It had been almost four years without new music from Britney Spears. She remained the defining figure of American pop culture, only that meant she had changed, and by then the image of the cheerful blonde from Kentwood, Louisiana had been replaced a few times. “Have you ever gone further than you wanted to?” Diane Sawyer seriously asked the singer Rush hour in 2003, turning the pages of a recent one esteemed sir shot she made with little more than a dozen strings of pearls. Its accompanying story, written by Chuck Klosterman, opened with the line “Britney Spears is without pants” and went on to conclude: “She's not so much a person as an idea, and the idea is this: You can want anything. as long as you don't get anything.” On the cover she was made like Marilyn Monroe, with whom she shared the ability to articulate her own myth with more depth and wit than most smug writers.
In the years since her last record, in 2003 In the zone, Spears had married a Fresno dancer, given birth to her two sons, negotiated a divorce, lost custody of the babies, checked into rehab twice, fired her management team, and spent her days being hounded by operators at gas stations, pharmacies . , and LA drive-thrus He also wrote a blog. For $25 a year, you could read the singer's thoughts on the terrifying beauty of tigers (“their eyes, their stripes, their constant search for survival”) or poems she'd written: “Manipulation is the key /Screw it/ Because you're naive,” went one from 2006. Other times she weighed her latest dramas with good humor and surprising self-awareness. “Recently, I was sent to a very humbling place called rehab,” she wrote in the spring of 2007. Three months earlier, she had shaved her head bald at a salon in the Valley as the paparazzi swarmed. The headlines called her crazy, but she seemed strangely at peace. “It felt almost religious,” Spears described in her 2023 memoir. The Woman in Me. “I was living on a plane of pure existence.”
In a blog update from June 2007, Spears appeared in a cheap wig and white elbow-length gloves, posing as if she had about Oops I Did It Again. “I'm asking for the help of my die-hard fans to name my upcoming album,” the post read, presenting the following titles for fans to vote on:
1. Omg is Like Lindsay Lohan Like Okay Like
