she invites on “Overprotected.” “I live for myself now” flips the script on “Alone.” “He’s in control” in the quirky, erotic “Boys”.
The fact that the album is self-titled and that Spears co-wrote five songs on the original album enhances her sense of self-reflection: “Lonely,” “Anticipating,” “Let Me Be,” “That’s Where You Take Me” and the barbed “Cinderella.”
The first of five tracks in the archive is “She’ll Never Be Me,” which she wrote with her then-boyfriend Timberlake, who also sings in the background. Timberlake co-wrote one track on the original album, but the new release comes after Spears wrote about their relationship in her 2023 memoir, sharing deeply personal details about her pregnancy, abortion and painful breakup.
In terms of its fit with the rest of the album, the song fits in nicely with its vocal effects and propulsive Y2K production; It makes for a good B-side in every respect.
The same can be said for the rest, from the slow-burning falsetto “Am IA Sinner” and the Latin pop-tinged grooves of “Right Now (Taste the Victory)” to the glitchy, proto-hyperpop “When I Say So” and the soulful, unusually long “My Big Secret,” which features Spears’ strongest vocal performance on the entire album. A striking falsetto.
Thematically, some of these tracks can be read as a response to the tabloid press’s obsession with Spears’ virginity at the time of publication. “I don’t want to mislead you,” he says in “When I Say So.” “You will have some when I say so.”
And “Am I a Sinner?” on his show he could very well be referring to an unfair media or any bad relationship: “Tell me, am I a sinner? / Tell me, am I wrong? / There’s something wrong with the picture / It’s not my fault.”
Since the release of her best-selling memoir, “The Woman in Me,” which details her childhood, rise to stardom, marriages, motherhood and guardianship, fans have sought to recontextualize how Spears was portrayed early in her career. These songs will undoubtedly inspire more detective work. But others may approach it more simply, through the rose-tinted glasses of easy nostalgia.
The result is an album written and recorded in the space between adolescence and adulthood, from a woman to whom a generation looks to guidance on doing the same.