#FreeBritney E-Book

Steven Heggings

• Herausgeber: BookThug
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 27

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

We are sorry, Britney..." As if it were the catchy chorus in one of her songs, the phrase became a trending topic when the documentary Framing Britney Spears was released. In addition to famous journalists, musicians and actors, many people understood that society as a whole had contributed to the pop star being caught in a desperate situation. It was not just the press harassment. It wasn't just the paparazzi. It wasn't just misogyny in the music industry. It wasn't just her father, who most fans depict as a greedy man. An appetite for celebrity gossip undoubtedly contributed to Britney Spears being stripped of a person's most precious asset: freedom.

Leseprobe

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Millions at stake

Britney Spears’ life has been, so far, both a huge success and a tremendous rollercoaster. Being in the music industry since she was a child, her fame exploded when she was still a teenager. She sold over 25 million copies of her first album, released when she was 18, and since then she has been constantly harassed by the media and the paparazzi, and the whole world paid attention to whatever she did or said. After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two boys, she struggled to get the custody, and had a crisis while the battle was taking place in the courts. She lost the custody and later she even lost the right to see her children. After being put under psychiatric treatment, her father filed for a temporary conservatorship over her daughter’s person and finances. But that wasn’t temporary at all: it became permanent and twelve years later, by 2021, Jamie Spears still had total control over her life and money, which seemed strange given that during those years she was touring, recording albums, winning awards and being full time judge in a TV show. Her fans started to investigate her situation, read hidden messages in her Instagram posts and even in her live performances, and came to the conclusion that she was being held in a regime that was totally unfair: she couldn’t even choose her own lawyer or who visited her, and seemed to be living with very little money. Spreading the hashtag #FreeBritney, her fans started a movement that has somehow grown bigger than the star herself: her situation implied a great misogyny, raised human rights concerns, questioned the media’s role in her crisis and put under scrutiny the entire conservatorship system.

Britney’s fortune was estimated in $58 million in 2018, and the conservatorship has been considered by fans as a very unfair arrangement used to control the pop star and use her under threats of not allowing her to see her children. During 2020 and 2021, new hearings regarding the conservatorship took place, this time with the #FreeBritney movement all over the Internet and outside the courts. Britney’s lawyer claimed that she would not perform again until her father stepped down from the conservatorship. The release of New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears gave more visibility to the special situation in which the pop star is being held, but also put under scrutiny how several journalists had treated her in interviews and how several TV comedians had made fun of her. People’s appetite for celebrity gossip may have contributed to an irreparable damage in Britney’s life: she was ripped of her freedom.

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Britney’s first steps in the music industry

Born in December 2, 1981 in McComb, Mississippi, Britney was the second of the three children that Lynne Bridges and Jamie Spears had. She grew in a humble environment in Kentwood, Louisiana, in an area that is known as the Bible Belt, and started to reveal her voice and dancing skills when she was just a little kid. She first auditioned for The Mickey Mouse Club