Line #25 YMMV/BritneySpears


1	* AccidentalInnuendo:
2	** The first line of the chorus of "I Wanna Go," "Shame on me, to need release." She's talking about having a little fun to blow off steam, but "need release" is also a way of saying you need to get laid. Granted, this was on ''Femme Fatale'', which was already HotterAndSexier to begin with, so it might not have been all that accidental in the first place.
3	** The second verse of the same song also has, "I've been told who I should do it with / To keep both my hands above the blanket when the light's out." Yeah, not ''that'' innocent indeed.
4	* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: There are several ways to interpret one specific scene in the "Lucky" video. When Lucky is getting into her limo, she sees Britney among her fans wishing her well and drops the StepfordSmiler act for a moment. Is Britney really meant to be Lucky of the past before her fame, and is Lucky being reminded of who she was before? Does Lucky get a momentary burst of something from seeing fans that seem to care about her? Does Lucky briefly wonder why these fans would want her life when she finds it empty? Is the fan Britney is playing noticing the act dropping, making Lucky realize she can't keep continuing the charade?
5	* AndYouThoughtItWouldFail: Three of New York record labels rejected her, arguing audiences wanted pop ensembles such as Music/BackstreetBoys and Music/TheSpiceGirls, and "there wasn't going to be another Music/{{Madonna}}, another Debbie Gibson, or another Tiffany". Creator/SimonCowell reportedly dismissed her, saying "She'll never be famous with a name like that".
6	* ArchivePanic:
7	** Over 100 tracks leaked since leaking became a thing. All the demos for her Blackout album can easily be found online. Various demos from all her albums are also easily accessible.
8	** She also has 8 albums of 12-14 tracks each and b-sides/bonus tracks and other little fun side projects between album releases.
9	* BestKnownForTheFanservice: For better or worse, her flirtatious image and sexual lyrics defined her for years, to the point that it earned her her fair share of jokes about how how her willingness to show off her body had more to do with her popularity than any singing or performing skills, or that her only fans were impressionable teenage girls or [[NoYay creepy old men]]. On the less favorable side, meanwhile, were MoralGuardians freaking out over their teenage daughters idolizing a promiscuous woman who was only slightly older than they were.
10	* BrokenBase: Every single album, era, song, scandal, gains and loses her fans, but basically, 1999-2001, 2000-present, 2005-present, 1999-2004, 2001-2008, 1999-2011, 2004-2012, 2001-2004, 2008-2011, 2011-present. Her "old music" used to be easily defined as her first two albums, but now it's any of her first 7 albums. Some fans come in recently and go backward and explore her older works, others pick and choose the eras and tracks and versions Britney they support. She's been around a while...
11	* FanNickname: Godney, Fierceney, Walkney, Empowerney, Tourney, Oopsney, Blackoutney, Momney, Safeney, Socialney, Breakdownney...
12	* FetishRetardant: Her decidedly kinky performance at the 2007 Video Music Awards saw her pole dancing among her backup dancers in nothing but a pair of black sequin short shorts and a tank top. Few found her performance or even her outfit alluring, which was not helped by how tired and apathetic she looked with her backup dancers practically guiding her back and forth across the stage.
13	* FountainOfMemes: Her fans are quite inventive:
14	** Godney/the Holy Spearit, a term for worshipping purposes/winning stan wars.
15	** Britney says "very cool" and "urban" a lot, so her fans do too.
16	** In a Candies promotional video, Britney noted, "These jeans are cool cause they're faded". The phrase is now iconic amongst fans.
17	** Fans attempted to create various terms for themselves but Britney seems to prefer just "Britney Army".
18	** Due to frequent leaks by the Brit-camp these events are always called Britmas by her fans
19	** "She did it again!" whenever her song is a big hit or she does something shocking.
20	** The pink wig she wore in 2007, Starbucks coffee, gum chewing, laughing with her mouth wide open.
21	** "Y'all!"
22	** "I Hate F+cking Waiting" off her For The Record doco has been memetic within other fanbases too.
23	** Radar was featured on two of her albums due to an agreement with the producers. Whenever fans are waiting for new material, someone will eventually joke that Radar is the next single or will be featured on the new album.
24	** Britmas: in reference to Britney usually releasing material/promotional stuff in one big clump out of nowhere.
25	** DreamWithinADream is also a concept she brought up.
26	** "[[Creator/CaraCunningham Leave Britney alone!!]]"
27	** "It's Britney, [[ThisIsForEmphasisBitch bitch]]!"
28	** Britney Spears invented anime, because of the Break the Ice music video.
29	* FriendlyFandoms: With MOST fandoms, Lana Del Rey, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and others, no doubt helped by many other singer citing Britney as a major influence.
30	* GrowingTheBeard: The 'Britney' and 'In The Zone' albums where she first began being sexier and more mature, She also became more open with her artistic wants and needs, and challenging the ideas she invented in her first two eras. In The Zone was infinitely more outright sexier, but Britney started it.
31	* HarsherInHindsight:
32	** "Lucky" was a song about a celebrity being trapped and unhappy that was released a full seven years before her infamous breakdown and personal issues.
33	** Everytime video is an example of the worst-case scenario when a star falls off the wagon and alienates all her associates and then almost dies.
34	** Given that the song is actually about needing a new man, this may be a stretch, but the lines: "This time I need a soldier [...] That knows how to take, take care of me / I'm so damn glad it's over" could, if you really think about it, serve as foreshadowing for the conservatorship that she'd be placed under that same year that would, ultimately, cause even more turmoil and disappointment in her personal life.
35	*** In 2023, she revealed that she had an abortion during her relationship with Music/JustinTimberlake. This put [[AbortionFalloutDrama a new light]]] on both the nursery-rhyme song and the music video which ends with the birth of a baby.
36	** Speaking of conservatorship, the chorus from "My Prerogative" can come off as bitterly ironic: "Everybody's talkin' all this stuff about me / Why don't they just let me live? / I don't need permission, make my own decisions / That's my prerogative"
37	* HilariousInHindsight: Her ex-husband Kevin Federline was one of the dancers in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHQKdNPkfzU this]] performance of "Girlfriend", a song by *NSYNC. She was dating Justin at the time.
38	* HypeBacklash: It's difficult to describe to those not around at the time just how much vitriol there was for Britney once she became popular. In the early 2000s, her image of "perfect bleach-blonde white girl" and production-heavy bubblegum vocal pop music were considered agonizingly manufactured, if not [[BestKnownForTheFanservice sexually exploitative]], especially for underage girls, not helped by the fact that [[FollowTheLeader so many similar acts came in the wake of her popularity]] (the {{boy band}}s got hit by this as well, but nowhere near as bad, for [[GirlShowGhetto unfortunately obvious reasons]]. It also didn't help that most of the female vocal pop acts in the later half of the decade ''only'' copied the hypersexuality, which seemed to validate her {{slut sham\|ing}}ers). She was basically shorthand for everything wrong with pop culture. And not unlike [[Series/BarneyAndFriends another pop culture figure whose name starts with B]], she eventually became so unpopular that there was briefly an anti-Britney ''movement'' in pop music, with singer-songwriter acts like Music/MichelleBranch, Music/AvrilLavigne and Music/VanessaCarlton being marketed as the more "authentic" version of the attractive female pop star archetype. It wasn't until her public meltdown that the haters finally started to back off.
39	* MemeticMutation:
40	** "IT'S BRITNEY, BITCH!"
41	** "Leave! Britney! ALONE!"[[labelnote:Explanation]]A video by Cara Cunningham in which she emotionally expresses sympathy with Spears' mental breakdown. The perceived melodrama of the video resulted in it going viral, turning Cunningham into a prolific media personality and resulting in parodies of the original clip being commonly invoked in reference to Spears and other notorious {{Creator Breakdown}}s.[[/labelnote]]
42	* MisattributedSong: "Candy from a Stranger" is attributed to Britney when in reality the singer is Myah Marie. Though to be fair, Myah Marie was Britney's backup singer.
43	* OnceOriginalNowCommon: It can be hard to appreciate what a shock it was for the general public, after several years of more earnest genres like {{grunge}} and GangstaRap and just barely a decade after the Music/MilliVanilli scandal, to see bubblegum vocal pop get as popular as her's did. It would take ''another'' decade for her brand of pop music to itself become more socially acceptable, with similar acts like Music/LadyGaga being more transgressive with the foundation Britney built, to the point that Britney, while not as unpopular, is seen as another pop star these days. Even her overt sexuality isn't seen as anything groundbreaking after decades of even more provocative, if not outright raunchy, female pop singers (though unlike Britney, most of them started when they were ''over'' 18).
44	* OvershadowedByControversy: She absolutely dominated the music charts in the late '90s and early [=2000s=] and was even starting to see a bit of a renaissance in the late [=2010s=]. However, much discussion of her was dominated by her very public breakdown that was so bad, she lost custody of her children and was officially under the conservatorship of her father, meaning all business and financial matters went through him, until 2021 when the conservatorship ended.
45	* PopularityPolynomial: Once the divine object of hatred amongst music fans, Britney's downward spiral and public breakdown have caused some of her most ardent haters to feel pity for her and call for the media to lay off of her. Her father and attorney have been appointed as her conservators by the courts and now oversee her personal life and finances. She has since made a real comeback in regards to many opinions of her by scoring five number ones in America alone and headlining two successful worldwide tours. Many people these days tend to have sympathy for her given her obvious personal and mental problems.
46	* SignatureSong: At this stage it's "...Baby One More Time", "Oops!... I Did It Again", "Slave 4 U", "Gimme More", "Womanizer", "Till The World Ends" and "Toxic".
47	* {{Squick}}: That famous "sexy schoolgirl" video for "...Baby One More Time"? She's [[NoYay seventeen]] in it. It's a good thing most of her fans at the time were even younger (and if it makes you feel any better, at least it was ''her'' idea to be dressed like that).
48	* SurprisinglyImprovedSequel: Almost all of her eras earn her new fans. On her forums, people will say they started becoming a fan of her between ''Oops'' and ''Circus''. Only ''Femme Fatale'' and ''Britney Jean'' may have caused a few walk-aways, but only barely.
49	* ValuesDissonance: Needless to say, if a seventeen-year-old wanted to make "...Baby, One More Time" or show their bra on the cover of ''Magazine/RollingStone'' after TheNewTens, when even the most gently implied sexualization of someone under 18 is considered SickAndWrong, they'd be told point-blank to wait a few years.
50	* VindicatedByHistory
51	** Once the target of many, many cruel jokes for her sugary music, raunchy performances and [[BestKnownForTheFanservice perceived lack of talent over her physical appearance]], the general public has viewed her in a much more sympathetic light in recent years due to her personal issues becoming common knowledge and bubblegum pop music becoming more popular, allowing her to exist as just another pop singer and music fans to judge her music more objectively and easier to appreciate her strengths. Her extremely dedicated fanbase, [[Music/DuaLipa a]] [[Music/LadyGaga few]] [[Music/LanaDelRey of]] [[Music/BillieEilish whom]] became very successful and respected singers in their own right who vocally cited Britney as a major influence, doesn't hurt either.
52	** ''Blackout'' was shafted due to rules (probably not helped by the fact that it was assumed it would automatically be bad, being made right in the middle of her public meltdown,) but now it's considered one of her best.
53	* WinBackTheCrowd: ''Circus'' started her resurrection.

Context YMMV / BritneySpears