Skip to main content

Britney Spears: how her fans made me feel lucky to be alive

Continuing our series on powerful music fandom, Alim Kheraj explains how finding like-minded Spears fans helped him turn the page on a dark chapter in his life

I have been a Britney Spears fan for more than two-thirds of my life. Raised on Top of the Pops and fixated on the Spice Girls, eight-year-old me was primed for the 1999 release of Spears’s debut single, the game-changing … Baby One More Time. I still remember going to Woolworths in Crystal Palace with my dad to buy the single on cassette, and my excitement as we played the song in the car on the way home. I don’t know exactly when I saw the video, Spears powerfully strutting down that high-school corridor – midriff exposed, hair in bunches – but I do remember that I was desperate to recreate that schoolgirl look. It was no surprise to my parents when, aged 13, I came out as gay.

While Spears’s music was a constant presence throughout my childhood and adolescence, my affinity didn’t mutate into devotion until I was in my late teens and she released her 2007 album, Blackout. Despite the media circus around her at the time, trailing her during a reported breakdown as if it were sport, here was this fascinating, dank, grungy pop record that eschewed soul-searching in favour of hedonism and raw sexuality. I was gripped, and soon I was frequenting fan forums, revisiting her back catalogue and exploring the treasure trove of online leaks.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ceQFkB
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more