Britney Spears’ head-shaving in 2007 was a shocking, memorable glimpse behind the glittering curtain of stardom. (X17online.com)

Even now you can probably see the pictures in your mind. A young woman holds a set of electric clippers to her head, smiling half-heartedly as she shaves off her long brown hair. She’s not doing the greatest job of it; a number of thin strands remain behind the blade. But by the time of the next photo, taken a few days later, the wisps are gone, and so is the half-smile: In this one the bald woman’s face is twisted in rage as she batters somebody’s silver SUV with a large green umbrella.

The images from 2007 are memorable by any standard. What made them shocking, of course, was that they showed us Britney Spears, America’s onetime sweetheart turned sexy snake handler, just a few years removed from her string of inescapable hits that defined desire for a generation. Would we say that the moments depicted in the photos — clear evidence of Spears’ suffering at the time — were something we loved in this millennium? Let’s not. But our witnessing these painful events is a different story.

Think of it as a glitch in the teen-pop matrix: After years of accepting the fantasies spun by Spears and ’N Sync and Christina Aguilera and the Backstreet Boys (and, of course, by their handlers), suddenly we got a glimpse behind the glittered curtain; the ugly pictures led us to realize that the hit factory was staffed by real people with complicated minds of their own. And that set off a flowering of critical thinking, even among the youngest listeners, that helped shape the way pop proceeded from there.


You don’t get to Kesha’s rowdy “Tik Tok” or Justin Bieber’s TMZ-ready “Sorry” or any of Miley Cyrus’ post-Disney freakouts without Britney’s umbrella attack. And you certainly don’t get to Billie Eilish’s smash 2019 debut, which opens with a bit of apparently spontaneous studio chatter meant to undermine the idea of pop perfection before the music has even begun. (Lest you think of Britney and Billie as oppositional figures, rather than points on a continuum, note that the latter proudly wore a Britney T-shirt at this month’s Jingle Ball concert.)

Were stars rebelling against systems before 2007? As Eilish might say: Duh. But Spears’ breakdown dovetailed with the rise of social media to dismantle the old illusions and bring reality, or at least a convincing version of it, into the light. “Back in the day, we had to keep everything very clean in order for the gatekeepers — MTV and ‘TRL,’ the big Top 40 radio stations — to give us that platform,” said Johnny Wright, the veteran talent manager who’s overseen acts including Spears, New Kids on the Block and Justin Timberlake. “Now artists can freely express themselves outside the machine.”

Indeed, we listen today — and often on streaming services that further reduce the role of corporate middlemen — with the understanding that music is only one part of a pop idol’s story that’s continuously playing out on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. Professor Joe Bennett, who teaches about the record industry at Berklee College of Music, points out that this reliance on cheap social media is good news for a business that’s rebounded from its post-Napster low point but which still pays more attention to costs than during the late-’90s boom time. Compared to the lavish music videos of yore, a tweet actually delivers more authenticity for a fraction of the price.

But the increased access to stars has also made us eager to believe that they control their own lives and careers — to believe in their sense of agency, to use a term nobody was using in the era of “…Baby One More Time.” When we read Ariana Grande speaking in an evidently unfiltered manner on Twitter, we expect to find the same amount of her in her music, which registers as a distinct shift from the era when Max Martin and a handful of other Swedish studio wizards more or less controlled the sound and content of teen pop.

“I can’t remember the last time I wrote a song the artist wasn’t involved in,” said Ali Tamposi, a songwriter who’s created tunes with Camila Cabello and Demi Lovato. And that involvement, particularly among female singers, Tamposi adds, has broadened the representation of pop’s primary subject — sex — beyond the limits of the male gaze that no doubt helped push Spears to shave her head nearly 13 years ago.

The old factory hasn’t closed for good: Perhaps the biggest teen-pop act in the world right now is BTS, the Korean boy band formed inside Seoul’s deeply systematized K-pop scene. But even that industry, which has been rocked in recent months by sexual scandals and a number of tragic celebrity suicides, is beginning to show signs of rupture. We’ve seen these pictures before.

— Mikael Wood

