ARTIST

Britney Spears

Britney Jean Spears was born Dec. 2, 1981 in the small southern town of Kentwood, Louisiana (population: 1,200), where she has lived most of her life. She started performing at a very young age, first in local stage productions and church choirs, later in national commercials and off-Broadway plays, and finally, starting at age 11, in two seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club TV show alongside future *NSYNC members Joshua "JC" Chasez and Justin Timberlake. After leaving MMC in '94, she auditioned for an all-girl singing group but instead wound up with a solo recording deal with Jive Records, home to similarly-minded teen-pop sensations the Backstreet Boys.

Jive savvily and aggressively marketed Britney to the Backstreet crowd, by including her songs on a Backstreet Boys CD sampler, offering free previews of her video to anyone who requested the Backstreet Boys' "I'll Never Break Your Heart" video on cable music channel the Box, getting her a slot alongside the Boys on the Sabrina The Teenage Witch soundtrack, and landing her generous coverage in teenybopper mags like Superteen, Bop, Teen Machine, and Teen People; all this before her debut album, the somewhat-suggestively titled ...Baby One More Time, even came out! (Rumors of Britney's romances with *NSYNC's Timberlake and Backstreet's Nick Carter, which Britney has denied, though she admits that Justin gave her her first kiss back in the MMC days, probably helped generate interest as well.) The boy-band connections didn't end there, either; Britney toured with *NSYNC and also enlisted the management team of Johnny and Donna Wright, the Backstreet Boys' former managers and the current managers of, you guessed it, *NSYNC.

All this cross-marketing obviously paid off, as ...Baby One More Time's first single (the title track) went to No. 1, and the album also debuted in the top spot on the Billboard charts, making Britney the youngest female artist in Billboard history to have her first single and first album go to No. 1 in the same week.

With cutesy song titles like "Soda Pop," "Email My Heart," and "Born To Make You Happy," not to mention appearances in McDonald's commercials and Tommy Hilfiger print ads, it's easy to dismiss Britney Spears as a pretty puppet whose sole purpose in the mega-marketing food chain is to push products of any kind, be they record albums, Big Macs, or various pieces of merchandise bearing her perky blonde likeness. And truthfully, it'll take the 19 year-old "baby diva" at least a couple more albums to prove herself as a somewhat lasting and credible artist, not just a Backstreet Girl.

But there are signs of, for lack of a better word, growth. Whether or not her impressionable young fans will relate to the more grown-up Britney in the long run remains to be seen, but so far it certainly hasn't hurt sales of her second album or made even the slightest dent in her popularity. And we all know little girls grow up fast, so it's possible that Britney's fans will grow up right along with her, just like the Madonnabes of that bygone era known as the '80s.

Written by Lindsey Parker