Growing Up With Britney Spears: Part One

Part one of the essay you've been waiting to drop on Adryan's POV

Photo credit: Paramount / Adryan Corcione

The year is 2001. It’d been two hours since I hopped off the school bus. I’d just started the third grade a few weeks prior. With dusty fingernails from snacking on 3D Doritos, I flipped to MTV with the television remote. It was almost time.

In moments, Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” music video premiered.

Britney appeared onscreen. 19 going on 20 in her “Not a Girl Not Yet a Woman'' era, she stripped herself of the schoolgirl uniform and pigtail braids from her iconic “…Baby One More Time” music video. Covered in baby oil, she and her backup dancers pranced and twirled around in an abandoned Asian bath house in this new video.

All you people look at me like I’m a little girl
Well, did you ever think it’d be okay
For me to step into this world?
Always saying little girl, don’t step into the club
‘Cause I’m just tryin’ to find out why
‘Cause dancing’s what I love

Consumed by the video, I didn’t notice that my mother walked into the living room. She stopped in her tracks and watched as Britney and her crew huddled close and breathed heavily on each other. 

“I think Britney is getting to sexy for you,” she delivers in such a casual, unphased tone as she reached for the remote.

“Don’t you dare take Britney away from me!” I cried.

I was six years old when I first heard of Britney Spears. 

It was the summer between kindergarten and first grade. I hung out in my dad’s home office, a loft with a modest bathroom that overlooked the downstairs living room. I sat on the faded beige carpet with blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals in front of a television set. I watched E.T., for the first time ever, on cable network television. In between scenes, a commercial for Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 2 came on.

The opening sequence featured the introduction of “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals before briefly highlighting Britney—an up and coming hot new artist—with an extremely brief clip from the “…Baby One More Time” video. The song was the first track listed on the compilation album. 

My pupils gazed at the screen. In only seven seconds, not even having watched the entire video, I was hooked. I had also already decided what I was going to do with my life: to be just like her.

To this day, when I hear the opening three-note melody to “…Baby One More Time” unprompted in public, my heart skips a beat.

In second grade, Britney was set to release her second album. Once I found out the exact release date—May 3, 2000—I counted down the days until the Oops! I Did It Again drop to my friends and classmates. A close friend would later gift me the CD for my birthday that summer. She knew me well enough to know it was the perfect gift, but not well enough to know I’d already have it in time to play the CD straight through repeatedly on the backyard speakers during my birthday pool party. I’d already played it in full in my Hello Kitty boombox too, so loudly that the speakers crunched and crackled at its maximum volume.

When May 3 finally came, my mom picked me up from school and headed straight to Ames, the closest department store that sold CDs. I raced to the entertainment section, down the aisle of CDs of artists whose last name started with S. I didn’t need to flip through any CDs because Britney’s was already front and center. A row of her new album, wrapped with white plastic security packaging around it, waited for me.

At the register, I pulled my own cash from my Crayola-themed backpack to buy the CD myself. The cashier leaned over the counter towards me to reach the bills between my tiny, fragile fingers. My copy was one of 500,000 sold on its first day of release. With over 20 million copies sold since, Oops! stands as one of the best selling records of all time.

During this era, my parents equipped a child blocker program on the family downstairs Acer desktop. I’d already used a computer unsupervised for years, but only through offline computer games. However, I recently started a new hobby of searching the internet and saving photos of my favorite photos of Britney on floppy disks. The blocker, though, had blocked Britney’s website, citing it as suspicious for children.

The first time this happened, I called my mother from another room. She put on her glasses and leaned over to carefully read the disclaimer on the monitor.

“Well, hold on, maybe there are sleazy photos on her website,” she hesitated.

“How else am I going to see her tour dates?” I snapped back.

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Thank you for reading Part One of my Britney Spear essay! Stay tuned for Part Two next month. (How else would I celebrate Pride month?) In the meantime, share this newsletter within your network and encourage folks to subscribe!