Britney Spears has achieved five Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s and 13 top 10s since breaking into the public eye as a young teen in the late 1990s. According to M.R.C. She has also sold 34 million albums in the United States. Britney is not the only prominent artist of the 20th century, though. Being a symbol of everything from suburban schoolgirl innocence to brazen sexual confidence to resiliency and hard-won freedom, she is also one of our time’s most important cultural touchstones.
Billboard re-listened to Britney Spears’ huge discography of the pop hit in honor of her 40th birthday (December 2) and came up with our staff’s choice for the top 40 Britney Spears songs.
Gimme More (2007)
The song starts out with “It’s Britney, bitch,” and it concludes with the producer, Danja, essentially praising the song that just played. A kinetic repositioning of Spears’ sound that, when removed from the context of her continuing personal troubles at the time, soars as a futuristic banger today, “Gimme More” fills the gap and more than justifies the braggadocio. In the midst of the confusion surrounding her music, Spears discovered a style that suited her best: bouncy electro-pop with a few sonic risks (“Gimme, gimme,” then a pitch-shifted “more!”)
I’m a Slave 4 U (2001)
Like the choice to throw a yellow Burmese python around Spears’ shoulders for that legendary performance, the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards were the appropriate venue for the release of this slinky, sensual track. Even while the Neptunes-produced song only reached No. 27 on the Hot 100, it more than paid off because it is one of the most critically acclaimed and cherished songs she has ever released. The 19-year-old sang “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” in a later Britney song, but “Slave” established her as a mature, seductive celebrity.
Stronger (2000)
With the pounding pop anthem “Stronger” from her second album Oops!, Brit announced to the world in 2000 that she is stronger than some might believe. I did it once more. After Spears was released from her conservatorship, pithy statements like “I’m not your property as of today” and “you could think that I can’t take it, but you’re mistaken” took on a deeper significance. For a celebrity who promised her followers right away that she’s not someone to trifle with, “Stronger” endures as a jarring reminder of what one can achieve with even a drop of Spears’ tenacity.
Till the World Ends (2011)
If Britney’s Instagram videos have shown us anything, it’s that she truly meant every word she sang in the futuristic electro-pop song “Til The World Ends” from 2011. Spears has kept dancing since the world did not end on December 21, 2012, as the music video promised. Nothing is more uplifting than when this explosive song starts playing at a bar, club, or possibly even in an underground sewer system, demonstrating to everyone on the dancefloor that they can undoubtedly make it through one more round. It is supported by sinewy synths and percussive production.
Hold It Against Me
Spears struggled personally over the latter few years of the 2000s, but by 2011, she had fully recovered and was once again a pop A-lister. The first song from that year’s Femme Fatale, “Hold It Against Me,” stated as much. The chorus lyric, “If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me,” highlights Spears’ enticing queries in the song, which never strays beyond its use of powerful synthesizers and pounding percussion (a homage to the turbo-pop era in which it was born).
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