She raised eyebrows again this past week with a series of Instagram posts that stopped just short of pornographic.
She was just 16 (and underage) when her first album dropped in 1997, amid a heavily sexualized theme that became part of her music style. Her second album, released a year later, included the song,” Oops, I Did It Again,” with the lyric “I’m not that innocent.”
At that age, should could easily have ended up on another path leading to Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and a rendezvous with the future “Celebrity Apprentice” host.
But she had enough singing and dancing talent to catapult her killer, “little girl” sexuality into a pop music phenomenon.
Spears was the culmination, not the beginning of the overt sexualization of female singers. That began with Madonna. But she took it to the next level and inspired a host of other singers, both famous and otherwise.
But by the early 2000s, the music industry had reached a sexual overload. The dot.com economic crash and the horrendous 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had a profound sobering affect on the public.
Billboard, the music industry Bible, documented the trend in a January 2004 story. (Full disclosure: I was a co-author of the piece)
Here’s a brief excerpt:
“Many of music’s reigning divas are partying like its 1999, even though the world has become a darker, more uncertain and more anxious time since Sept. 11, 2001.
With the economy in a funk and record sales down for three years running, even established artists are sexing it up — no doubt encouraged by edgy industry executives.
The problem is, the public just doesn’t seem to be in the mood for it, and recent mediocre record sales by Spears, Pink and similar artists may reflect a classic case of mismarketing.
The scene was shifting. Ascending artists like Alicia Keys traded overt sexuality for glamour and folk singer Nora Jones represented understated beauty, sensuality and a sense of normalcy.
Amy Lee, the front singer for the 2004 break-through band Evanescence, said she was appalled by the crass marketing of some pop singers.
“Talking about Britney is like beating a dead horse; I don’t even want to go there,” she said at the time.
But what goes around can also come back around. Two university professors submitted a study of economic, social and demographic trends before the American Psychological Association, that showed how those factors affect human preferences.
Indeed, American attitudes about sex have moved in cycles that seem to roughly correlate with economic trends. “The U.S. is always going back and forth between our puritan values and our need for indulgences,” said one marketing and research firm executive.
In the early 1900s, the prim “Gibson Girl,” representing serene self-confidence, was the prevailing icon. By the “Roaring ’20s,” following the end angst-ridden and threatening World War I, flappers were the rage.
During the Great Depression and World War II, another period of great uncertainty, Rosie the Riveter was just as much an icon as screen siren Betty Grable.
But the post-war 1950s a period of unprecedented economic prosperity, overtly sexual icons like Marilyn Monroe, Bridget Bardot and Jayne Mansfield emerged followed by a string of starlets. The 1960s and ’70s blew the lid off of human sexuality, until the AIDS epidemic emerged as a sober awakening.
Still, trends don’t die with the flick of a light switch; they slowly ebb until they are washed over by a new trend. At the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, Madonna and Spears kissed passionately at the end of their performance, causing an enormous media frenzy, conservative outcry, and hundreds of complaints.
That was topped the following year at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show when Justin Timberlake ripped co-singer Janet Jackson’s costume, exposing her breast, nipple and all, on CBS national televison.
More than half a million complaints poured into the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which launched a massive federal investigation. The network claimed it was an unplanned “wardrobe malfunction.” But the public wasn’t buying it.
The FCC fined CBS over half a million dollars for the indiscretion, but the Supreme Court ultimately threw out the fines on a legal technicality, dodging a ruling on the First Amendment, and ending an eight-year legal battle.
The controversy ostensibly marked the end of the raunch era. But it’s never entirely gone away. The Great 2008-2009 Recession and COVID kept the lid on most of the 2000s.
Local, state, and federal authorities ended the lockdown gradually from 2021 through 2023 and people were ready to party again. Consumer spending almost doubled and 90% of it was spent on outside dining, entertainment, travel and recreation.
By 2024, the good times were ready to roll again. Despite Trump propaganda, the Biden administration economy recovered faster than any industrial nation and ended 2024 with low inflation, strong job recovery and low interest rates.
By all rights, the economy should have kept on rolling, despite a change in administrations. But Trump tariffs, his wildly erratic policies and alienation of key allies like Canada, Mexico, NATO and the European Union racheted up consumer anxiety.
The illegal invasion of Iran was the body blow that knocked the wind out of the consumer confidence, caused inflation to soar, led by gas prices, and cloaked the nation in a gloomy realization that we’ve been here before under previous Republican administrations.
Trump has only made matters worse for himself and Republicans by barnstorming the nation claiming the economy is booming and prices are declining, when anyone who buys groceries, gas or a house can clearly see that just the opposite is happening.
Trump’s “good times” end at the economic divide that separates the mass of Americans from the entitled 1% whom Trump surrounds himself with at Mar a Lago, who line his pockets, fill his campaign coffers, genuflect and stroke his bottomless ego.
Spears is a metaphor for Trump because both are living in worlds that no longer or never existed.
The “Hit Me Baby One More Time” singer posted short videos of herself on instagram, alone in a caverous mansion, stripped down to a barely there bra and panties, with smokey eye make up, numerous red bracelets, and clunky black boots.
Her blonde hair is as raucous as ever, and she tosses it around as she struts and dances. But the moves of a 44-year-old woman look maudlin compared to Britney’s once lithe body.
Trump, at 80 and in questionable health, looks equally maudlin as he travels the country.
The lame jokes, the janky dance moves, the insults, hyperbole, lies, fantasies, self-aggrandizement and ego boosting don’t play the same as the did before the economy and the world turned darker.
He’s just a cariacture of himself now; he’s dancing in an echo chamber in front of dwindling crowds, as out of touch as Marie Antoinette, holed up in her vain-glorious palace, just as Trump is holed up in his gold guilded oval office, Mar a Lago or one of his golf courses, vainly oblivious to the outside world.
Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, his edge into the abyss of historical infamy is of his own making.
His alienation of traditional U.S. allies, his treachery over Ukraine, his tariffs and economic mismanagment, his cozying up to vile dictators, his vindictive pursuit of political opponents, his wanton illegality, broken promises, transparent lies, unbridled greed and his misadventure in Iran are all at the root of the nation’s current malaise.
It’s no wonder the public wants a change. But rest assured, Trump will find his place, dancing alone in an empty, cavernous mansion.
Keith Girard has four decades of experience as an award-winning reporter, editor-in-chief, and senior media executive. Keith’s career began in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for Regardie’s and Washingtonian magazines. He also worked as a writer/producer in CNN’s Washington Bureau and has written non-fiction books on the U.S. Marines in the Gulf War and Donald Trump and two novels, “The Heidelberg Conundrum” and “The Curse of Northam Bay.”