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Hip-hop redefines the circumstances of the Black/White power scenario relative to the music industry. Although one cannot argue with the fact that White ownership of the industry still controls Black involvement, there is a certain cultural authority that is tied to Blackness here.
— Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C.

Where do you draw the line and say what you really want to do? I think a lot of the things I've done that seem absurd were out of rebellion and out of wanting to break free. I know that sounds weird. Can't live in a prison.
— Britney Spears, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12 March 2004

I didn't want people to feel like a pedophile for looking at her. There was no reason she should still live in the shadows of the Mickey Mouse Club.
— Pharrell Williams, Newsweek, 29 December 2003

You have to hand it to her. Britney Spears knows when and where to show up. And yet, despite her momentary appearance in Michael Moore's gonzo moneymaker and tree-shaker, Fahrenheit 9/11, in which she announces her support for George W. Bush, most current Britney news has to do with her engagement to dancer Kevin Federline. Young love: it's so... summery. "This is my life, and I don't care what people think," she tells People magazine, the issue featuring the couple on its cover. "I'm going to get married. I'm in love."

How nice for her. Despite the fact that the 22-year-old pop star can't possibly not "care what people think" (she's talking to People magazine, after all), her declaration might best be understood as a bid for some kind of independence. Indeed, it follows a series of such declarations, each more emphatic, pop-culturally speaking, than the one before.

Consider the massive marketing campaign for Spears' late 2003 album, In the Zone, which deemed it yet another "transition" for the girl who's been "growing up" in front of millions. No longer "not yet a woman," now she was a woman. Believe it. The shift was marked by a series of high profile events, increasingly difficult to navigate. First, she was a victim of bad-talking, when Maryland First Lady Kendal Erlich told a rally for her husband, the governor, "If I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears, I think I would" (she later apologized for her choice of words). In August 2003, Britney kissed Madonna at the VMA's, made a music video with her ("Me Against the Music"), where she almost kissed her again, and was allegedly involved with her black, married backup dancer Columbus Short, whose wife was allegedly pregnant. On 4 January, she married hometown friend Jason Alexander in Las Vegas, a wedding that lasted for 55 hours (now, with the Federline announcement, Alexander is again making headlines of a certain small measure, selling his salacious story: she proposed, he accepted, her parents objected, vociferously).

Then came the out-and-out malfunctions: she approached Barbara Broccoli, who rejected her as a Bond Girl, leading the Los Angeles Times' Samantha Bonar to disparage her low class, Southern origins, and lack of intelligence: "Britney thinks a corset and a python make good accessories and it wouldn't be surprising if she ate her peas with a knife" (18 April 2004). Her now defunct Onyx Hotel Tour (cancelled when she required knee surgery) was called out as shallow and shameful. The New York Daily News' Jim Farber actually commended her lip-synching, because, "The few times she sang flagrantly live, Spears navigated the notes like a person trying to drive a car after downing an entire bottle of Scotch" (12 April 2004). Ouch.

By the same token, London's Observer noted, "Once a Barbie doll, primly clad in blushing pink, Britney now resembles one of those inflatable female torsos that used to be sold in the sleazy emporia around Times Square, with permanent smiles on their painted faces and skins of clammy, squeaking plastic" (Peter Conrad, 2 May 2004). To promote the record and the tour, Spears made two lurid videos, the first for the "sex-tastic" "Toxic", where she plays a salacious flight attendant, and another for "Everytime" where she appears to kill herself. Stephanie Zacharek called the latter "a teenage temper tantrum, a glossy 'you'll be sorry when I'm dead' melodrama" (New York Times, 25 April 2004). On top of everything else, Spears sort of admitted she's in therapy, dealing with her "issues."

No surprise, each of these historic occasions garnered inordinate press coverage, including accusations that they were "publicity stunts", as if she needs more publicity. The girl's many transformations since 1999, when "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)" broke, have been relentlessly recorded on television, the internet, and magazine covers, from her burgeoning breasts to her smoking and drinking to her breaking up with that punk Justin. She's followed the leads of other pop stars (read: J-Lo), trying to front a restaurant (the kaput NYLA) and, as of this June, launching a fragrance line with Elizabeth Arden ("Curious" -- available as fragrance, body cream and shower gel -- is described as "a blend of white flowers and vanilla-infused musk").

Derivative and annoying as she can be, Britney remains the most resilient and re-inventive of today's pop princesses, this even if, as Avril insists in Britain's FemaleFirst, "I'm more about a performance, she's more about entertainment and sex, being a sex symbol and trying to look like she's having sex". True, Spears is reviled and renowned for "selling sex" of a certain kind, walking a thin line between faux-virginal charm and youthful scandal. Her specific affiliation with pop, a genre that is ostensibly innocuous and voracious in targeting preteen dollars, amplifies the recurrent public controversy over her behavior, lyrics, and performances.

While her music has long evinced diverse influences, the borrowing is increasingly evident, as in her work with the Neptunes on her 2002 album Britney, or the new collaboration with the Ying Yang Twins, "(I Got That) Boom Boom," which she premiered in a live performance late last year on TRL. The rooftop dance -- energetic, not very well lip-synced, choreographed and framed for multiple sets of viewers -- exemplifies the sort of expansive, big dance-focused show for which Spears is infamous: equal parts athletic and erotic, naïve and calculating.

Still, the concept, on its face, is bizarre. At a moment when red and blue states seem to matter so terribly much and yet not at all, here comes Miss Southern Comfort claiming her turf and expanding it, via her affiliation with crunk rappers. The TRL business had Britney striding on stage to announce, "This is for all those Southern boys out there", at which point a crunk fiddle backed her dancers' speedy line-steps. As Britney had her way with this currently trendiest style of hiphop, it was also likely that there weren't too many Southern boys right around Times Square (TRL's location), though we might imagine them somewhere in TV-land.

Britney's tenuous and occasionally disturbing connections with hip-hop provide a framework to examine the culture's emergence as a mainstream form that, for all its good work, can make white kids pose as adult and vaguely resistant. The phenomenon is exemplified in Spears' absorption and renegotiation of the form, and its assimilation of her. This assimilation is not so neatly tailored as, say, that of Justin Timberlake, who, before the 2004 Superbowl Halftime Show, his shoddy treatment of Janet, and the subsequent revocation of his "ghetto pass", was produced by the Neptunes and Timbaland, and generously welcomed at 106 and Park. And Spears' assimilation of and into hiphop has not been so broadly pronounced as Christina Aguilera's, whose very visible and actually innovative work with Redman (on "Dirrty") and Lil Kim (on "Can't Hold Us Down") is of a piece with her very own ongoing crusade to demonstrate her autonomy and preach a kind of self-empowerment to the masses of little girls who admire her so.

Spears works differently. She -- as an icon, not a person, for I'm not even going to pretend to understand what she's thinking -- makes no pretense that she understands or even appreciates hip-hop as a culture, and neither does she take on the trappings of hip-hop as a means to authenticate or "street up" her own performances. Rather, Britney Spears uses hip-hop to reframe what she has always done, that is, to expose her own artifice and effort, her investment in looking the part, whatever part. Spears, then, is that perfect pop product, prone to describe her personal "authenticity" (what she really believes, how she really feels), but with no expectation that anyone will believe or feel the same way. While hip-hop clings to "being real" with a strange ferocity, while also celebrating performative artifice and excess, Spears and other pop artists have maintained a tension, at once contrived and confessional, make-believe and sincere.

Spears' ongoing and transient performance of self won't be altered by hip-hop, only dressed up, briefly. Greg Tate writes of hip-hop's effects, as cultural emissary and multi-billion dollar business, "In a world where we're seen as both the most loathed and the most alluring of creatures, we remain the most co-optable and erasable of cultures too" (Everything But the Burden, 14). Spears' flirtation with hip-hop typifies this dynamic. During the production and promotion of 2001's Britney, and extending to the Ying Yang Twins' collaboration for In the Zone, Spears' self-presentation was notably changing, that is, turning more explicitly "adult" (if not mature exactly, then at least sexually brazen). She was already having trouble maintaining, or perhaps more accurately, deciding on, an image for her maturation; as Pharrell notes in the epigraph I've quoted above, the former Mouseketeer-jailbait gig was limited by definition.

At the same time, and even as parents of her girl fans decried Spears' sexual displays, the fans themselves were turning away from Britney for other reasons, mostly having to do with youthful consumer self-identification. So, as the perky, even slightly wayward, schoolgirl image faded, Newsweek reported in January 2003, Britney's fans were recognizing her increasing irrelevance for their own purposes: "She's so fake," says a 10-year-old former fan, "like Barbie, and sings really stupid things like 'I'll be your slave.' Not even the fourth graders like her now" ("Hit or Miss," Lorraine Ali and Vanessa Juarez, 20 January 2003).

This approximate lyric, from "Slave For U," is, somewhat contrarily but rather perfunctorily, an assertion of independence. This by way of a manifest pursuit of pleasure, or, what the New York Times' Jon Pareles calls "sexual brinkswomanship" (11 November 2001): "What's practical is logical," she breathes on the track, "What the hell, who cares? / All I know is I'm so happy when you're dancing there. / I'm a slave for you. I cannot hold it; I cannot control it". In "My Britney Problem, And Yours," Jim DeRogatis declares, "[F]or all her talk of self-empowerment, the submissive sex toy is still the role Spears plays best. She returns to it again and again, and it's certainly the pose that's being used to peddle the disc" (Salon, 3 December 2001). But the ways consumers understand or use Britney are more complicated than DeRogatis, the self-identified father of a five-year-old daughter, allows, and in Spears' professions of self-abandon-as-self-dominion, artifice cuts all ways.

Pareles observes, "For Ms. Spears, artificiality is part of the come-on." To this end, he cites production on the album Britney by the Neptunes and Rodney Jenkins, where her artistic evolution is formulated within a "realm of airless synthetic sounds. Within the pings and buzzes, her vocals become both a percussive sound effect and an emissary from the corporeal world". This especially in the hip-hop-inflected tracks, where percussive is an optimum vocal mode, where resistance and containment are always in tension. As Craig Watkins argues, hip-hop absorbs and makes sense of all positions, such that creators and consumers "mobilize their own meanings" even within seeming limits. "Black youth," writes Watkins, "continue to recreate hip-hop... and continue to penetrate and shape the popular media cultures... generating a broad range of cultural products that enlarge its creative community and sphere of influence" (Representing, 74).

If Spears is an emblem of that "penetrated" popular culture instead of any creative force within hip-hop, she is also, at 22, already an old hand at generating product and demand. That's not to say she uses her experience wisely, or even very efficiently. "Unfortunately," writes Erica O'Young, "what could have been a huge transporter for America's No. 1 teeny-bopper over the pop-urban bridge burned to the ground, as Spears alienated her stronghold teen audience and failed to seduce a new one from the club-hopping hip-hop genre" (Stanford Daily, 28 August 2003). This "failure" now looks even more clearly delineated, in the gossip swirling around the Federline relationship. He's been depicted repeatedly in gossip venues as a "bad influence," encouraging Spears in her drinking and smoking (and lack of self-control), the father of one child with Shar Jackson, who is currently expecting their second. But in this aspect, he's only the latest embodiment of Britney's efforts to break from her naïve, pop-girl reputation.

Britney's "failure" to move her new audience, to create a bridge between pop consumers and dance club habitués, may be disappointing for observers like O'Young. But it's not for lack of trying. In what follows, I'll consider several Spears performances that specifically reveal her tapping into hip-hop, as one means of "crossing over." One prominent example has her working with Pharrell, on the "Boys" remix. In the music video, Pharrell raps and sort-of sings, and Britney does her best Janet Jackson imitation (going so far as to sigh, "Get nasty" a few times). "For whatever reason", she sings, "I feel like I've been wanting you all my life. / You don't understand. / I'm so glad we're at the same place at the same time. / It's over now". (Or would that be, "almost over now," as in the Neptunes' "Rock Star"?) He comes into frame, his profile filling the screen: "What would it take for you to just leave with me?" he raps. "Not trying to sound conceited, / But meeting you was destiny. / I'm from N.E.R.D., / Aren't you Britney? / Let's turn this dance floor into our own little nasty thing".

If Pharrell is "from N.E.R.D.," like it's another planet, he's also bringing to Britney a news kind of identity. "Aren't you Britney?" he asks, turning the very name into a question instead of an assertion, of place, time, and purpose. The visual track organizes the lyrics' merging of bodies, styles, and effects: Pharrell's initial engagement with a light-skinned girl is paralleled by Britney's flirtation with an ultra-white boy emerging from a swimming pool. They leave behind these partners to engage at a bar, where the chorus kicks in ("Boys! / Sometimes a girl just needs one (Ooh) / Boys!"). Here their exchange is intimate and slithery, at once showy and subtle.

They repeat this sort of "culture clash" encounter during the Fourth of July live performance of the song. This show, aired by NBC from New York in 2002, was billed as a coming together and reassertion of U.S. identity and patriotic excess following 9/11. The recuperation of U.S. self-celebratory spirit is rendered in a particular way, merging white and black bodies, pop and hip-hop, dancey display and a weird, almost shy demonstration of MC skills (this was before Neptunes were officially the largest producers on planet earth). It's a commercial implosion that marks a supposed end to the nation's briefly sober, if not exactly self-reflective period following the attacks.

Equally strange and instructive are several incarnations of "Slave 4 U," also produced by the Neptunes. At the beginning of the video for "Slave," directed by the frankly ingenious Francis Lawrence, Britney performs her own sort of "rap," talking her way through the early lyrics in which she complains that she's not a "little girl". "I know I may be young", she states, gazing into the camera, "But I've got feelings too. / And I need to do what I feel like doing. / So let me go and just listen".

Getting viewers to listen to Britney (no matter her "feelings") hardly seems this video's highest priority. As is well known, she spends most of the video dancing amid a veritable orgy of sweaty, lithe bodies of all colors, her breathing fast and thrilling, her own gyrations choreographed to the millisecond. As the "narrative" here has it, Britney makes her way into an apparently airless room where the dancing ensues; en route, she passes a young black man whose glance back at her takes center frame, as both register desire, or skepticism, or perhaps disbelief. The visuals from this moment on are all about bodies up against bodies, seemingly enslaved to the rhythm, the song heavy on beats, metrical breathing, and Britney's cooing invitation to "Get it, get it, get it, get it," and so on.

The most infamous live version of the track, at MTV's 2001 Video Music Awards, extends the feral "instinct" and "slave" imagery from the Lawrence video, incongruously literalizing the metaphors. The VMAs show begins with a spectacularly bad idea: Britney appears on stage with her dancers swarming around her, several of them in cages (slaves, presumably) who are loosed as the lyrics begin, prowling the stage in their elaborate Cirque du Soleil meets Lion King costumes. Britney dances enthusiastically for a minute or so, before she pauses to pick up a large white boa constrictor, and arrange it across her neck and shoulders. "Baby," she breathes, "Don't you wanna dance up on me, / To another time and place? / Baby, don't you wanna dance up on me, / Leaving behind my name, my age?" Again, the language conveys the desire for loss of identity, even loss of self, that makes sex seem a form of romantic transport.

While this scene is plainly ill-conceived, Britney's 2003 TRL performance with the Ying Yang Twins -- so desperate and preposterous -- illustrates just how wrong executive-arranged collaborations can go. The "Boom Boom" show mashes together the salacious crunk kings and the whitest girl on the planet, as she lip-syncs, "I got that boom boom that you want all night long". The Twins come on stage, flanking her, to rap, "She naked, she soaking wet... She got a little body I can't forget, I ain't met a young lady that outdid her yet". That the Twins didn't even write a new hook for this number, but only recycle their overplayed lyric from "Salt Shaker" -- "She leakin, she's soakin' wet" -- suggests the utter lack of investment and invention that went into this publicist's concoction.

Though the Ying Yang Twins exhort their TRL audience to "Get crunk with Britney" before the show begins, their absence from her precise little dance performance (except as a set of encouraging grunts in the backing track) only exacerbates the extraordinary clash of styles, expectations, and possibilities in these performers. "Britney Spears and the Ying Yang Twins," they rap, "Wazup, yeah. We all became friends, might as well let the party begin". Mm-hmm. They all friends.