In 2003, Britney Spears was enjoying her time as a hot, young and newly single 22-year-old. After her high-profile split with *NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake, who went public with news of the couple’s consummation on a radio talk show, the secret was finally out that pop’s princess was no longer a virgin. Though this really came as no surprise, this cat-out-of-the-bag freedom enabled Spears to finally embrace her sexual appetite and leave behind the diluted virgin act that failed to convince the masses anyway. Her fourth studio album “In The Zone” is a result of this newfound empowerment, as told through sweaty dance floor numbers, sonic trips across a slew of continents and unflinching tales of grief. 

The arc of young female pop stars becoming much more mature “bad girls,” is not singular to Spears, however. Pop’s bright-eyed pack of newcomers (most commonly those who belonged to Disney, Inc. prior) often shed their skin in an effort to reinvent themselves and redefine what they represent to the public. After years of the public boxing these women into the molds of family friendly, All-American girls-next-door, what else to do but burn those confines to the ground? Some have done reinvention more drastically (see: Madonna’s “Erotica” and Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz”), while others ease their way into being a “bad girl” more delicately (see: “reputation” by Taylor Swift). What remains consistent throughout all of these women’s transformations into adulthood is their rejection of the patriarchal systems that “defined” them in the first place. 

Four years prior to “In The Zone,” Spears’ public image was largely contained to that of an All-American girl next door who would never dare admit to having premarital sex. The Spears of 1999’s “…Baby One More Time” was the poster girl for gossiping with girlfriends at the lunch table and sitting alone in her room at night, waiting for an email back from her honey. As her career progressed and she turned 18, her image expanded ever-so-slightly, allowing for more suggestive music and fashion, but essentially maintained the same “clean” image. 2001’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” was one of the first times her sexuality was allowed to take center stage, but her calls to “get it, get it” were swiftly contrasted by coming-of-age ballads like “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” 

“Hey Britney, you say you wanna lose control/Come over here I got something to show ya,” Madonna taunts in “Me Against the Music,” the album’s lead single. 

“Control,” as the label executives at Jive and her father would have it, would be lost quickly — first with a three-track run of unabashed sensuality. “Showdown” putters along as Spears sets the scene for a sexual confrontation with the brash warning of, “when you come, don’t get too hot.” “Breathe on Me” is the album’s most syrupy sweet admission of pleasure, complete with plenty of falsetto moaning atop a slinky bassline. “Early Mornin’” prioritizes promiscuity and details a hotel escapade with “a guy named Joe.” Amid each of these tales of sexual encounters, she maintains her agency as the initiator and calls her own shots. If she does let a man “bump, bump ‘til the break of dawn,” it’s because she wants to. 

Other than the more mature subject matter of the music, Spears swapped the polished pop sound created by Swedish super producer Max Martin for two others, this time recruiting the duo Bloodshy & Avant to work on some of the album’s biggest songs, including “Toxic.” The fresh Swedish duo offered a “darker” take on Spears’ famous brand of teen pop, using grittier synths and production styles. Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, who later produced Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” left his sonic fingerprints across the album, having a hand in the record’s lead single “Me Against the Music,”  “Early Mornin’” and “The Hookup,” all of which stick to the shadows of pop sonics rather than the sunny tween anthems of her earlier work. 

“(I Got That) Boom Boom” adds the Atlanta rap duo the Ying Yang Twins into the mix, beginning with a loud “Shawty! We finna go to the club and get crunk with Britney, hey!” This country-inspired track pairs twangy banjo plucks with heavy hip-hop drums and bass, throwing in some string arrangements for added drama, because why not? For how outrageous it is to hear Spears clarifying “this is for those Southern boys out there,” alongside banjo plucks and loose percussion, the song is undeniably catchy and a merger of two cultures (white Southerner and Black Southerner). 

Spears’ co-opting of hip-hop culture is evidenced in songs like this and “Outrageous.” The R. Kelly-penned and produced “Outrageous” is unfortunately forever tainted by the R&B singer’s heinous acts of sexual abuse, and takes a Middle Eastern-sounding approach to an early aughts R&B/hip-hop cut (which would be further popularized by songs like “Buttons” by the Pussycat Dolls). In the scrapped music video for the song, Spears shoots hoops opposite Snoop Dogg, dressed in a baggy basketball uniform, large gold hoop earrings and a sideways trucker hat. 

Homagés to different cultures are found throughout the record. The high-pitched string arrangement heard on “Toxic” was lifted from the song “Tere Mere Beech Mein,” (“Between You and Me”) which came from the 1981 Bollywood film, “Ek Duuje Ke Liye.” “Touch of My Hand,” a meditative song about masturbation, features cascading synths and Asian-inspired strings. On “The Hookup,” Spear channels her inner island gyal, delivering a reggae number that might as well have her shouting out “jah mon!” herself. 

The latter half of the album falls back into more familiar territory, with power ballads about a distant lover (“Shadow”) and punchy Disney-sounding cuts (“Brave New Girl”). The LP’s closing track “Everytime” has added poignance after Spears revealed in her 2023 memoir that she’d had a secret abortion with then-boyfriend Timberlake. The album closer was once regarded as Spears’ apology to Timberlake amid rumors of her infidelity. Now, “Everytime” is a haunting tale of Spears’ grief while navigating not only her breakup, but the loss of her unborn child — which just further represents the literal blood (apologies to squeamish readers), sweat and tears that went into the making of the album. 

“In The Zone” is one of the final pieces of work that maintains a shred of authenticity, and celebrates her freedom (sexual or otherwise) before it would quickly be taken away from her by a court-ordered conservatorship headed by Papa Spears. Her freedom today (conveyed in scantily clad Instagram posts in which she regularly dances to songs from the album) bears the most resemblance to the kind she fought for on “In The Zone.”

Freedom has often been the theme fought for by young women in pop music, and entertainment at large. Whether it was Madonna pleading with her daddy to let her keep her baby (“Papa Don’t Preach”), Janet Jackson declaring her “Control,” or Christina Aguilera defining herself as a “Fighter,” self-governance is a common thread throughout contemporary pop music. In a world that often finds the public telling young women what to wear, who to be and what to do with their bodies, even the smallest acts made by women in pop to redefine their identity are politically-driven efforts to challenge the (male) powers that be.

Featured image by Patrick Demarchelier.