On the Shelf
Hit Women: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Girls Who Constructed Pop’s Shiniest Decade
By Nora PrinciottiBallantine Books: 240 pages, $29If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help unbiased bookstores.
Rising up in a small city in New Hampshire, Nora Princiotti lived two hours away from the closest mall, so the Scholastic Ebook Honest was her lifeline to popular culture purchases.
In fall 2003, the then-9-year-old made a beeline to the honest and purchased gum, glitter gel pens and “Metamorphosis,” the second studio album from “Lizzie McGuire” star Hilary Duff.
At the moment, Duff was “the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family,” Princiotti writes in “Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade.” “This is the first day of the rest of my life.”
This proclamation isn’t any exaggeration. Duff’s CD was Princiotti’s gateway to the colourful pop music universe of the 2000s — an period that “Hit Girls” completely examines by the lens of a number of the decade’s music icons.
The chronological e-book opens with Britney Spears reigniting trade curiosity in mainstream pop after the roaring success of her snappy debut single, 1998’s “…Baby One More Time.” Princiotti subsequently devotes chapters to Rihanna’s world-shifting dance music and savvy use of know-how; the scrappy (and infrequently bumpy) pop-punk odyssey of Avril Lavigne; and the sophisticated relationship between indie rock and pop, exemplified by “American Idol” sweetheart Kelly Clarkson.
She additionally reexamines with a a lot kinder eye the music of Ashlee Simpson, whose profession cratered after she was caught lip-syncing on “Saturday Night Live,” and then-tabloid fixtures Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
Princiotti, a employees author on the Ringer who covers pop music and the NFL and co-hosts the podcast “Every Single Album,” says she was sure which artists wanted to be included in “Hit Girls.”
“I had the idea a little bit before the Y2K resurgence that we’ve experienced over the last few years,” she says. “But it was trickling into the ecosystem. And I had this very clear idea that there are all these disparate segments of the pop star world and the version of that world that existed in the 2000s. … Even though that music is different, it all fit together to me really obviously, because I was the fan.”
Princiotti augments her rigorous analysis with colourful reminiscences from this period, together with chatting on AIM (her deal with was mangorainbow99), digging up Taylor Swift rarities on YouTube and listening to Girl Gaga’s “Just Dance” at a highschool dance.
Discovering a cohesive story of the 2000s was more difficult. “The question that I had to answer [in the book] was, ‘Other than the audience — and other than having this feeling inside me that a book that covered the rise of Britney Spears also needed to cover ‘Rumors’ by Lindsay Lohan and also needed to cover Ashlee Simpson, because that’s how I lived it — what actually ties these artists together?’”
That uniting thread is Spears. The e-book deftly traces the parallels between the evolution of Spears’ profession and the way the last decade itself unfolded — from the best way her music broadened past teen pop (e.g. the electro-disco “Toxic”) to the unfavourable affect the extreme tabloid scrutiny had on her psychological well being.
“She is the artist of the 2000s,” Princiotti says. “If you think of the aughts as a whole, it starts with Britney, [and] she manages to keep it going. There’s so many things that I think just come back to that one woman.”
Princiotti additionally concludes that the feminine pop stars of the 2000s helped legitimize pop music.
“There’s something about what all of these women — because it is women in the book — did to chip away at the idea that pop is disposable and unserious music, that somehow got us to this place where it is more often recognized as a serious art form, something that moves culture [and] is worthy of real, deep criticism,” she says.
“You’re seeing every day where there are thesis-driven projects about Taylor Swift and the music of Taylor Swift, and [people asking,] ‘What does she mean to society?’ and ‘What does she mean to culture? The thing that struck me was, ‘Oh, we didn’t have that. It wasn’t like that — and now it is.’”
“I came away with an appreciation of just how early in her career she laid the blueprint of how she would develop her fan base,” Nora Princiotti says of Taylor Swift.
(Ballantine Books)
Given the e-book’s slim time-frame — “Hit Girls” begins simply earlier than Y2K and ends within the early 2010s — the e-book additionally takes a unique spin on the careers of Swift and fellow celebrity Beyoncé.
The latter was newly rising as a solo artist with 2003’s “Dangerously in Love” after breaking by with Future’s Baby. Princiotti argues that Beyoncé’s success on the pop charts opened doorways for hip-hop and R&B artists, which had a seismic affect on tradition as a complete.
Though these genres had began making huge inroads into the pop charts and mainstream music beginning within the late Nineteen Nineties, Princiotti noticed in her analysis that journal and tabloid covers nonetheless largely prioritized white artists.
“While there was a clear relationship between the interest in an artist like Britney Spears’s life and the interest in her music, that feedback loop did not exist for a lot of Black artists,” she writes. “Which meant that hip-hop could dominate popular music while being shut out of the elite celebrity spaces that promote true pop stardom.”
Swift, in the meantime, was an earnest country-pop wunderkind constructing her fan base one MySpace remark at a time — and even then occurred to be a genius at understanding the psychology of fandom and the web habits of her followers.
“I came away with an appreciation of just how early in her career she laid the blueprint of how she would develop her fan base,” Princiotti says. “When it’s all said and done, we will look back at her artistic legacy, yes, as the songwriter of a generation, yes, as the poet laureate of young women.”
“But I do think that the legacy of Taylor Swift is going to start with the communities of people that she brought together within her fan base — and how powerful and sometimes scary and how mobilized that fan community has become, and how she built it to be that way.”
As with Swift, lots of the artists in “Hit Girls” stay widespread at present. Lavigne and Beyoncé are presently on main excursions; Clarkson has discovered success together with her daytime speak present; Rihanna is a billionaire enterprise mogul because of her manufacturers Fenty Magnificence and Savage X Fenty. And Duff, who now has 4 youngsters, starred within the TV present “Younger” and, most lately, the short-lived “How I Met Your Father.”
Close to the top of “Hit Girls,” Princiotti explores the continued affect of those artists and this decade — from the present crop of younger pop stars led by Olivia Rodrigo and nostalgia festivals like When We Have been Younger to style tendencies resembling darkish denim, “going-out” tops and butterfly hair clips.
Princiotti herself maintains a love of pop stars and presents stable theories about why this particular period stays such a fascination: a heady mixture of nostalgia, second possibilities and perspective.
“For people like me who lived through at least some of it, it’s the ability to go back a little bit older and wiser,” she says. “We can take the best of it and then reexamine the worst of it with more open eyes. And there’s something to me that’s very satisfying about that.”
