Growing Up With Britney Spears: Part One

Part one of the essay you’ve been waiting to drop on Adryan’s POV, my Substack newsletter

Adryan Corcione
4 min readMay 24, 2023
Photo credit: Paramount / Adryan Corcione

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The year is 2001. It’d been two hours since I hopped off the school bus. I’d just started the third grade a few weeks prior. With dusty fingernails from snacking on 3D Doritos, I flipped to MTV with the television remote. It was almost time.

In moments, Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” music video premiered.

Britney appeared onscreen. 19 going on 20 in her “Not a Girl Not Yet a Woman’’ era, she stripped herself of the schoolgirl uniform and pigtail braids from her iconic “…Baby One More Time” music video. Covered in baby oil, she and her backup dancers pranced and twirled around in an abandoned Asian bath house in this new video.

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