Fans of Britney Jean will already know that there are two kinds of trouble in Spears paradise. The first is an old story, the one where Britney in 2008 refused to hand over her kids to former husband Kevin Federline’s people. The police arrived, suspected she was on something, and she was 5150’d—i.e., involuntarily committed to psychiatric care. She lost custody of her sons. Her father Jamie Spears and a lawyer named Andrew M. Wallet became Britney’s conservators, a role for those who usually care for the extremely old, demented, or otherwise very ill. Over a decade later, the conservatorship remains in place, severely limiting Britney’s ability to make decisions for herself. Britney is not allowed to drive a car. Every one of Britney’s purchases is documented for legal posterity. Britney is not allowed to have a smartphone. Britney is 37 years old.



The second drama is more recent, and related to the first: #FreeBritney. You may have seen this hashtag online. Various explainer articles pick apart the labyrinthine details, but the gist is this: In January, Britney dropped out of a Vegas residency to enter a psychiatric facility, citing stress from her father’s colon rupture.* In March, Wallet resigned from his position, leaving Jamie Spears her sole conservator. Already suspicious over an uncharacteristic emoticon in one of Britney’s Instagram posts (she prefers emoji) announcing the cancellation of her Vegas show, a fan podcast called Britney’s Gram then aired a call from an anonymous source who alleged that Britney was being held against her will at the facility after refusing to take her medication or to heed the prohibition on driving. The source also claimed that her father had canceled the Vegas gig in retaliation for her misbehavior. The hosts of Britney’s Gram told Jezebel that they verified the source’s identity, but have not released any corroborating information.

Picking up on Britney Gram’s story, the hashtag spread across Twitter and Instagram. Various celebrities have begun to repeat the refrain: It appeared on the rapper Eve’s shirt during a TV spot, and Miley Cyrus recently ad-libbed “Free Britney!” during a live performance. The viral rumors might be all guff, of course, but that barely matters to her fans: The hashtag is just the most recent expression of outrage at Britney’s years-long predicament. As far as we know, she has no illness debilitating enough to warrant a conservatorship under the ordinary application of the law. She was once branded crazy, so crazy she remains: totally without autonomy, cut off from the world, at the mercy of people who control her access to her children. It’s no wonder that the plight of Britney Spears continues to haunt us.

For a particular generation, Britney was the star. Whether they listened to her music or not, for the elder slice of millennials there was no avoiding the princess of pop. Without smartphones or on-demand digital entertainment, kids and tweens of the peak-Britney era (roughly 1999 to 2004) received their pop culture via television, radio, and magazines, which centralized and made concrete her celebrity.

What did she mean, then? Both everything and nothing. She was an appointed role model, with her compulsory virginity, those compulsory abs, that compulsory smile. She was kitsch and apolitical, on the surface of things. Her celebrity stood for a kind of ideology—sex-drenched chastity, beauty seen in the torso—divorced from anything in particular aside from her origin myth in Kentwood, Louisiana: Simple Bible Belt child gets a taste for fame on The Mickey Mouse Club. As in Vox Lux, Britney’s break came after she shopped a demo in New York at age 15. Jive Records sent her to record an album in Sweden, and she soon became the biggest pop star in the world.