Welcome to In the Zine
“I wasn’t good. I was great.” — Britney Spears
In 2016, Britney Spears released her last, and potentially final, album, Glory. The record, one of her best, arrived following a period of stagnation in her career: since 2013, she had been sequestered in Las Vegas, performing her record-breaking Piece of Me residency at Planet Hollywood. The album released to coincide with the beginning of the residency, 2013’s Britney Jean, was hollow, notable for the absence – creatively, spiritually, and perhaps even physically – of its author. One song followed, the formulaic Little Mix reject “Pretty Girls” featuring Iggy Azalea, in 2015; it was named one of the worst songs of the year by Time magazine.
While making Glory, however, something shifted. “I started to get my spark back,” Britney said in 2022 during a 22-minute voice note shared (and subsequently deleted) online. “I got the fire back in my eyes.” The reasons why and how that fire was smothered are well documented, both by the press and by Spears herself in her memoir The Woman in Me. But to summarise in no particular order: sexism, misogyny, classism, control, coercion, abuse, divorce, family, celebrity, rebellion, the paparazzi, the tabloids, the media, the music industry, the conservatorship, the American legal system and the general public.
For Britney fans, seeing that spark again in 2016, albeit lit a little differently, was reassuring. For the previous decade, a chasm had grown between the artist who once redefined pop music with songs like “…Baby One More Time”, “I’m A Slave 4 U” and “Toxic”, and the disengaged performer lip syncing to euro-dance bangers like “Till the World Ends”, “Work Bitch” and the whirring “Womanizer”. While the hits were still coming – 2008’s Circus album sold over half-a-million copies in one week in the US, while 2011’s Femme Fatale produced three top ten singles on the Billboard Hot 100 – Britney’s previously insatiable appetite for pop supremacy had, for innumerable reasons, waned.
Glory, it could be argued, was an act of creative course correction. And if it is the last we hear of Britney as a pop star, its efforts at artistic reclamation are largely successful: it’s weird, at times hypnotic, and fizzy with personality, much like 2003’s In the Zone or 2007’s Blackout. It is a good, if not entirely satisfying, end to a music career that reshaped our understanding, engagement with and consumption of pop music.
In 2016 I, too, was getting my spark back. After spending years muscling my way into journalism, I’d experienced my first redundancy from a job that had also smothered my fire. In between applying for work and sending freelance pitches, I found myself following the roll out of the album obsessively, scrolling forum threads on Britney fan site Breathe Heavy for any rumours of collaborators, release dates and potential musical direction.
I’ve been a Britney fan since childhood — “…Baby One More Time” came out when I was eight — she is, after friends and family, the biggest love of my life. As such, I knew that Glory was significant: its success, at least artistically, was necessary to prevent Britney the pop star from sliding further into obscurity.
In her book On Michael Jackson, the cultural critic Margot Jefferson writes about her frustration at how impenetrable Jackson’s “acts and actions” were. “I was angry too,” she adds, “angry at what I saw as the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. I mean by that the expense of talent in a waste of torment, sociological and psychological torment.”
I’ve felt similar frustration about Britney’s sometimes confounding “acts and actions”. I’ve felt that anger, too. I don’t believe Britney battled the same demons as Jackson, but I do feel that, since 2008, she was subject to the same expense, or maybe extraction, of her spirit. And with that came a similar expense of talent amid sociological and psychological torment.
The story of Britney Spears is one dripping with injustice. There is the horror show of the conservatorship, which legally stripped her of her personhood for nearly 15 years. There is the public’s consumption of her humanity under the guise of celebrity. The indefensible way the media has treated her. There is Justin Timberlake and Kevin Federline and Sam Lutfi and Lou Taylor and Jamie Spears. The list, shamefully, goes on.
In 2016, though, the injustice that I became fixated on was the erasure, or at least obfuscation, of Britney’s artistry. Scepticism about her creative agency since day one, and in the years since, especially post 2008, the concept of her artistic autonomy had eroded to nothing, both because of the apparatus that upheld the conservatorship and because of a misogynistic culture that struggled to align the commercialised commodity Britney had become with romantic, rockist and misogynistic notions about music.
We can, perhaps, thank Taylor Swift and Beyoncé for helping dismantle those ideas. But while they are both significantly different artists to Britney, neither would exist, at least in their current guise, without her. She may not have the songwriting skills of Swift or had the same opportunities for storytelling and genre-bending as Beyoncé, but Britney ushered in the blueprint for 21st century stardom, paying the price for it in the process. She was pop’s sacrificial princess, flipping her hair to try to shake off the blood.
If Glory was Britney’s creative course correction as an artist, I felt, as a music journalist, that I could also help to pivot the narrative about her art. The year the album came out, I had an idea for a small collection of essays, written by a number of cultural critics, music journalists and Britney fans that would go some way at reframing our understanding of her artistry and her position in pop culture. It was going to be a small print publication and I would call it In the Zine.
Emails were sent, meetings were had, but ultimately the project faltered. In the years since, Britney’s life has changed exponentially: she toured, finished Las Vegas and, as has been well documented, was freed from the conservatorship she had been subject to since 2008. In that time, I have written about her, if not incessantly, then at least regularly. I’ve discussed her on podcasts, reviewed her book, ranked her songs, written about the #FreeBritney campaign and the role being a fan has had on my life. I’ve even explored her mythical “lost” album Original Doll.
Throughout it all, I thought about how I could pursue In the Zine. I considered writing a book but it felt too formal, too structured, to capture or converse with an artist and entity who has become so enigmatic.
Ultimately, like so many ideas, it came to me on the bus: In the Zine would work as a Substack. With no formal parameters, a newsletter could facilitate writing about a pop star whose life, career and impact often feel so thorny, frustrating, intricate, complex and fascinating.
To do Britney justice, and to honour my pledge to (at least attempt to) pivot the narrative about her art, it felt important that each edition of In the Zine use her music as its springboard. The most comprehensive way of doing this is to work through every Britney Spears song one by one. And with that in mind, we might as well do them in order of appearance.
Each edition of In the Zine will feature writing about a specific Britney Spears song. Beginning with “…Baby One More Time”, this Substack will make its way through all 150 songs released either as part of an album or as one-off singles in chronological order. There will also be extra posts about obscure bonus tracks, unreleased songs and rarities. Each album will also get a bonus essay when the tracklist is complete.
Sometimes the newsletter will focus solely on one song, in others they may be bunched together. There will be stories behind the songs, in-depth essays, straight up reviews, and some experimentation along the way. As things progress, there will hopefully be group debates, guest writers and interviews. Will it (drive me) crazy? Most likely. But you do crazy things for the people you love, and I love Britney Spears. However, I’ll try to not let this adoration blind me: while I am a fan, In the Zine is an attempt to critically engage and wrestle with her work and legacy without reserve.
For now, In the Zine will be free to access for subscribers, although if you enjoy reading and have the means, you can pledge your support for $5 a month.
So if you wanna get In the Zine, I hope you’ll join me on this endeavour and subscribe (bitch).
I promise you it’ll be a newsletter to remember.
See you soon.
