My Journey With Britney Spears Part 5: My Prerogative

The fall of 2004 was a time of big changes for Britney and for me. For me I went off to up state New York to start my college career at Ithaca College. I would start the year in the closet and by the end of my freshmen year I was out and exploring my life as gay man for the first time. Britney meanwhile had married Kevin Federline and was turning away from the music industry to start a family, but before she left she graced us with a greatest hits CD entitled My Prerogative.

The compilation featured 3 new songs including a cover of the Bobby Brown song. The song and video for My Prerogative seemed to be Britney’s response to people saying she was starting to act too reckless. The video started with her driving a car into the pool, which is definitely one way to start a video. It also showcased her new relationship with Kevin Federline, which from the start was controversial with the media and the public. Special shout out to that bridge where she drops the beat. Easily my favorite part of the song.

Then there was the music video for Do Something that Britney directed herself and it was BANANAS! I honestly can’t describe it any other way. It is so wacky that it really has an allure all its own and provided hours of entertainment for me and my college friends. What these two videos had in common though was that Britney was shedding her polished pop star persona and we were starting to see Britney unshackled from the pop machine with these videos.

Meanwhile I met a girl who I became fast friends with in college and she figured me out real quick. She asked me the right questions and I gave the wrong answers and just like that someone knew I was gay. I ended up being so thankful that she had figured me out though because I finally had someone to confess all my feelings I had kept bottled up for years at that point. We hung out all the time that year and we both loved Britney. I ended up buying the DVD of My Prerogative with all of Britney’s music videos including the European ones I had never seen. Remember we were still about a year or 2 away from Youtube. I had this small TV with a built in VCR and DVD player attached at the end of my bed in my dorm. I used to play that Britney DVD every morning when I woke up. Playing Britney videos was my morning routine for a long time. In fact it got to the point that other boys in my hall started humming Britney songs at me in the hallway of our dorm. Yeah I was that gay who blared Britney loud enough for the whole hallway to hear every morning.

Eventually I came out to everyone second semester and for the first time in years I felt like I was happy. I was finally living out of the closet and it was good. Britney meanwhile was becoming the butt of jokes everywhere especially on Mad TV. Mad TV during the 00s went to the Britney well a lot presenting her as a ditzy white trash slob. I will admit though that the skit where they show Britney making a thanksgiving Turkey and the final “super secret” ingredient involves a pinch of glitter always makes me laugh. I also liked at the beginning of their parody of My Prerogative it has “Britney” saying “I like to whisper at the start of my songs. It sounds like I’m saying something important but I’m not.” I used to say that quote a lot. Still do sometimes.

I remember sometime in the mid ‘00s watching a VH1 special about the paparazzi and in that special they said that Britney was still on high demand for photos despite not having been musically active for a while. It showed the kind of fascination people still had with her, but also why she still couldn’t get away from the media and live her life. I remember a lot of us just assumed it was Kevin Federline who was bringing her down. We all felt if she just leave him things would be better. Of course I can’t leave out the fact that K Fed tried his hand at a music career with Popozao during these years. The song was a train wreck that you couldn’t turn away from. Kind of like the guy from American Idol who had his 15 minutes with She Bangs. It did provide a good laugh the first few times.

While Britney was still making the news and tabloids every day we still were not getting much new music from her. I remember on iTunes the new 3 “new” songs off My Prerogative were still selling well 2 years afterward, which showed the demand for new Britney music was still high. My roommate Junior year was also really into Britney. He was Bi sexual and our relationship was best described as roommates…with benefits. He’s the one that finally showed me Crossroads and he also downloaded the few new Britney songs that came out around this time or were still unreleased. There was Chaotic the theme song to Britney and K-Fed’s disastrous reality show.

There was Someday I’ll Understand Britney’s ballad about becoming a mother. The best though was Over to You Now. There’s a part in the song where Britney keeps saying “Oh My God!” and her reading of that line is so drop dead serious yet detached it makes me laugh every time I hear it. Yet once again it’s these moments of goofiness that make Britney so darn likeable. She just makes you feel happy especially when she is goofy.

Eventually Britney left K-Fed and we thought all was going to be well again in Britney world. Instead Britney started partying harder and going out with Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan and a leaving a trail of destruction behind them. I too was partying a little harder though nowhere near Britney’s level. But I was meeting boys, drinking booze and maybe more...

There’s me being a goofball in college while hanging out in the studio of our college’s Internet Radio station VIC.

Having one of our many dance parties in the kitchen of our London Flat. If I had to guess I’m probably singing Freak Like Me by the Sugababes.

Early 2007 I did my study abroad in London with my friends. We hit the gay clubs and bars and had some pretty good times. Like everyone we took the tube every day in London. Now remember we were still several months away from smart phones. We also didn’t have any internet or TV in our flat so our only source of ‘news’ was the British tabloids, which used to be handed out for free at every stop. So we would all read that every morning on the train. Of course there were many celebrities we didn’t know in these tabloids since we were American, but Britney sure was covered in these tabloids. We kept seeing her crazy nights out and about partying harder and harder.

Drinking while studying abroad at age 20 because the legal drinking age in London is 18!

Then one fateful morning on our train ride to school we picked up the latest British tabloid with Britney on the cover, her head shaved, bashing a car in with an umbrella!!! Dear GOD! We knew Britney was getting reckless, but nothing could have prepared us for this! It was absolutely shocking and all anyone could talk about. Once we got to class all we did was talk about Britney’s meltdown. Every day the British tabloids kept giving us a blow by blow of what was going on with Britney and even did a weekly wrap up going over everything that had happened for the week. For the first time I wasn’t just worried for Britney I was SCARED for her. I honestly thought she was going to die. It seemed like she was at the end of her rope and was going out guns blazing. You have to understand just how unbelievable this all was. This was up there with Kurt Cobain’s suicide, John Lennon’s murder or the first time Michael Jackson was accused of child molestation. It shocked the world and left everybody stunned.

All of a sudden a person that had been the butt of jokes for years, who had been mocked, ridiculed, and critiqued endlessly was falling apart in front of the whole world and we were all to blame. I think this was the moment a lot of people took a good hard look at how they had treated this woman over the years. In the footage from 2007 there’s one part that is unbelievable where one of the members of the paparazzi goes up to Britney’s car and asks if she is doing OK because “we are all worried for you” and then proceeds to take more pictures of her! You sir are the problem! We couldn’t see just how much we were tearing her down and invading her privacy. And then the infamous umbrella attack that shocked the world happens shortly thereafter and yet people were blind to the fact that we all had played a part in this.

It also showed us how the music industry and the media chewed people up and spit them out like garbage. There was a reason so many musicians had died tragically before and would continue to do so after. As Pete Townsend of The Who once said the music industry is like this blazing fire that never goes out. It seems so alluring and beautiful until you realize the thing keeping the fire alive is bodies. I thought about that quote a lot after Britney’s 2007 meltdown.

At this point I didn’t care if new music ever came I just wanted Britney to not die! Nonetheless new music was coming and I was excited for it. Could Britney with all the craziness surrounding her deliver a quality album that also delivered on the promise of Toxic? Could she regain the crown again as the queen of pop, but more importantly did she even want to? These were difficult questions with no easy answers, but soon enough we would all find out and the answer was even more complicated than we thought.