HOLLYWOOD - Becoming a pre-Madonna can be very hard, but it can be done. Just ask Britney Spears. The teen princess wants her fans to see her "in a different light that they've never seen me in before,'' she told her fans on the opening night of her current Britney tour on Nov. 1. "This music that I'm singing right now is such a reflection of me and who I am."
If that’s the case, who she is may be a bit unclear. Her third studio album, Britney, features the track " I’m Not a Girl, I’m Not Yet a Woman."
Nonetheless, saying that she’s "not a girl" seems like an effort to put her Lolita years behind her, and it looks like she may succeed. Spears has sold a whopping 745,000-plus copies of Britney since its release on Nov. 6, placing her firmly atop the new Billboard 200 albums chart.
Even though her new album did not move enough units to break her own record for one-week sales (Oops! I Did It Again sold 1.3 million), her latest work did well enough to bump Michael Jackson from the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart after he’d been there just one week.
While Britney, 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys are getting older and changing their ways, their fans are getting older and wiser, too.
Will they be coming along for the ride?
Year after year, each generation of teens seems to become stronger and tougher than the one before. Not to mention pickier. Teenagers are constantly being examined under a microscope as the entertainment industry picks apart its target market in the hope of discovering what makes them tick.
A teen explosion
When the Backstreet Boys’ tune "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)" first aired in the radio stations in the Spring of 1996, no one could have conceived of the impact their music would have on the teenagers around the globe.
We’d seen the New Kids on the Block come. And go. There was no reason to suspect this group would be any different. I remember watching the video debut on MTV and thinking to myself, "Oh boy...it’s the New Kids on the Block of the ‘90s."
But there was a whole new generation of teens just waiting to be sugar-coated in the Backstreet bubble--and a whole generation of record producers waiting to profit from the dollars teens would spend to keep the bubble-gum fresh.
Louis J. Pearlman was the most ambitious of the bunch. Seeing the success of the Backstreet Boys, he quickly formed another boy band, with a slightly different flavor, that would take the masses to new heights.
Their name? 'N Sync.