It had been nearly four years without new Britney Spears music. She remained the defining figure of American pop culture, only what that meant had changed, and by then the image of the happy blonde from Kentwood, Louisiana had been replaced a few times over. “Have you ever gone further than you wish you had?” Diane Sawyer asked the singer gravely on Primetime in 2003, whipping out the pages of a recent Esquire shoot which styled her in little more than a dozen strings of pearls. Its accompanying story, written by Chuck Klosterman, opened with the sentence, “Britney Spears is pantless,” and went on to conclude: “She is not so much a person as an idea, and the idea is this: You can want everything, so long as you get nothing.” On the cover she was made up like Marilyn Monroe, with whom she shared a knack for articulating her own myth with more profundity and wit than most smug writer types.
In the years since her last record, 2003’s In the Zone, Spears had married a dancer from Fresno, gave birth to their two sons, negotiated a divorce, lost custody of the babies, went twice to rehab, shook off her management team, and spent her days hunted by cameramen through the gas stations, pharmacies, and drive-thrus of L.A. She also wrote a blog. For $25 a year, you could read the singer’s musings on the fearsome beauty of tigers (“their eyes, their stripes, their constant quest for survival”) or poems she’d written: “Manipulation is the key/They screw it in/Because you’re naive,” went one from 2006. Other times she’d weigh in on her latest dramas with good humor and startling self-awareness. “Recently, I was sent to a very humbling place called rehab,” she wrote in spring 2007. Three months before, she’d shaved her head bald at a hair salon in the Valley as the paparazzi snapped on. Headlines called her crazy, but she looked strangely serene. “It felt almost religious,” Spears described the moment in her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me. “I was living on a level of pure being.”
In a blog update from June 2007, Spears appeared in a cheap wig and elbow-length white gloves, posing like she might have circa Oops!… I Did It Again. “I’m asking my most die-hard fans for some assistance in order 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
