Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade

Every Single Album podcaster Princiotti throws it back to the early aughts in this nostalgic debut essay collection analyzing how the era’s female musicians redefined what it meant to be a pop star. The opening chapter details how Britney Spears rose from Mickey Mouse Club cast member to adolescent superstar, precipitating a “surge in resources and enthusiasm for young, female pop singers.” Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” marked the moment that indie music went mainstream, Princiotti contends, discussing how producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke wrote the song as a popified version of “Maps” by indie rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Exploring how other stars distinguished themselves with new technologies, Princiotti discusses how a teenage Taylor Swift changed how artists interact with their fans through her MySpace page, and how Rihanna harnessed the possibilities of digital recording software to move pop in a more dance-centric direction. Princiotti’s voice is akin to gabbing with an erudite friend who doles out insight and humor with equal aplomb (she writes of Spears’s idiosyncratic phonetics in “...Baby One More Time” that “it’s as if she took a look at the lyric sheet and thought, I have better plans for these vowel sounds”). It’s a boisterous celebration of how women moved pop forward in the early 21st century. Agent: Anthony Mattero, CAA. (June)