The princess and the plea; At 23, Britney Spears wants out of the

Sunday Herald, The, Nov 7, 2004 by Leon McDermott

The big cd Britney Spears My Prerogative: Greatest Hits (Jive/ BMG) 3/5 It's not included on this greatest hits compilation, but on Britney Spears's second album Oops! I Did it Again there's a cover of the Rolling Stones's (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. In musical terms, it's not a particularly remarkable cover; the fuzzbox guitar and hip- bashing tambourine of the 1965 original are gutted and replaced with anodyne beats and the final-chorus key change ubiquitous among pop hits. Gone, too, is the original's strutting, peacock bravado and barely-constrained sexuality, as are the lines about "trying to make some girl". Not, presumably, because Britney's adverse to a bit of lipstick lesbianism to gain publicity; it's more likely that the reference to being "on a losing streak" (one of the rare occasions rock even mentions menstruation) was too much of an acknowledgement that women aren't sexually objectified marketing tools but actual living, breathing people.

When Baby One More Time started colonising MTV and jukebox channels like The Box a little over five years ago, Britney Spears was 17, and already a showbiz veteran well-versed in the methods, if not the semiotics, of popular culture. Clad in a midriff-baring school uniform and still possessing the puppy fat of the average teenage girl, Britney in the video for Baby One More Time was the first iteration of a supposed object of desire (for the boys) and a role model (for the girls). The sexually provocative Britney, obviously, was required to also have a submissive side: hence Born To Make You Happy, in which she all but shackles herself to the cooker to please her beau.

In the albums since then, Spears's image has matured. By the time of 2001's Britney, she was singing that "my loneliness ain't killing me no more" on Stronger, while Overprotected saw her attempting to step out of the career bubble. By last year's Outrageous, Spears was singing about going out in a "trench coat and my underwear". At every step of the way, there's an evolution of Spears's sexuality; the tops get a little higher, the hipster trousers a little lower, the lyrics a little more risque.

The evolution of Spears's music has paralleled that of her image; her first two albums were mostly written and produced by Max Martin, the Swedish mogul whose obvious love for Abba's melodrama (not to mention their epic, perfectly-judged melodies) made them mostly sugary confections. The Britney of 2001, meanwhile, and last year's In The Zone, saw Spears grounding herself - lyrically and sonically - in the bump'n'grind of contemporary R&B thanks to producers like The Neptunes and Rodney Jerkins; tracks like I'm A Slave 4 U and Toxic are, in pop music terms, genuinely radical and thrilling.

Next month she turns 23, and already, like the countless teenage tennis players who storm the women's game before they're old enough to vote and end up burnt-out by their early 20s, she comes across as tired and bewildered; a Queen of Pop ready to abdicate. Spears posted a remarkably candid message on her website last week, saying - in among promises to start a family, and mentioning a new film starring her labelmate Mandy Moore - that if her life "seemed like it was all over the place in the past two years, it's probably because IT WAS!" Having struggled to keep up with the treadmill since she was 15, she professed that "it's amazing what advisers will push you to do, even if it means taking a naive, young blonde girl and putting her on the cover of every magazine."

So is this greatest hits, named after her cover of Bobby Brown's 1992 hit My Prerogative, a swansong? Solo female pop stars generally have a short shelf-life, particularly the ones who first achieve fame through shiny-haired success on a TV show; the only one who's really, truly bucked that trend and had a lasting career as a singer is Kylie Minogue, and she's had countless periods where people have declared she's finished.

Look further back, and for every Cilla Black who moved into light entertainment, there are a hundred female singers who burned brightly before being deemed surplus to requirements. One of the few who didn't was, of course, Jagger's old flame, Marianne Faithfull. But it seems unlikely that Spears will spend the next decade addicted to heroin and believing herself to be living on a wall, before recording her own Broken English sometime around 2014.

Spears's legacy, more than her music, is her brand, her image. That's both what sells, and what has influenced everyone else, not least the millions of teenage girls whose Saturday afternoon shopping outfit is a crop top, a pair of low-cut jeans and blonde highlights.

If Madonna pushed the envelope of female sexuality in pop music for much of the 1980s in a misguided attempt to explore it herself, then Britney has been little more than a complicit cog in something far more invidious: the entertainment industry's fetishisation and sexualisation of youth taken to hitherto unimagined lengths.