"Toxic" by Britney Spears, Wednesday, December 7, 2023

Yesterday, we took a deep dive into where Kesha is as a musical artist by looking at a mature work in her discography. When Wikipedia introduces Kesha Rose Serbert, she is said to be an American Singer-Songwriter, a term that signals to significant factors: 1) the singer writes songs and thus has a greater opportunity to monetize the song and 2) the singer is actually an artist, which is more important for music snob conversations. It grafts the wheat from the tares, the Lady Gagas from the Britney Spears. But recently, I’ve been rethinking this argument, mainly because it doesn’t account for the sexism in the industry. Moreover, I’ve really started to think about how unfair my opinion has been formed about Britney Spears, particularly after watching the documentary Britney vs. Spears. 

A TASTE OF YOUR POISON PARADISE. I happened to go through puberty around the time of Max Martin’s first era of teen pop. MTV was filled with the late ‘90s sounds of boy bands, pop rock, a few Spanish-language crossovers, and scantily-clad solo girl pop acts. My guitar lessons and rock band aspirations fueled a snobbery towards artists “who didn’t even play an instrument,” but conflicting with that was puberty and not identifying that I was gay, so of course I had to say that Britney Spears was hot, but “I couldn’t stand her music.” And for the most part that was true. I wasn’t a fan of the baby voice nor the later breathy songs like “I’m a Slave 4 U.” And of course there was the Christian purity culture aspect to my bias against Britney Spears. I was so quick to judge the singer for her provocative clothing because it made men “stumble” into lust, yet she didn’t make me stumble—I tried several times to stumble to her, but in the end it was Men’s Health magazines. 

A GUY LIKE YOU SHOULD WEAR A WARNING. Britney Spears is only about five-and-a-half years older than me, but that seems like an eternity during adolescence. Everything that the singer did was big news, and of course the media covered the relationship and the break up with *NSYNC singer Justin Timberlake. Then the rumors started that Timberlake had taken Spears’ virginity. There was certainly an edgier look and sound to Spears post-breakup. Of course, now we know much more about this relationship as details have come out in Spears’ recently released memoir, The Woman in Me. Spoiler alert: Justin Timberlake does not look like a good guy. From the break up record, though, 2003’s In the Zone, Britney gave us her biggest hit, and I would say the only Britney Spears song that I listen to by choice, “Toxic.” My friends at school couldn’t stop talking about the body suit Spears wears in the music video. I couldn’t stop thinking about how brilliant the production was: a disco violin, a James Bond guitar, a tango rhythm that stops between the pre-chorus and the chorus, and Britney’s voice tickling the listener’s brain, permeating through the musical layers. I was addicted to the song, but I couldn’t admit it. The song is said to not be written about Timberlake, as Spears didn’t write the song, but fresh from the break up, she certainly channels a dualistic love and hate for the subject of the song. Twenty years after Spears released “Toxic,” I think about how unfair I was to the singer. She was a “good Southern Christian girl” who sang in church until her parents decided to make her a star. And once she became a star, she was forced into keeping the hits coming, not because it was something she wanted to. She was a young girl struggling with faith, fame, and purity culture. Was she ever liberated from those struggles even after the ending of her conservatorship? I’m very tired of hearing stories about women being exploited by a music industry that credits their male producers for everything that they do and even forces them to adopt an image and sing songs that are not theirs. But thanks to Spears speaking out in her memoir and Kesha suing Dr. Luke and countless other examples, women are starting to be taken much more seriously in the industry. But we as music snobs and listeners alike have a lot more work to do to undo these biases. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.