Britney Spears is releasing a memoir, The Woman In Me, next Tuesday (October 24), and it promises to be one of the biggest book releases of the year.
The legendary singer – one of the most successful pop stars of all time – has spent over 20 years in the limelight, with her every single movement dissected by the media and the public.
Her journey hasn’t been easy, to say the least: Britney has won dozens of awards, sold more than 150 million records worldwide, and has given the world some of its greatest pop songs. But she’s also weathered heartbreak and been subjected to tabloid humiliation, as well as being forced into a court-appointed conservatorship for 13 years. Spears described the situation as "punishment," and was freed in 2021 when the agreement was finally terminated. Now she will tell her side of the story.
My story is yours October 24th… #TheWomanInMe https://t.co/ifGb83HMHq pic.twitter.com/ogCcVgy38r
— Britney Spears 🌹🚀 (@britneyspears) October 15, 2023
With less than a week to wait until the highly-anticipated book is released, we're celebrating Britney’s incredible career by ranking our the singer’s top tracks, running all the way up to our absolutely favourite song.
10. Gimme More (2007)
Loud, brash, and angry Gimme More was Spears giving the two fingers to the world, in the form of an absolute banger.
In 2007, the Grammy-winning singer was going through a particularly tough time. She had filed for divorce from Kevin Federline in November the previous year, and her aunt died of ovarian cancer several months later. In February 2007, frustrated with constant scrutiny, she shaved her head. The incident was widely and cruelly mocked. "I'd been eyeballed so much growing up. I'd been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager," she writes of that decision, in a memoir extract shared by People. "Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back."
By the end of 2007 she had lost custody of her two young sons. On the music side, though, it was business as usual. Her fifth studio album, Blackout, landed in October, but there's plenty of defiance and fury on show here.
Even though Gimme More initially appears to be about two people getting it on in a club, it's also about being under constant observation, without a shred of privacy: "Cameras are flashin' while we're dirty dancin' / They keep watching," she sings.
9. Lucky (2000)
Fame has been a running theme in Britney's music since the start of her career, although the tone intensified as the scrutiny heightened. In Lucky, a 19-year-old Britney sings about the isolation she feels being a celebrity: "They say, she's so lucky, she's a star. But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking... If there's nothing missing in my life... Then why do these tears come at night?"
In the music video she plays two versions of herself: the glamorous superstar and the lonely young woman hidden behind the scenes. The premise is undoubtedly sad, particularly as we now know how much Spears would go on to suffer. Nevertheless, the easygoing track is one of her most catchy – we apologise, you may now find yourself humming Lucky for the rest of the day.
8. Stronger (2000)
From the same album as Lucky, Spears' 2000 mega-hit record Oops!... I Did It Again, Stronger addressed some of the same qualms, but with a much more determined tone. Her defiant remarks – "I'm stronger than yesterday, now it's nothing but my way" – could be applied to both a situation involving the fall-out from a break-up, or a pointed message to the public. But whoever she meant to speak to, the message of empowerment, coupled with the catchy hook, has made Stronger a lasting hit.
7. Oops! I did it again (2000)
A highlight from Britney's second album, Oops! I did it again struck many of the same chords as her debut single ...Baby One More Time: the 21-year-old Britney sang another spirited pop anthem (while pretending to be a sexy alien in a music video – why not?) and declared, without an ounce of remorse, "I think I did it again, I made you believe we're more than just friends... Oops!"
After the wild success of the star's first record, everyone was watching to see what Britney did next – with Oops! she did not let them down.
6. Scream & Shout (2013)
We know we're going to ruffle a lot of feathers here, but Scream & Shout was the Britney hit for the Gen Zers who were just toddlers when some of her first hits came out.
Look, we agree: Britney has rarely looked stranger than in the music video, where her hair is combed back like a morphed Barbie-porcupine. And we agree: the voices of Will.i.am and Britney have been so heavily edited that today the artists would surely be accused of using AI. But we don't care. Scream & Shout was a massive tune. It went to number one in the UK, number three in the US, and sold more than eight million copies worldwide – it also feels like the perfect encapsulation of the loud, brash, drop-riddled dance-pop that ruled the 2010s.
5. I’m A Slave 4 U (2001)
Landing three years after Spears' debut single, I’m A Slave 4 U saw Britney transformed. She was no longer a schoolgirl dancing by the lockers: she was grinding and whispering her way around the world's sweatiest club. She was also, somehow, making wearing underwear over jeans look rather good.
The song itself, which was co-produced by Pharrell Williams, was provocative, sultry and introduced the world to a sound from Britney.
4. Everytime (2003)
Sure, the music video is a little OTT, and its overly-dramatised depiction of suicide likely wouldn’t pass 2023's sensitivity checkers. But Everytime remains one of Spears’ finest tracks: not only did the gut-wrenching song remind audiences that Spears has a banging singing voice underneath all that sound editing, but it achieved the very difficult task of being both moody and moving, yet somehow a total earworm.
Even better, pop culture lore has it that Everytime was written in response to Justin Timberlake's Cry Me A River which had been released in 2002: the same year the famous couple broke up.
3. ...Baby One More Time (1998)
Released when Spears was just 17 years old, ...Baby One More Time was Britney's debut single – and what an introduction. The song, which is still a massive jam 25 years later, proves she was a megastar from the very beginning: her husky edited voice, her half-sassy-half-nonchalant attitude, her choreography – it's all there. Like many of the songs here, it's co-written and co-produced by the pop titan Max Martin, who also had a hand in making some of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Robyn's greatest songs.
The music video – where she is dancing in a school, still a teenager when it was filmed – has become utterly iconic, and her school-girl get-up is one of Halloween's easiest go-to costumes.
2. Piece of Me (2007)
On the same album as Gimme More, Piece of Me delves into similar subject matter, blasting the singer’s defiant message across the world. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was seventeen, don’t matter if I step on the scene, or sneak away to the Philippines. They still gon’ put pictures of my derrière in the magazine. You want a piece of me?” she hisses.
The song also happens to be a massive banger, with heavy metallic beats complimenting Spears’ highly auto-tuned voice. Few people have ever been better positioned to comment on the glorification and destruction of celebrity figures.
1. Toxic (2003)
One of the greatest pop songs of all time – which landed with one of the greatest music videos ever – Toxic is Britney at her best.
Sampling Lata Mangeshkar and S. P. Balasubrahmanyam's Tere Mere Beech Mein, the track, which was initially offered to Kylie Minogue – was not Britney's biggest chart-hit, 'only' reaching number 9 in the US. But the beat, Spears' throaty delivery of the lyrics – "Baby, can't you see I'm calling?" – the strings, and the song's intensity all mean the track is still enthusiastically played in clubs the world over.
"I can't believe Britney Spears invented international airlines," said one fan on X under Toxic's video. And we have to say, we deeply understand the sentiment.
