Happy 20th Anniversary to Britney Spears’ third studio album Britney, originally released in Japan October 31, 2001, in the UK November 5, 2001 and in the US November 6, 2001.
In just under two years, Britney Spears had unleashed two sequential blockbusters on Jive Records: ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops...I Did It Again (2000). Between the pair, Spears had amassed no less than nine singles whose commercial ubiquity ensured their status as eventual classics of their era. Not too bad for the precocious Southern girl who dreamed of singing and dancing her way to the top. While radio and retail were held spellbound by Spears, critics stood immune to her apparent charms.
Opinions about the singer-dancer pinballed from hostile to begrudgingly kind—the consensus was that the teenage wonder’s good fortune was solely owed to shrewd management and the Jive label machinery. This was, of course, an erroneous assumption to make. Spears’ likable demeanor belied a keen sense of self-awareness: she knew exactly how she was perceived. As such, she had already begun tasking to alter that jaundiced view. Shortly after ...Baby One More Time arrived in shops, Spears insisted on injecting more of herself into its follow-up. Leveraging the success of that sophomore offering, she now had the space to create more freely for what came next.
Sessions for Britney commenced in February 2001 and saw the vocalist darting between recording studios in Los Angeles to as far afield as Stockholm, Sweden—she wrapped the long player that July. Impressively, these album convocations ran parallel to the creation of Spears’ other passion project, Crossroads; the movie debuted in cinemas at the top of the following year. Although she helped plot a considerable share of its story and concept, her relative lack of experience as an actress meant she had to rely on her rapport with Shonda Rhimes and Tamra Davis, the film’s writer and director respectively, to guide her inaugural foray into the motion picture realm.
Despite the differences between these artistic mediums, Crossroads and Britney shared a common link: self-governance. Returning to the latter venture, Spears had shown herself to be a quick study regarding studio craft. No longer a novice, she was able to specify exactly which writer-producers she wanted to work with for Britney. Established ties with Max Martin, Rami Yacoub and Rodney Jerkins were maintained, but Spears reached outside of those familiar collaborative circles by onboarding Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, Justin Schwartz, Brian Kierulf, Dido, and (then flame) Justin Timberlake. That second cited clique included just some of the fire-new figures she asked along for the ride.
Seventeen selections from the Britney workshops manifested across its varying domestic and international iterations upon its worldwide reveal in the fall of 2001; one of those tracks was assigned to B-side status. Out of that batch of songs, Spears co-penned seven. Two such pieces—“Anticipating” and “That’s Where You Take Me”—joined with “Bombastic Love” as breezy callbacks to her first two albums. Spears’ ability to write in a similar style of mentors Martin and Yacoub demonstrated that she had internalized the best of their lighter, melodic approach; this let her hold a space for fans of that earlier compositional structure. That said, Spears’ other co-writes—“Lonely,” “Let Me Be,” “Cinderella,” “Before the Goodbye” and “Intimidated”—signposted that a more dynamic, cohesive aesthetic was to inform Britney on the whole.
A newfound complexity in Spears’ narrative content is palpable on the record. Whether these song scripts vended in life or love, they’re all suffused with the underlying concept of autonomous ideation. Spears was discriminating in gathering or commissioning sides for the album that spoke to her lived experiences of growing up in view of the public; Spears was a month shy of 20 when the Britney campaign kicked off.
Entries like “Let Me Be” and “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” did just that. If the title for “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” came over as too overt for some, its actual words (and how Spears delivers them) were quite genuine to many others. It was one of two cuts to not only be lifted as singles from Britney, but did double duty as thematic tie-ins to the Crossroads soundtrack.
But the strongest statement of Britney’s progressive aim came via its launching point, “I’m a Slave 4 U.” Several pundits willfully derided the single as nothing more than crass bimbofication—it was not.
She states at its opening, “I know I may be young, but I’ve got feelings too / And I need to do what I feel like doing / So let me go and just listen…” Subsequently, Spears lays out her missive to embrace a form of unrepentant self-expression through music and dance. In that context, Spears’ figurative surrender is empowering because she chooses to do so (albeit briefly). The lyrical intensity of “I’m a Slave 4 U” is affixed to an equally compelling track: a topsy-turvy slice of beat driven pop-funk. It was one of two uptempos—along with “Boys”—tendered to Spears by tunesmiths Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, known in aggregate as The Neptunes.
These jams had initially been prepared in consideration for the legendary songstress Janet Jackson and her seventh album, All For You (2001). Ultimately, Jackson passed on the pair which left them free for Williams and Hugo to rework and present to Spears. They fit her like a glove. While no one can deny the signature Williams/Hugo production swagger on “I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Boys,” it complemented the rhythmic bedrock Spears had already laid as the foundation for her anterior output.
What was different was that the sounds executed on Britney are richer and fuller. From the emotive balladry of “I Run Away,” to the pop-rock swing of “Overprotected,” around to the glitchy nu-disco of “Intimidated” (flipside to “I’m a Slave 4 U”), on over to the throwback pastiche of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Spears finally had more dimensional material to sink her teeth into as a singer. An example? Her singing on the LP iteration of “Boys” approximates a sensual, but intimate soulfulness one would have never expected to hear from Spears.
Returning to the Arrows single from 1975 that Joan Jett & the Blackhearts turned into a jukebox staple in 1981, it was the other selection to feature handsomely on the aforementioned Crossroads companion record. Spears’ take saw her continuing on with a tradition of classic covers with “The Beat Goes On” (Sonny and Cher) and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) as correspondingly housed on ...Baby One More Time and Oops...I Did It Again.
Britney made its initial landfall in Japan on October 31, 2001—remaining global territories were serviced the collection at the outset of November that year. Reviews swung from glowing to lukewarm; those remitting the warmer write-ups recognized Britney for the watershed affair it was. Its nomination for “Best Pop Vocal Album” at the 45th Annual GRAMMY Awards in 2003 was certainly vindicating. The record continued Spears’ multi-platinum streak, but her dominance as a singles artist seemingly slipped during this period. Britney yielded no less than six commercial singles, but where almost all of them performed to expectation internationally, stateside, most of them only had modest impact. Out of that sextet, two received revised takes: “Overprotected” and “Boys.”
The former groove had gone out overseas in its original Martin-Yacoub power-pop configuration, but in the United States, Spears costumed it in a caustic electro-R&B sheen courtesy of Rodney Jerkins. The latter piece saw Williams-Hugo invite a heavier hip-hop edge versus the smoothed-out funk tip actioned on Britney. The inclusion of that single edit of “Boys,” “the Co-ed Remix,” on the Austin Powers in Goldmember soundtrack should have guaranteed it a spot on the charts, instead it barely cast a ripple on the Billboard Hot 100.
With Spears attempting to court one audience and hold onto another, she had inadvertently made a schism between her ardent followers and general listeners—it was a necessary hazard to expand her base. More than likely the soft reception that greeted this superlative string of singles came down to a case of overexposure at home. The partnering tour for Britney (Dream within a Dream), Crossroads and countless other performances/appearances meant that Spears had saturated every level of American pop culture. Understandably, a bit of fatigue had set in. But she kept moving. Promotion for Britney had started to cool off when Spears rushed right into the construction of In the Zone (2003).
At press time for that fourth record, Spears curiously touted it as a stronger effort than Britney, but its scattered, harried feel left much to be desired in comparison to the focused tenor of its predecessor. Hindsight has since shown that the “tossed together” vibe of In the Zone was a portent for larger woes lying in wait for Spears.
Given all that has been exposed about her tragic war for control—over both her personal and professional lives—there is a fresh resonance to the thematic crux of Britney where the singer-songwriter ceaselessly quested for agency. Twenty years on from its issuance, Spears’ eponymously titled third album holds fast as an artful, singular entry in her canon—she has never sounded more impassioned or purposeful as she does here.
LISTEN: