AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
When most people think of the start of the new millennium, they probably remember this.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Back on the Y2K front...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: A simple glitch is threatening a new age of chaos.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Y2K, the movie.
RASCOE: But author and podcaster Nora Princiotti hears something a little different...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "...BABY ONE MORE TIME")
BRITNEY SPEARS: (Singing) Oh, baby, baby.
RASCOE: ...Because for the self-described millennial pop culture obsessive, the 2000s actually started 15 months earlier with the release of Britney Spears' chart-topping album "...Baby One More Time."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "...BABY ONE MORE TIME")
SPEARS: (Singing) My loneliness is killing me, and I, I must confess, I still believe, still believe.
RASCOE: Princiotti's new book "Hit Girls" starts with Britney and moves through the aughts' most dominant female powerhouses, like Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, Beyonce and so many more, definitely too many for us to get to, so don't send us letters. Nora Princiotti joins me now from our studios in New York. Welcome.
NORA PRINCIOTTI: Hi, Ayesha. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here and chat.
RASCOE: Yes, yeah. So I mean, you start off the book with this memory of - and all - a lot of us can remember back to those Scholastic book fairs.
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: But it wasn't a book that you were looking for, right? What was it?
PRINCIOTTI: No. No, I was buying Hilary Duff's first album, "Metamorphosis," which I just remember being sort of the first piece of culture that really taught me what it is to be obsessed with pop culture, which, of course, has gone on to have major impact on my life. So, you know, I had to start the introduction there.
RASCOE: And what was it about that album that really got you, like, kind of obsessed with pop culture and pop stars?
PRINCIOTTI: Well, I think, in part, it was that, you know, Hilary Duff was a core figure in the sort of mid-aughts Disney to post-Disney ecosystem of entertainers who were doing a really, really good job making music and other types of entertainment content that appealed to the sort of preteen microgeneration that I was a part of. The other piece of it, though, is that I really ride for that album. Those songs totally hold up. Like, I will listen to "Come Clean" right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COME CLEAN")
HILARY DUFF: (Singing) Let the rain fall down and wake my dreams. Let it wash away my sanity. 'Cause I want to feel the thunder...
RASCOE: Well, I mean, you talk a lot in the book about how pop music is often viewed with this disdain. Especially, I think, music for - made by women but also music kind of directed and aimed at young women. Would you say that, like, that was part of the disdain that pop music felt, especially in those early aughts?
PRINCIOTTI: Absolutely. Even though young women, you know, from the Beatles to the Backstreet Boys, have always been incredibly astute predictors of where culture is going to go and what's going to be popular and what things that actually end up having real lasting significance in, you know, entertainment history and music history, there is this tendency to sort of look down your nose at, oh, that's teenybopper music. That's not important.
RASCOE: You know, when you think about pop in general, but especially in that decade, you can't talk about that without talking about, like, R&B, hip-hop. And even though it's such a huge component of the pop music, actual R&B singers and rappers - they were not given the same platforms for the most part. Why was that?
PRINCIOTTI: I mean, I think that it's mostly just sort of straight-up racism. The chapter about Beyonce in the book spends a lot of time sort of tracing how hip-hop and R&B was the most mainstream musical style in all of America. But what was sort of closed off was these upper echelons of celebrity. It's getting the Vogue cover. It's, you know, going to the Met Gala. That was being reserved for mostly white and more traditional pop artists, despite the fact that those artists were often borrowing the sounds that they were using to stay current from hip-hop and R&B. And Beyonce, I think, is the figure who breaks through that ceiling for the first time and particularly by turning the narrative of her relationship with Jay-Z into something that people obsessed over.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "03' BONNIE & CLYDE")
JAY-Z: (Singing) All I need in this life of sin is me and my girlfriend, me and my girlfriend.
BEYONCE: (Singing) Down to ride 'til the very end is me and my boyfriend, me and my boyfriend.
JAY-Z: (Singing) That's right. All I need in this life...
RASCOE: Well, you know, the thing about that decade is - you talk about this in the book - is how you had these women and young women who were, like, really charting this new course for music. But then you also have this kind of moralizing double standard. Like, talk to me about, like, all that double standard that these women faced.
PRINCIOTTI: Well, I think culturally, particularly around a lot of the early Britney Spears' stuff, it started to sink in for me that progress is not always linear in society. And there's sort of a reflexive return to lowercase-c conservatism in some ways, around the beginning of the 2000s. And there are some sort of galaxy brain ideas around there that things like the Monica Lewinsky scandal kind of reintroduced the idea of moralizing about sex as something that was OK to do in more serious areas of media. And therefore, it was just suddenly kind of acceptable dinner table conversation to be casting these judgments about what people are doing in their personal lives, that really found a way to pick up some steam. The other piece of it is just tabloid culture reaching a real fever pitch.
RASCOE: Do you think, as a society, we've reckoned with the pressure and the ridicule that we put on these young artists?
PRINCIOTTI: Not really. I think the place where there's been a real reckoning is within professional media, though I don't think professional celebrity media has the same type of power that it did in the 2000s. It's still a gatekeeper. It's still a tone setter for the people who consume it. So I do think that that's a meaningful change. I just think that the sort of most aggressive tendencies of the paparazzi in, say, 2006 have mostly been taken over by just, you know, anybody with an iPhone.
RASCOE: What do you see ultimately as the legacy of these hit girls, you know, of the Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, you know, Beyonce, Avril Lavigne? What is their legacy?
PRINCIOTTI: I really think this generation taught the ones that came after them to take pop music seriously and to get over the idea that because there is an inherent manufactured quality to pop - it's about escapism and fantasy and showmanship and putting on a show, and that performance means that there is something of a facade that's a part of it - that those things did not make it any less valid or any less real or authentic.
RASCOE: That's Nora Princiotti. Her book "Hit Girls" is out now. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
PRINCIOTTI: Thank you, Ayesha. Thanks so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRONGER")
SPEARS: (Singing) ...own, but now I'm stronger than yesterday. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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