Star Profile

Britney Spears

Born December 2^nd 1981, raised in Kentwood Louisiana.

She has always been a performer and started as a child; she signed to her 1^st record company in 1997 as a teenager and released her debut album ‘Baby One More Time’ in 1999. She joined the new Mickey Mouse club on Disney channel as her 1^st job in the Media at the age of 12. She was part of Pop culture and her music is main stream. She done extremely well coping with fame in her early celebrity years and was even credited with changing the face of teen pop music, however since then her image and life has been in the media dramatically documenting all her personal life, resulting in her finding it hard to deal with stress and trauma.

Despite all this, although less now than previously Britney still sells her music and has sold over 100million records worldwide and has been at international number one on a few occasions.

Her image was one of a fun exciting artist when she began wearing school clothes in one of her videos to promote her youth, but of course it also helped sell the record ‘Hit me Baby One More Time’. Her video was based in a school which made her appeal to a young audience as they would be able to relate to her surroundings and therefore be influenced by her and her music. She embraced her young face and youthful voice by matching her songs to this image. Through her 1^st and perhaps even her 2^nd album she had a ‘cute’ and ‘innocent’ persona.

Her image began to change into a more sexual one with the innocence fading away as she tried to reach out to not only her original fans but new ones as well. In her videos she normally plays herself performing a song or an alter ego of herself performing a song. One quite recent example of this is her song ‘Circus’ in which she is a prerogative confident lady she uses a lot of material goods such as designer jewellery and extravagant backgrounds to show off her wealth, talent and her international success. She plays up to the camera in her videos to make sure her fans know the song is by her and about her, especially in her video ‘Circus’ she is showing off her newly toned body and uses her image to get more attention as many female artists do.

Britney’s video’s to her songs largely reflect on her image at the time, ‘Not a girl, Not Yet a women’ was the beginning of the turning point when she became getting more reckless and the song showed the world that she was in the transitional stage of teenage to adulthood and the media saw her actions as this was how she had chose to cope with the pressure.

Britney was and still is a very popular media image, she sang songs that young girls could relate to and became someone boys wanted to be with. Although the spotlight has proven too much for her at a few points in her career she has once again brought it back to real in more fans more record sales and more hits. One major event that was talked about in the media for many months was the state of Britney’s wellbeing and mental health, many journalists believed that becoming famous with all that work at a young age had pushed her over the edge of sanity. In February 2007 after a few months of reckless behaviour Britney had her head shaved so she was bald. This came to a great shock to many of her fans and this was a major point when the thought she was suffering from serious mental illness; there were others however who believed this may just be a cry for help from the young women who had been forced to grow up so fast due to her talent. This was one of her many bad decisions most likely cause by the stress of constantly being in the limelight of the international media. Her image although drastically different to the Britney Spears we saw as a teenager she still uses her femininity as a key selling point and this factor of her hasn’t changed much and was only faltered when she shaved her hair off. Her record companies promote her image as a way of selling the international artist.

Girl power and strength have been Britney’s main messages to uphold, she also likes to give the persona of being indestructible which is re enforced when she bounces back onto the music scene after her many traumas. Much of the camera work in her videos is aimed towards her making her look beautiful and powerful, this is done so more fans are pulled in to her representation and feel like they want to follow her footsteps more. In some of her videos there is a lot of focus on material goods but still she is there and prominent.

Although Britney has been faced with many problems which haven’t been eased at all by the media about her children, her image and her behaviour she always has come back fighting to prove to herself and the music industry that she has still got what it takes and still is the Britney we first loved even if her image is very different and her music takes a more dance edge.