Britney Spears starred in a film, Crossroads, which reached number two in its first week at the box-office charts, but quickly dropped from sight. Songs from the album Britney appeared in the film. Spears’ performance was very badly received by critics, and she netted herself a Razzie Award for Worst Actress, tied with Madonna. One of the tracks from Britney, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” also won the Worst Original Song award, and in 2005 Spears was again ‘honored’ by the Golden Raspberry judges when she was proclaimed Worst Supporting Actress for her cameo role in the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which showed her response to a CNN interview question by Tucker Carlson, regarding her political views during the then-impending 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In late 1998, Britney Spears’ debut single “…Baby One More Time” was beginning to impact radio stations and MTV. Within a year of the record’s release, the album had become the best-selling LP by a teenager in history, spawned two U.S. top ten hits (in “…Baby” and “(You Drive Me) Crazy”) and shipped over ten million copies in the U.S. alone; it would go on to ship another four million copies on top of this.
In April of 1999, she was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. The sexually suggestive Lolita-themed photo spread began a whirlwind of rumors that the still-seventeen-year-old had gotten breast implants. These claims were denied by Spears’ camp, and seemed to have little impact on the young starlet’s rising popularity. That summer, she kicked off her first headlining tour, titled the …Baby One More Time Tour. By late 1999, Britney Spears had become one of the year’s biggest stars, a claim backed-up in the amount of award nominations she received that season.
Released in May 2000, Oops!… I Did It Again also debuted at number one in the U.S. and Canada, and was a similarly huge hit like her debut. It sold over 1.3 million units during its first week in the U.S., making it the fastest-selling album by a female artist in history.
In November 2001, she released her third album, Britney. It debuted at number one on both the U.S. and Canadian charts, selling over 745,000 units during its first week in the U.S. This made her the only female artist in SoundScan history to have her first three albums debut at number one. Over four million copies of the record have been sold in the U.S. alone [2], and while this is by no means low, these figures can not compare to the sales of her first two albums. Britney also failed to spawn any U.S. top ten hits; in fact, the only successful single released from the album was “I’m a Slave 4 U,” which became a top thirty hit.
In common with a number of other popular female figures in show business, Britney Spears’ private life has attracted considerable media attention. Indeed, some people feel she has courted it by cultivating, in her early years at least, a chaste, God-fearing and “wholesome” image somewhat at odds, not only with the traditional pressures, temptations and opportunities of “pop ‘n’ roll”, but with the increasingly sexualized content of her own songs. Regardless of where the responsibility for the gossip industry surrounding the pop star lies, Spears’ public response has been to repeatedly express regret and resentment at the intrusive media coverage.
