Put some respect on Usher’s name.
Across his 30-year career, Usher has been deemed the “King of R&B” and a “legend” for his catalog of Top 10 hits, smooth dance breaks, life-changing serenades, and lighthearted, meme-worthy energy. And yet, fans and music experts still have to explain why the superstar is a big deal ahead of his career-defining Super Bowl moment.
In September, Usher surprised his younger self with the news that he’d be performing during the major event. A promotional video following the NFL’s announcement shows present-day Usher calling Usher from the 2004 “Confessions Pt. II” music video to deliver the big news. “Stop playin’ with me,” the younger Usher responds. Many saw the eight-time Grammy-winning singer as an obvious, even overdue, choice. Fans rejoiced, posting “Yeahhhh!” (a nod to Usher’s 2004 hit featuring rappers Lil Jon and Ludacris) and jokingly claiming to be prepping the Y2K outfits they’ll wear to their living rooms to watch one of the country’s biggest stars hit the NFL stage.
But critics also spoke out. On a Reddit post about the announcement, a user commented, “Wow, this would have been really exciting news 20 years ago” and received nearly 4,000 upvotes. Another wrote, “Seriously the best they could do?” On X, one user wrote ahead of the announcement, “I know y’all think Usher should perform the next SB but I don’t think he has enough pop/hip-hop hits.”
More recently, as Taylor Swift’s romance with Travis Kelce — who will play in the big game — continues to dominate the news cycle, Swifties have demanded that Usher bring Swift onstage. Some have argued the attention on the Eras star is already dimming Usher’s moment.
One could say that the mixed reactions ahead of Usher’s show are typical responses for any Super Bowl announcement: One artist, or genre, can’t please the more than 100 million viewers who tune in. But experts told Vox that the critics questioning Usher’s impact and relevance are illustrating something much bigger: It’s a reaction that’s indicative of racial, generational, and cultural divides in America.
“The discourse is really showing how we live in two different Americas,” said Taylor Crumpton, a writer and culture critic who has written extensively about the return of R&B. “There’s a [contingent] of people who feel that Usher getting a Super Bowl is way overdue. It’s time to give him his flowers.”
What the perfect Super Bowl halftime star needs
An event as massive as the Super Bowl halftime show requires an artist with a deep catalog of well-known hits, dedicated fans, and widespread appeal. They must be able to speak to the NFL’s diverse and enormous audience. Some 118.7 million people tuned in to the 2023 halftime show, the most viewers in the show’s history.
Usher has performed at the Super Bowl before — in 2011, alongside the headlining Black Eyed Peas, to sing “OMG,” his 2010 hit featuring will.i.am. In 2024, during Black History Month, he’ll perform a career retrospective and honor the Black artists who came before him.
“It’s an honor of a lifetime to finally check a Super Bowl performance off my bucket list. I can’t wait to bring the world a show unlike anything else they’ve seen from me before,” the 45-year-old veteran entertainer said in a statement at the time of the announcement.
Some are already saying that the halftime performance is a part of Usher’s renaissance, but others see the moment as confirmation of what the star has been giving fans all along.
“I don’t think it’s so much a renaissance moment as it is a validation moment,” said Naima Cochrane, culture journalist and professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. “Usher’s been Usher. He has a longevity and consistency of brand and presence that is unmatched in R&B.”
Having the King of R&B headline football’s main event makes sense for the NFL in 2024.
Back in the summer of 2019, Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment company, struck a deal with the league to produce the Super Bowl halftime show. When the deal went through, many speculated that the NFL signed it to distract from its racist history and present and to quell uproar over its treatment of Colin Kaepernick. Critics see Usher’s performance as somewhat linked to this effort.
Since 2019, Roc Nation has selected a diverse slate of artists, a mix of icons and popular newcomers with current hits. There was Shakira and Jennifer Lopez in 2020; The Weeknd the following year; a hip-hop-themed showcase for the genre’s 50th anniversary featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar in 2022; and last year’s performance by Rihanna. It was a reset from over a decade of often lackluster shows.
Following 2004’s wardrobe malfunction with Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson — which received more than half a million Federal Communications Commission complaints — the NFL parted ways with producer MTV and brought on Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and The Who over the next six years, hoping to play it safe. The mostly white male “classic” artists were an attempt to appease viewers who complained that the show had gone astray, but the shows became something of a joke for featuring what the Washington Post called “over-the-hill rockers.”
“Since MTV stopped doing the halftime show, there’s never really been any consistency with who is selected for the act,” said Cochrane. “I think the Super Bowl just chooses to focus on different things at different times.”
In 2024, the league and its affiliates have decided to focus on Usher. And it’s time to put some respect on his name.
People have tried to deny Usher’s legacy
Usher has most recently been crowned the “New King of Vegas,” the city where he’ll perform on the Super Bowl stage at Allegiant Stadium.
He began a residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in 2021 and a year later moved to the Park MGM, where tickets consistently sold out. The show was extended multiple times until the end of 2023, when Usher wrapped it up after 100 performances. The residency stage was part strip club, part roller skating rink, part parade, and part jazz club, and his decades-spanning career prepared him well for it.
Before arriving in Las Vegas, it had been six years since Usher was on tour. He told GQ, “I really wanted to give women something to look forward to, something to come here to Las Vegas with their friends for. They’ve been saving up all year and were able to manage to get away from their kids or get away from their problems.”
The show grew popular as countless celebrities (Keke Palmer, various Kardashians, LeBron James, Jennifer Lopez, Doja Cat, Zendaya and Tom Holland, Issa Rae, and more) stopped by and videos of the superstar serenading thirsty audience members went viral. In a number of videos, fans could be seen running up to touch Usher as he walked through the crowd singing “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home).”
Usher’s popular songs carried the show. Out of his 18 Billboard Top 10 hits, a whopping nine of them (“Nice & Slow,” “U Remind Me,” “Yeah!,” “U Got It Bad,” “Confessions Part II,” “Burn,” “My Boo,” “Love in This Club,” and “OMG”) made it to No. 1. He has 53 songs that made it to the Billboard Hot 100, and by some estimates he has sold over 100 million records in his career. His stage presence has earned dozens of awards, including Grammys, Critics Choice Awards, BET and MTV Music Awards, and NAACP Image Awards.
Cochrane said that Usher’s traditional training is what makes him unmatched today.
“He has always been a consummate performer, one of the last of his school who really got to sit at the feet of the greats, directly learn from them, and apply it,” she said. The star names icons like Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, Teddy Pendergrass, and more as his inspirations. “He’s in the last of the classes who were in vocal training, underwent artist development, or were in the studio learning their stage shows. He is an entertainer, and we don’t have a lot of those anymore.”
Usher’s roles and guest appearances on various reality TV programs expanded his stardom. He joined fellow music icons Shakira, Adam Levine, and Blake Shelton on season four of The Voice as a coach. He returned in season six, leading his team to victory, and appeared on later seasons as a leading coach and adviser. His “watch this” moment during his NPR Tiny Desk concert in 2022, in which he placed his fingers across his face to the beat and became a viral meme, endeared him to viewers and reminded everyone of his charm.
While Usher’s career took a dip in the 2010s when changes at Billboard tested R&B’s popularity, after dominating the 1990s and aughts, he remained relevant, critics say. “The album that people point to as his flop” — Raymond v. Raymond — “was still a platinum album. He has had moments where he’s less consistent, but he’s always been present and relevant,” Cochrane said. “We take him for granted. Usher is doing collaborations with these younger artists. He’s sampling his own work. How many people get to do that?”
The Super Bowl announcement isn’t the first time Usher’s legacy has been questioned. During online debates about who would make a good matchup for the popular pandemic Verzuz battles, commentators cast doubt on Usher’s record, uncertain he’d be able to win over Chris Brown. And in the early 2000s, some people pitted Usher against Justin Timberlake, seeing them as rivals.
With the halftime show, some people have questioned Usher’s crossover appeal — whether he can appeal to audiences who love pop and also hip-hop. But it is his crossover appeal that makes him the no-brainer choice for the Super Bowl, critics told Vox.
“Gen Z may think of Usher as a person who signed Justin Bieber, whereas earlier generations see him as a king with crossover appeal — working not only in music but also in TV and film,” said Crumpton. “Every suburban soccer mom feels a type of way when ‘Yeah!’ comes on.”
Usher just released his ninth studio album, Coming Home, a few days after announcing a new world tour and a few days ahead of the big game. It’s a medley of Afrobeats hits featuring new artists, across 20 tracks.
But the star made it clear that his performance at Super Bowl LVIII will focus on the impact of Black R&B artists of the past.
“To have R&B have the main stage at the Super Bowl, it’s a major thing for me,” he said in an interview with Good Morning America. “I think about what our country has kind of represented for Black artists having to at some point go through kitchens to even be able to perform for an audience, but they had to leave back through that same door [and] fear for their lives as they went to the next state to do the same thing. So I’m coming through the front door with this one. I think about all of the R&B performers who I carry in this moment.”
In the short 13-minute show, critics expect Usher to bring the energy, be elaborate, but most of all represent where he’s from.
“He’s going to elevate Black people in Atlanta and Black people in the South,” said Crumpton. “That’s why it will be so monumental and invigorating to see.”
A rundown of the people auditioning for the job — and what they bring to the ticket.
Given former President Donald Trump’s dominance in the GOP primaries, attention is now turning to a new topic: who he’ll pick as his potential vice president.
In past elections, a nominee’s choice of running mate has been closely watched for a variety of reasons. They may bring experience to balance a nominee’s lack of it (think Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden), or they may appeal to a region or demographic that the nominee would like to reach (think Donald Trump’s pick of Mike Pence), or they may amplify a presidential campaign’s message (think Bill Clinton with Al Gore).
But the veepstakes — and the attention lavished on it — can also overstate the importance of the pick. Research has found that vice presidential picks matter much less to the outcome than is often assumed. The work of vice presidential scholars Chris Devine and Kyle Kopko, for instance, found that VP picks typically affect general election outcomes only if they’re extremely popular or polarizing. Those results have been echoed in other analyses, like a 2016 study by the Wall Street Journal that found most voters don’t take a candidate’s VP into account when choosing a president.
Who Trump picks might also mean even less in an election like 2024, given that the public’s views about the former president are already fairly set. Which isn’t to say the identity of Trump’s number two is unimportant. Trump’s age means his vice president may well have to step in for him, so who he chooses may prove to be consequential. His pick will also signal if he’s looking for a governing partner with more experience, and what, if any, other ideological viewpoints he might be willing to consider.
Thus far, sources told Fox Business a shortlist includes everyone from Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to House Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). As part of this decision, Trump is reportedly prioritizing both loyalty and selecting someone who won’t overshadow him. He has also said he would be interested in choosing a woman, according to the Associated Press.
In a Fox News interview, Trump described the individual he’s likely to select as a “very good person, pretty standard,” noting that he didn’t think people would be “that surprised.” He’s also said the top quality he’s considering is whether the person will be able to take on the role of the presidency.
With the caveat that other names may still come out, here’s what we know about the potential running mates Trump is considering — and what they’d bring to the ticket.
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Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Kristi Noem
Who is she? Noem, 52, is the governor of South Dakota and a longtime Trump supporter. Noem is known for keeping the state open during the pandemic, her backing of gun rights, and her frequent appearances as a commentator on Fox News during which she defends Trump and stresses South Dakota’s economic successes.
What’s the case for her? Noem could plausibly be seen by the Trump campaign as appealing to women and bringing a younger voice to the ticket. Her executive expertise as governor could also be a selling point. And her conservative media savvy is another likely draw, as is her commitment to the MAGA agenda.
Trump emphasized the importance of her loyalty in a recent Fox News interview when he said, “Kristi Noem has been incredible fighting for me,” adding, “She said ‘I’d never run against him because I can’t beat him.’ That was a very nice thing to say.”
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Tim Scott
Who is he? A three-term, relatively conservative South Carolina senator, Scott, 58, is also the only Black Republican serving in the upper chamber. Scott is known for his own presidential run, which floundered early on, and his efforts to find a compromise on police reform in Congress. He previously framed much of his candidacy around pushing back against Democrats’ views on race, citing his own success as negating the idea that Black Americans are disadvantaged by systemic racism.
What’s the case for him? One of the more surprising findings about the 2020 election is that Trump made inroads with nonwhite voters, and a Scott selection could be seen by the campaign as a way of cementing those gains. Scott is also a religious social conservative with political views broadly in line with Trump’s, though his establishment credentials — including refusing to contest the 2020 election results — might assuage some Republicans wary of the former president.
Trump recently name-dropped Scott on Fox News, noting that he told the South Carolina lawmaker, “You’re a much better candidate for me than you are for yourself.”
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Elise Stefanik
Who is she? Stefanik, 39, is a five-term House Representative and member of House Republican leadership. Once more moderate, she’s pivoted hard to the right in recent years after her upstate New York district swung in favor of Trump. Stefanik has raised her profile in congressional hearings pushing back against Trump’s impeachment and in a recent appearance questioning elite university presidents about antisemitism on campus. She’s also long advocated for growing Republican women’s representation in Congress, and backed fundraising and recruitment initiatives to do so.
What’s the case for her? Stefanik has had about a decade of legislative experience and has increasingly established herself as a prominent conservative voice who could potentially energize base voters. She’s signaled staunch fealty to Trump and would bring gender and age diversity to the ticket, along with strong rhetorical skills.
Her stated views are also pretty much consistent with Trump’s. Stefanik was among the House Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results, and has embraced many of the same extreme positions as the former president on issues like immigration.
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J.D. Vance
Who is he? Vance, 39, is a freshman Ohio senator, onetime Trump opponent, and now vocal Trump supporter. He’s also known as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir that chronicled his experience growing up in a working-class family in the Midwest.
What’s the case for him? Vance would fully embrace the MAGA agenda as one of Trump’s ardent defenders, as well as add a younger perspective. He would also bring his brief experience in the Senate and some business expertise from his background working in venture capital. Like many of the names on this list, he’s a pick that could resonate with the base.
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Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Who is she? Haley, 52, is a former governor of South Carolina and former ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration. Haley had a mostly conservative record as governor: She imposed aggressive voter ID restrictions that were initially blocked by the federal government for disproportionately affecting Black voters, but was also known for signing a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the state Capitol.
In the presidential race, Haley has positioned herself as more of a moderate compared to Trump, and has grown increasingly critical of the former president’s age and temperament. She’s struggled during primary season, failing to win the Nevada primary despite being the only major candidate on the ballot, and coming in second to Trump in New Hampshire’s contest. She’s tried to differentiate herself in a once-crowded GOP primary field with solid debate performances and her foreign policy experience. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley, like Scott, has also pushed back at the idea of systemic racism — most recently igniting an uproar when she questioned whether America was a “racist country.”
What’s the case for her? She’d bring a slightly different ideological stance to the ticket — including a greater commitment to preserving democracy and more hawkish views on foreign policy — as well as gender, age, and racial representation. She’d also offer past experiences as governor and UN ambassador, though her critiques of Trump could well rule her out from consideration. In a Fox Business report, sources said that Haley was not on Trump’s shortlist. Haley has also said she doesn’t “want to be anybody’s vice president.”
Britney was too out of control. Taylor is too in control. What now?
There seems to be a kind of paranoid storm swirling around Taylor Swift just now. It’s as though she’s at the center of a gothic novel filled with conspiracy theories and secret doubles, with the far right placing her at the center of government operations and 4channers putting her in deep-fake porn.
Taylor is currently poised at the tipping point into oversaturation. At this year’s Grammys, she became the first person ever to win Album of the Year four times, and then stole the show by announcing her next album. Her record-breaking Eras tour is making its way steadily around the globe. In November, a filmed version of the concert became the highest-grossing concert film of all time. Her mediagenic romance with football star Travis Kelce dominates pop culture so thoroughly that the question of whether or not Taylor Swift will show up at the Super Bowl has become one of the most-discussed issues of the game. She is everywhere right now, including in places where she would probably rather not be.
In January, AI-generated Taylor Swift porn went viral on Twitter, where it had leaked from 4chan forums. The 404 reported that Taylor has been one of the most popular targets for nonconsensual computer-generated sexual imagery since at least 2017, as the technology first emerged. Meanwhile, conservatives are theorizing that Taylor is a deep state psyop, her ersatz popularity manufactured by the government in order to boost the impact of an eventual Biden endorsement from Swift.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” posted former Republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on X in January. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”
All the paranoia seems to stem from a recognizable anxiety. Normally, when music stars of Taylor’s archetype (white, blonde, conventionally girly) reach her stature (globally revered superstar), it’s possible to write them off as the products of overbearing stage parents and producer puppeteers. Yet Taylor has made it all but impossible for anyone to think of her this way. She put out a documentary that shows her arguing with her dad about her image choices. She got into a public feud with her old record company and then started rerecording all her old records so that she would have control over the masters.
Taylor has made the idea that she is in control central to her image, to a fault, from the beginning. Now, Taylor’s levels of control over herself seem to be threatening to people, so threatening that they are inventing wild theories and using AI to create realities where she’s no longer in charge of her career or her body.
Yet we only have to consult history to see that a woman in the opposite situation would be just as threatening to male observers. Britney Spears was famously out of control, and famously punished for so being.
The fate of Britney Spears is one Taylor has surely studied. Taylor talks frequently in interviews about examining the downfalls of other pop stars to see what she can learn from them. (“When other kids were watching normal shows, I’d watch Behind the Music,” she explained to GQ in 2015.) She also released her first album in 2006, just as Britney was beginning to publicly spiral. Looking back at Taylor’s earliest era — the time when she was always in floofy white dresses and singing about how she wasn’t slutty like other girls — it begins to seem as though Taylor had Britney in mind as who she didn’t want to be. It begins to seem as though Taylor built her career in direct opposition to the precedent Britney set.
Yet considered together, Britney Spears and Taylor Swift form a mirrored pair, opposites who have almost too much in common. They are the virgin pop princesses turned queens of the genre. They are the woman who is too in control and the woman who is too out of control. They are cautionary tales for the women who watch them. They are stories of the amount of agency we are willing to ascribe to women.
Britney is Taylor’s shadowy antecedent. Going back over the cipher of her career can make legible Taylor’s strategy of total control, and how she got to this moment: punished for being too controlling.
“Taylor Swift is on good behavior, as usual.”
When Taylor Swift released her self-titled first album in 2006 and began making her way into the music scene, she was, determinedly, a good girl. She would maintain that posture firmly for the next few years.
“On a bright Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, Taylor Swift is on good behavior, as usual,” begins a Rolling Stone profile of Taylor from 2009, when she was 19 years old. It goes on to outline her 4.0 grade point average, and her refusal to dye her hair or smoke or drink.
She declines to comment on the subject of her sex life. “I feel like whatever you say about whether you do or don’t, it makes people picture you naked,” she says.
Taylor seemed to consider her good girl status to be something of a badge of honor. “It’s a compliment on your character,” she told the New Yorker in 2011, in an article that cites her as a rare role model “in a world of Lohans and Winehouses.” “It’s based on the decisions that you make in your life,” Taylor went on. She was determined that her decisions would be good decisions.
In this era of Taylor’s career, Britney Spears haunts all her interviews like a ghost. Taylor never says Britney’s name, but nonetheless her specter looms: the shadow of the woman who went too far.
In 2008, Taylor released her sophomore album, Fearless, and had two giant early hits with “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me.” Her star was on the rise, and the pressure was on. In an interview with the Washington Post, Taylor spoke fretfully about how afraid she was of messing up, of how much she wanted to make her fans and her parents proud and never succumb to substance abuse issues, like other unnamed pop stars have. She said:
I never, ever wanted to let my parents down. And I never want to let my fans down. I never want to let those little girls I see in the front row down by doing something stupid that’s, like, completely preventable and completely my fault. When people go through drug problems and alcohol problems, everyone points their finger at them and says: “You did this to yourself.” I don’t want to be that girl.
That first time you mess up — from then on, people are going to be waiting for you to mess up again. I never want people to look at me like somebody who doesn’t take it seriously. Because I do. My career is the only thing I think about. It’s stronger than any alcohol, stronger than any drug, stronger than anything else you could try — so why should I do those things, you know? I think I have an advantage over people in Hollywood because I go out every night and have to look my fans in the eye. I know that I need to set a good example for them. Every night, I’m in a different small town, and I see those little girls and their moms and it’s a constant reminder of why I want to live this way.
Britney’s conservatorship began earlier in 2008, following two years of increasingly erratic public behavior and increasingly scathing press coverage. (“What you did was disrespectful to your few remaining fans,” wrote Perez Hilton after Britney turned in a subpar performance at the 2007 VMAs.)
Taylor, the good girl who studied the pop playbook, was going to stop at nothing to avoid the Britney Spears downfall. She was going to be virginal. She was going to stay away from substances. She was not going to be photographed strapped down to a gurney or shaving her head. She was going to stay in control of how the world saw her, always.
The strategy was effective for Taylor’s bottom line. “She’s been called ‘America’s Sweetheart’: she rarely drinks, doesn’t smoke, go clubbing, or get arrested—she’s the anti-Lohan, and this squeaky-clean image has made her an attractive advertising partner for Target, Sony, CoverGirl, Keds, Elizabeth Arden, and, recently, Diet Coke,” reported Vanity Fair in 2013.
The good girl/control freak combo image also, however, seemed to make Taylor something new, something almost unprecedented. “She has never gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy,” marveled GQ in 2015. “There’s simply no antecedent for this kind of career: a cross-genre, youth-oriented, critically acclaimed colossus based entirely on the intuitive songwriting merits of a single female artist. It’s as if mid-period Garth Brooks was also early Liz Phair, minus the hat and the swearing. As a phenomenon, it’s absolutely new.”
She was nothing like what had come before her. If she was the anti-Lohan, she was also the anti-Britney.
“Control freaks often make good pop stars, and Britney Spears is not lacking in that department.”
When Britney Spears began her career, no one would have considered her to be someone out of control. She was a good sweet girl who did everything her label told her to, was consistently described as a pleasure to work with (as if her press releases were report cards), and, yes, had the sultry voice of a sex goddess. She was a carefully controlled quantity, and it showed.
Britney was one of the extremely good girls. “She’s not just a superkid,” wrote Jon Pareles of Britney for the New York Times in 1999. “She’s obedient, too, singing the songs and hitting the marks that are choreographed for her. … Pop provides wish-fulfillment for listeners, and kiddie pop can give adults the ultimate parental fantasy: well-groomed, perfectly behaved, highly motivated adolescents who — fantasy of fantasies — always do as they’re told.”
Britney herself seemed to relish her good girl image. She was thoughtful about her fame, and she sweated all the little details. (“Control freaks often make good pop stars,” mused Rolling Stone in 1999, “and Britney Spears is not lacking in that department.”) Britney wanted — as Taylor would want 10 years later — to be a good role model to her fans.
“You want to be a good example for kids out there and not do something stupid,” Britney said in that 1999 Rolling Stone profile. “Kids have low self-esteem, and then the peer pressures come and they go into a wrong crowd. That’s when all the bad stuff starts happening, drugs and stuff.”
Yet where Taylor made her choices from a deeply informed place as a student of fame, Britney was less skilled at controlling the way the world saw her. “I never knew how to play the game. I didn’t know how to present myself on any level,” she explained in her 2023 memoir The Woman in Me. “I wasn’t manipulative. I was just stupid.”
As Britney’s star rose and she gained more leverage, she also matured out of childhood and into adulthood. She began pushing back mildly against her management team’s strictures. The public reacted with horror.
“She has a pierced navel now, and a little tattoo, and she talks back to anyone who’d criticize her new wardrobe,” gasped Pareles in 2000, describing Britney’s transformation from “the pert parochial-school girl of her first video” into “a coquette in hot pants and halter tops.”
“Pop princess Britney Spears: Too sexy too soon?” demanded People the same year. “Little girls love her, but her image makes some moms nervous.”
Once Britney began to experiment with a more mature image, she didn’t seem to have control over the way her audience had begun to fetishize her.
In 2000, Britney told Chris Mundy for Rolling Stone that she never intended to have a sexual image. Then what, Mundy demanded, about all those sexy magazine covers?
“It was about being in a magazine and playing a part for that magazine,” said Britney. “It’s like on TV, if you see Jennifer Love Hewitt or Sarah Michelle Gellar kill someone, do you think that means they go out and do that?”
A few years after Britney transitioned away from her good girl image, she went full bad girl.
In 2007, Britney was just coming out of a divorce and enmeshed in a vicious custody battle for her two young children. She was also, she would later admit, dealing with some intense postpartum depression. She began to behave strangely. She yelled at the paparazzi in a British accent. She shaved her head. She attacked a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. She went in and out of rehab. The paparazzi were there for all of it, documenting and exacerbating every wild moment.
In her memoir, Britney explicitly positions this time as a reaction against her heavily controlled adolescence and young adulthood.
“Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you,” Britney writes. “I’d been the good girl for years. I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I’d sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil. And I was tired of it.”
The result of her brief rebellion was the conservatorship. For the crime of spiraling out of control, Britney lost control of her life altogether.
“You can see the puppet strings.”
Taylor’s laser grip on her career, her determination not to be Britney’ed, has served her well over the 18 years of her fame. It’s also been operational in many of the backlashes against her.
In the late 2000s, a narrative emerged that Taylor slut-shamed other girls, that she was a bad feminist. The case partly came from the text of Taylor’s lyrics, but some of it was responding to her image, too, its primness.
“I mean, if people want to listen to Taylor Swift, fine,” wrote Jude Doyle in 2009. “I personally can’t stand the whole cartoonishly innocent and pure (and white-dress-wearing! Always with the virginal white dress!) blonde blue-eyed white girl thing; it strikes me as just as artificial and calculated as any other pop star’s personal brand, with an added noxiousness due to its edge of moral superiority and ‘50’s-style coy submissiveness. But don’t pretend Swift is a ‘good’ role model, or even an ‘attainable’ one. Telling girls stories about how being too sexual will make them broken hollow sluts who can never succeed at life isn’t new, and it isn’t cute. Not even coming from sweet little Taylor Swift.”
In the 2010s, the case against Taylor became that she was a liar: never appearing in a paparazzi photo that wasn’t perfectly costumed and posed, never seen in public with a friend or a boyfriend who wasn’t precisely on brand. The sense of control she wielded over her brand was so intense it felt almost stressful to witness.
“My main complaint with Taylor Swift is that she no longer does it [media manipulation] well — you can see the puppet strings,” wrote Amanda Dobbins at the Ringer in 2016. “You can see the goddamn photographer she hired to follow her friends around all weekend. That’s just shoddy craftsmanship.”
When Kim Kardashian appeared to expose Taylor in a lie in 2016, she fit the mood of the moment perfectly. Taylor was a snake and a fraud and a liar, and the world had always known it.
Britney was too out of control of herself, and she was punished for it. Now, Taylor is too in control of herself, even when she follows the script the world handed her. She’s been punished for that, too.
The backlash against Taylor in 2016 was hot and ugly. She spent the following year not allowing anyone to see her in public: the control freak’s remedy to the problem of being considered too controlling. It would take two more album cycles for her to fully recover from the damage done to her reputation and climb back up the ladder of public admiration.
Now, Taylor is at the top of the world again, only higher than she was before. Her current status presents a problem to a society that doesn’t trust women with power. The paranoia accumulating around Taylor seems to demand that someone — preferably a man — take control of this girl. Either she’s a government plant or she’s a porn star, but she certainly can’t be this famous and this autonomous at once. The punishment against her is ongoing.
If the 2000s were an era when there was no right way to be a girl, the 2020s are showing that the girls who learned the lessons of the millennium will just have to keep learning it: There’s no right way to be a woman now, either.