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      Takeaways from Britney Spears’s Memoir ‘The Woman in Me’

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      The pop star’s new book, “The Woman in Me,” recounts her rise to fame, struggles that became tabloid fodder and her efforts to escape a conservatorship that long governed her life.There came a point during the 13 years that a conservatorship strictly governed Britney Spears’s life and career that she gave up fighting it, the singer recalls in her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” which is being released on Tuesday.Her father, James P. Spears, had been put in charge of her affairs in 2008 after she was twice hospitalized for involuntary psychological assessments. At times over the years that followed, she pushed back privately, but ultimately her exhaustion and fear of losing access to her two young sons won out, she recalls in the book.“After being held down on a gurney,” the memoir reads, “I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. And so I went along with it.” Spears adds, “My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”In the much-awaited 275-page memoir, which The New York Times obtained from a retail store in advance of its authorized release, Spears writes about her career as a teen idol, her struggles that became tabloid fodder, her time under the conservatorship and her eventual push for its termination in 2021, when she regained the right to make her own decisions.Throughout, she describes the feeling of being too much in the public eye, too scrutinized, whether by her parents or the paparazzi, or even by the doctors who she says “took me away from my kids and my dogs and my house.” But the story is, by nature, incomplete, referring cheerily to Spears’s post-conservatorship marriage to Hesam Asghari, known as Sam, who filed for divorce in August after a little more than a year.Below are other notable moments from the book.Rise to fameFrom performing her first solo — the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?” — at her mother’s local day care to auditioning with Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” in rooms full of record executives, Spears tracks her rapid ascent to fame as a child and teenager.When she was 10 years old, she recalls, she was on the show “Star Search,” where the host, Ed McMahon, asked her if she had a boyfriend. After she replied that she didn’t, because they were “mean,” McMahon responded, “I’m not mean! How about me?” She “kept it together” until she left the stage, Spears writes, “But then I burst into tears.”After appearing on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” Spears writes, she decided that she wanted to live a “normal life” back in Kentwood, La., until Larry Rudolph, a lawyer whom her mother met on the audition circuit, suggested that she record a demo. She won a record deal at 15, and Rudolph became her longtime manager.Spears performing in 1999 during her … Baby One More Time Tour.Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMounting fame, and attentionSpears quickly rose from a teenager performing at malls to a 16-year-old pop princess with a hit single: “ … Baby One More Time.” She went on tour with the boy band ’N Sync, and had a high-profile romance with Justin Timberlake.She writes that she “couldn’t help but notice” that talk show hosts asked Timberlake different kinds of questions from the ones that she was asked: “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts,” the book says, “wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.” The pressure only grew as she became a fixture on MTV, and the public criticism ultimately led her to start taking Prozac, she recalls.Spears describes a loving relationship with Justin Timberlake but says she was pained by what she describes as his unwillingness to have a child together when she became pregnant. She had an abortion, she writes.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressBreaking up with TimberlakeSpears recounts her connection with Timberlake as magnetic and describes their breakup — which she said he initiated over text message — as leaving her “devastated” and fantasizing about quitting show business.She recalls her reaction to the release of Timberlake’s music video “Cry Me a River,” in which, as she describes it, “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain.” She viewed the media as portraying her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” she writes, when in reality: “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”As first revealed in excerpts released by People magazine earlier this week, Spears recounts in detail the decision to get an abortion after she became pregnant while in the relationship with Timberlake. She said she didn’t view the pregnancy as “a tragedy,” but that he thought they were too young, leading her to agree “not to have the baby.”After the breakup, Spears says, she felt forced by her father and her management team to participate in an interview with Diane Sawyer, during which Sawyer pressed her on what she did to Timberlake that caused him “so much pain.” (In the book, Spears confirms a longtime rumor when she says she kissed the choreographer Wade Robson during her relationship with Timberlake, but she suggests that her behavior was related to rumors of Timberlake’s unfaithfulness.) Spears recalls that interview as a “breaking point” for her. “I felt like I had been exploited,” she writes, “set up in front of the whole world.”Relationship to drugs and alcoholTackling the peak years of her notorious stint as a paparazzi and tabloid fixture, Spears writes about her early adulthood forays into partying and nightlife with a sense of disbelief about how they were portrayed in the media.Of her time being photographed alongside celebrity peers like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Spears writes, “It was never as wild as the press made it out to be,” saying that she had no interest in hard drugs and “never had a drinking problem.” Instead, Spears describes her “drug of choice” as the ADHD medication Adderall, which “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.”Spears writes that during some of her most widely known public episodes — shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car — she was “out of my mind with grief” following the death of her aunt and a custody fight with her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. “With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom,” she writes. “Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”Spears adds: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”Spears with her parents. She says in her book that her father, Jamie, became so controlling of her career while running her conservatorship that at one point he declared, “I’m Britney Spears now.”Denise Truscello/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe conservatorshipIn early 2008, amid her public struggles, the singer’s father, known as Jamie, was appointed conservator of her finances and personal life by the state of California, an arrangement that lasted in various forms until 2021. Even as she returned to work as an entertainer, Spears writes that her every action was monitored, including who she could date or spend time with.“I know I had been acting wild, but there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like I was a bank robber,” Spears writes in her memoir. “Nothing that justified upending my entire life.” She describes the decision as being made by her father along with support from her mother and a business manager, Louise Taylor, known as Lou, who has denied being an architect of the conservatorship. (Jamie Spears has long defended his involvement as an effort to protect his daughter from financial exploitation.)“Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week,” Spears writes, adding of her father: “From that point on, I began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow.” Elsewhere, Spears recalls her father saying, “I’m Britney Spears now.”“I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” Spears writes. “Security guards handed me prepackaged envelopes of meds and watched me take them. They put parental controls on my iPhone. Everything was scrutinized and controlled. Everything.”Any pushback by Spears was frowned upon, ignored or minimized, she writes: “I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”Fans in the #FreeBritney movement often showed up outside court proceedings where they urged that she be released from the conservatorship. Spears writes of how much that lifted her spirits. Chloe Pang for The New York TimesFighting back and #FreeBritneyWhile Spears had intermittently pushed back against the conservatorship behind closed doors to no avail, she traces the beginning of the end of the arrangement to disputes with her father near the end of 2018, when she was made to undergo further mental health evaluations and then spend more than three months in rehab.“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” Spears writes, adding that he threatened to make her look like an “idiot.”In addition to being prescribed lithium at the facility, Spears says, she was allowed only an hour of television before a 9 p.m. bedtime. “They kept me locked up against my will for months,” she writes. “I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.”It was there, in a $60,000-per-month Beverly Hills rehab, that Spears says a nurse showed her clips of fans representing the viral #FreeBritney movement that was questioning the need for the singer’s conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears writes. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”She writes that “it felt like every day there was another documentary about me on yet another streaming service” (including one, “Framing Britney Spears,” by The New York Times). “Seeing the documentaries about me was rough,” she writes. “I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first.” She adds, “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.”When her father was removed as her conservator, not long before the arrangement was ended entirely, “I felt relief sweep over me,” Spears writes. “The man who had scared me as a child and ruled over me as an adult, who had done more than anyone to undermine my self-confidence, was no longer in control of my life.” When she received the call from her new lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, that the conservatorship was officially over, Spears writes, she was at a resort in Tahiti.But Spears remains raw about the aftermath of the conservatorship, writing of her continued estrangement from much of her family. “Migraines are just one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship,” she writes. “I don’t think my family understands the real damage that they did.”The memoir is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.Gallery Books, via Associated PressA return to music?While some say the conservatorship saved Spears’s life, she writes, “No, not really. My music was my life, and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul.”Throughout her time performing a revue in Las Vegas, Spears writes, she was not allowed to update the show. “When I wanted to perform my favorite songs, like ‘Change Your Mind’ or ‘Get Naked,’ they wouldn’t let me,” she writes. “It felt like they wanted to embarrass me rather than let me give my fans the best possible performance.”Now that she has the opportunity to create freely again, the singer writes, she does not feel motivated to do so, although she mentions a one-off collaboration with one of her musical heroes, Elton John, released last year. “Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” Spears says. “It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”Sarah Maslin Nir and Chris Kuo contributed reporting. More

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      Britney Spears Writes of Having Abortion While Dating Justin Timberlake

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      The pop star included the detail in her upcoming memoir “The Woman in Me”; Timberlake did not immediately respond.Britney Spears wrote in her much-awaited memoir that she had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake, according to excerpts released Tuesday by People Magazine.“Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy,” the excerpt reads, according to People. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”Representatives for Timberlake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Spears and Timberlake dated for a few years starting when she was 17 and he was 18, generating a tabloid frenzy as they made their ascents as two of the defining pop stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s.Their relationship became subject to public scrutiny again in 2021, after a New York Times documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” included a re-examination of the world’s reaction to their breakup, which was framed in the media as being Spears’s fault — partly because a music video by Timberlake implied that Spears had cheated on him. Without going into detail, Timberlake apologized to Spears in an Instagram post, saying that he had “failed” her.The memoir, called “The Woman in Me” and slated for release next week, is Spears’ first in-depth account of her life and career and is being published in the aftermath of her release from a legal conservatorship that governed her life for more than 13 years.The collection of excerpts released so far recall the heady days leading up to her getting a record deal at 15, her inner monologue as she held a live snake in the famous moment at the 2001 Video Music Awards, and her loss of passion for performing while under the strictures of the conservatorship, which was instituted amid a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008.“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore,” the excerpt read. “As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.”The end of the conservatorship nearly two years ago was preceded by waves of outrage from fans who called themselves the #FreeBritney movement and held rallies in Los Angeles for the end of the legal arrangement, which was largely overseen by her father, James P. Spears.Since it ended, Spears, 41, has gotten married, separated from her husband and released two singles; she has shared bits of her rage about the conservatorship in Instagram posts, but her memoir will include the most significant — and organized — insights yet into her thoughts on the ways in which the minutiae of her life were under others’ control even as she worked as an international pop star.In the excerpts released so far, Spears rewinds back to her days as a preteen in “The Mickey Mouse Club” — recalling a truth-or-dare kiss with Timberlake, a fellow cast member — and to coming close to being cast as the lead opposite Ryan Gosling in “The Notebook,” a role that ultimately went to Rachel McAdams.She recalls her childhood growing up with parents that she would later blame for exerting too much control over her life, telling a story about how her mother, Lynne Spears, would let her drink cocktails as an eighth grader. And she discusses the constant pressures surrounding her body, writing how, during the conservatorship years, her father “repeatedly” told her that she “looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”“I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” one excerpt said. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back. But under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”Spears had privately pushed for years to end the conservatorship, but she left no doubts about her position in 2021, when she told a judge in Los Angeles that the arrangement was “abusive,” saying that she was forced to work when she didn’t want to and prevented from removing her birth control device when she wanted to have more children. Her father has long maintained that the conservatorship had always been intended to protect his daughter from exploitation.The memoir pushes back fiercely on the idea of that the conservatorship was for her own good: She writes, according to an excerpt, that the arrangement made her into a kind of “child-robot,” a shadow of her former self, asserting that male artists had mismanaged their money and dealt with substance abuse problems without being treated as she had.“There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl,” one of the excerpts said, “but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.” More

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      ‘Reptile’ Review: Unusual Suspects

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      Benicio Del Toro plays a detective investigating a suburban homicide in this overstuffed thriller.The tortuous crime thriller “Reptile,” streaming on Netflix, at times feels like the unwise attempt to cram an entire season of a cops-and-perps show into just over two hours. The movie, peopled with a near-bottomless supply of unsavory rogues, tracks the aftermath of a grisly murder by trailing the policemen on the case. Domenick Lombardozzi (of “The Wire”) is even featured among the crew — although his presence is merely another reminder of the sharper stories this movie aspires to replicate.Set in an overcast marsh town in Maine, the movie opens on a couple facing friction: Will (Justin Timberlake), a real estate mogul, and Summer (Matilda Lutz), an agent at his company, converse tersely while readying a house for a showing. The sheeny manor is all stainless steel and vaulted ceilings, a home that, in its moneyed facade and alienating interior, offers an apt metaphor for the pair’s domestic strife.Once Summer is found stabbed to death in a for-sale property, however, the movie shifts into procedural mode. We swivel to center on Tom (Benicio Del Toro), a detective who’s fresh meat on the local force; he and his wife, Judy (a convincing Alicia Silverstone), decamped to the hamlet following a scandal in Philadelphia. Working under the stony police captain (Eric Bogosian), Tom presents as a weary but devoted enforcer of law and order. “There’s only one thing I love almost as much as I love you,” he smolders, less to Judy than at her, “and that’s being a cop.”Thank goodness for that fidelity, for this particular homicide soon proves a Pandora’s box of treachery and pretense. The poised Summer, during her short life in suburbia, managed to mingle with a legion of kooks and creeps, including her ex-husband, Sam (Karl Glusman), an artist fond of stealing human hair for his sculptures, and her glum confidante, Renee (Sky Ferreira), who seems to resent her pal’s success. That’s not to mention the bratty, well-to-do Will, whose resting pout face is only partially the fault of Timberlake’s restricted acting range.In his first feature, the director Grant Singer (who wrote the screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and Del Toro) demonstrates a knack for building suspense. In one stylish sequence, Tom dials a mysterious number that could be the key to cracking the case. As he listens to the tone, Singer cuts to multiple characters reaching for ringing phones. The small scene oozes with Hitchcockian tension.The trouble with “Reptile” is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices. Once the film gets around to revealing the culprit, we have already lost interest, enervated in the face of a movie that, like an overeager snake, bites off far more than it can swallow.ReptileRated R for coldblooded murder. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Romeo Santos and Justin Timberlake’s Team-Up, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Shygirl, Ava Max, Horse Lords and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Romeo Santos and Justin Timberlake, ‘Sin Fin’Ever the canny collaborator, Justin Timberlake joins Romeo Santos — formerly of the Dominican-rooted boy band Aventura, now a stadium act on his own — to pump up a typically imploring bachata. Both of them are sleek high tenors who can always sound like they’re eager for romance; both also know what it’s like to sing answered by ecstatic screams. “Sin Fin” (“Endless”) is a bilingual pop promise with a stalking undercurrent. Timberlake sings, “Can’t escape my love ’cause it’s yours/Even if you walk out the door it’ll chase you down.” It opens with cathedral-choir harmonies, then buttresses the bongos and syncopated guitar of bachata with pop’s synthesizers and hip-hop’s hype-man cheers. Melding bachata and power ballad, it still begs for love with high drama. JON PARELESAva Max, ‘Million Dollar Baby’Ava Max is partying like it’s 2000 and 2004 on the thumping “Million Dollar Baby,” a sleek, calisthenic pop song that name-checks Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture winner and interpolates “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” LeAnn Rimes’ once-inescapable “Coyote Ugly” theme song. (Who said Y2K nostalgia was dead!) While Max still hasn’t quite carved out a distinct persona in the pop sphere, she’s proven herself to be a satisfying practitioner of aughts-pop pastiche — there’s even a stuttering echo of “Bad Romance” on the bridge. “She broke out of her chains,” Max sings of her titular, diamond-encrusted heroine, “Turned the fire into rain.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex Lahey, ‘Congratulations’On the booming power-pop track “Congratulations,” the Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lahey attempts to process the news that an ex is getting married: “Congratulations,” she sings, dripping with sarcasm, “so happy for your perfect life.” There’s pathos in her voice during the verses — “If I don’t care then why do I still think about you all the time?” — but the chorus is volcanic and cathartic, as Lahey’s colossal guitar tones swell like a sudden surge of inner strength. ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Nike’“Peri-peri, too hot to handle,” the London-based Shygirl boasts with cool confidence on “Nike,” the latest single from her forthcoming debut album, “Nymph.” While the previous songs she’s released from the record have been glitchy and ethereal — think hyperpop crossed with “Visions”-era Grimes — “Nike” is all woozy low-end and spotlit swagger. “He tell me, ‘Nike, just do it,” Shygirl intones on the track (which was produced by the British electronic artist Mura Masa), her delivery full of winking, sensual charisma. ZOLADZHorse Lords, ‘Mess Mend’The instrumental “Mess Mend,” by the Baltimore band Horse Lords, starts out skewed — with chords from a slightly detuned piano hitting unevenly on offbeats — and gets nuttier from there, with a tricky 7/4 meter, a guitar melody that suggests a non-Euclidean hoedown and a gradual devolution into a funky electronic drone, not to mention a final twist. It’s a brainy lark. PARELESVDA, ‘Môgô Kélé’VDA — short for Voix des Anges — is a vocal duo from Ivory Coast that has become a consistent hitmaker in the Ivorian pop style called zouglou, which floats suavely sustained vocals over brisk polyrhythms and glossy synthesizers: airborne tracks that often hold sociopolitical messages. Above the speedy six-beat rhythms of “Môgô Kélé” — a hyperactive mesh of drums, marimbas, flutes and call-and-response vocals — VOA sings about easing tensions that have risen lately between Mali and Ivory Coast, citing their longstanding historical ties. The video shows jailed soldiers; it also gives the VDA a backdrop of both countries’ flags and words like “la paix,” “fraternité” and “union,” while the music sparkles and bounds ahead. PARELESDanielle Ponder, ‘Only the Lonely’“Love is lost and I must walk away,” Danielle Ponder sings, with mournful resolution, in “Only the Lonely,” a ballad that fights back any regrets with the certainty that “You don’t love me, you just lonely.” As the track rises from hollow keyboard tones to grand orchestral melancholy, Ponder’s voice opens up to reveal its bluesy power, with ghosts of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. By the end she finds herself, once again, nearly alone. PARELESCarm featuring Edie Brickell, ‘More and More’CJ Camerieri, who records as Carm, plays brass instruments in yMusic, a contemporary chamber ensemble he co-founded; he has also backed Bon Iver and Paul Simon. In his own music, he often multitracks his trumpet and French horn into a supportive brass choir, as he does in “More and More,” a collaboration with Edie Brickell as a topliner. She sings about love, almost diffidently, amid sustained swells of brasses and strings. an electronic drumbeat and some echoing trumpet calls raise tensions, only to dissolve them in the undulating warmth of Carm’s orchestrations. PARELESWild Pink featuring Julien Baker, ‘Hold My Hand’John Ross, who leads Wild Pink, went through extensive cancer treatment between the band’s 2021 debut album and its coming one, “ILYSM.” He has explained that “Hold My Hand” came from a moment of “lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under.” As he whisper-sings to ask, “Will you be there when I come around,” joined by Julien Baker sounding delicate and fond, the band rolls through four rising chords again and again, promising nothing but reassurance. PARELESDawn Richard and Spencer Zahn, ‘Vantablack’The ever-evolving, impossible-to-pigeonhole Dawn Richard once again introduces a new side of herself on the first movement of “Pigments,” an upcoming collaborative album she made with the experimentalist Spencer Zahn. Each track on the album is named for a specific hue: “Coral,” “Sandstone,” “Indigo,” and “Vantablack” make up “Movement 1,” which the pair released in full this week. The culmination “Vantablack” is a tranquil, abstract, and utterly gorgeous contemporary classical soundscape populated by lilting clarinet, Zahn’s airy bass playing, and above it all Richard’s fluttering vocals, which profess a deep and radical comfort in her own skin. ZOLADZSteve Lehman and Sélébéyone, ‘Poesie I’In the hip-hop-jazz-avant-electroacoustic group Sélébéyone — which means “intersection” in the West African language Wolof — the saxophonist, composer and producer Steve Lehman collaborates with rappers from New York City (HPrizm from the Antipop Consortium) and Dakar (Gaston Bandimic), a saxophonist from Paris (Maciek Lasserre) and a drummer based in Brooklyn (Damion Reid). The group’s second album, “Xaybu: the Unseen,” pushes its previous ambitions further. “Poesie I” knocks its rhythms around with piano clusters, drumming that keeps moving the downbeat, hopscotching saxophone lines and a rap from HPrizm that keeps switching up its flow: “These words don’t fit so I’m forcing ‘em in/smashing the edges,” he declares. PARELES More

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      Let’s Look Back on 2021, When We Couldn’t Stop Looking Back

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      There’s now a thriving cottage industry for content that re-examines the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. Is that a good thing?Time is an abstract and collectively imaginary concept, and often our brains must latch onto contemporary metaphors to fathom its churn. So I will say, with all due respect to our (gulp?) probable future president Matthew McConaughey, this was the year I no longer felt that time was a flat circle.I found it to be moving more like a social media feed, dominated by freshly excavated and somewhat randomly retweeted remembrances of the recent past. A bit of cultural flotsam from the last 25 years would suddenly drift back up to the top of our collective consciousness and spread wildly, demanding renewed attention in the context of the present.Sometimes this was harmless fun — a welcome distraction from the fact that, this being Year 2 of a global pandemic, the actual present was depressing and exhausting to think about for too long. So everybody started watching “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos” again. Taylor Swift released note-for-note replications of two old albums, allowing everybody a brief opportunity to get mad at an ex-boyfriend she had stopped dating a solid decade ago. “Bennifer,” the most gloriously of-their-time celebrity couple of the early aughts, were back together, baby! It was almost enough to make you want to live-tweet a contemporary rewatch of “Gigli” and declare it an unfairly maligned and subversive take on sexual fluidity, or something. (I said “almost.”) In 2021, the turn-of-the-millennium past was back in a big way, even if the eyes and ears through which we were taking it all in had grown older and — just maybe — wiser.Documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears” helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series.Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.,via Getty ImagesA word I sometimes noticed bandied about this year when talking about pop culture was “presentism.” Like so many other terms whose meaning has been distorted and hollowed out by contemporary, social-media-driven use — “problematic,” “intersectionality,” “critical race theory” — it began its life as jargon confined mostly to college classrooms and undergraduate term papers. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “presentism” is a philosophical term describing “the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To translate that into pop-culture speak, it is the modern tendency to look at an old video of David Letterman grilling Lindsay Lohan on late-night TV and feeling compelled to tweet, “Yas queen, drag his ass!”But this year some of these reassessments went refreshingly deeper, and they were long past due. What’s the opposite of partying like it’s 1999? Recycling the empties, dumping out the ashtrays and soberly assessing the damage to property or — worse — people? Whatever it was, there was suddenly, and very belatedly, a lot of it going on in 2021.All year, headlines and trending topics were monopolized by old, familiar names suddenly being scrutinized under new lights, using language and means of critical thinking that had gone mainstream in the wake of both the #MeToo reckoning and last summer’s protests for racial justice. The lines separating heroes and villains, victims and monsters, were being redrawn in real time. Flashbacks to salacious media coverage of the late ’90s and early 2000s were reminding people how horribly both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson had been treated in the court of popular opinion, and how Justin Timberlake’s white male privilege had allowed him to skate through both of these controversies unscathed. (The New York Times released documentaries about both Spears and Jackson.) In a New York courtroom, the victims of R. Kelly were telling the same stories they’d been telling for years and finally being heard, if damnably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted in plain sight, while far too many of us turned away..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}So many of these conversations were so long overdue, kicked down the road because of how difficult it is for masses of people to face hard truths. But documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” “Allen V. Farrow” and “Surviving R. Kelly” (from 2019) helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series, using a familiar narrative vocabulary to sharpen viewers’ understanding of familiar events they thought they knew all about. As uncomfortable as most of these documentaries were to watch, their mass consumption helped shift public opinion, set the terms of cultural conversation, and in some cases maybe even expedited justice.Victims of R. Kelly were finally heard this year, if regrettably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted for years in plain sight.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockBut not every reconsideration felt as vital as the next. By now it feels like there is also a thriving and somewhat formulaic cottage industry for content that reconsiders the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. In September, Rolling Stone released an updated version of its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list, a fascinating and (given the racial and gender biases of its previous iterations) even noble endeavor whose critical perspectives will nonetheless, in time, look as dated and of-their-moment as those of the one it replaced. A month later, the online music magazine Pitchfork caused a brief furor when it “rescored” 19 of its old reviews, seemingly to reflect changing public opinions. (I worked there from 2011 to 2014, and one of the rescored reviews was mine.)Operating from a similar point of view, HBO has released several music documentaries in partnership with the entertainment and sports website The Ringer that invite the viewer to relive massively popular ’90s cultural phenomena (the rise of Alanis Morissette; Woodstock ’99) through the seemingly more enlightened perspective of 2021. (I worked at The Ringer from 2016-19.) Directed by the filmmaker Garret Price, “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” first came to HBO Max in July. The documentary makes the case — through repeated and rather heavy-handed montages of Columbine, the Clintons and music videos featuring angry young men in cargo shorts — that 1999 was a very particular time in pop culture, seemingly alien to anyone who didn’t live through it. The economy was prosperous and so bands were apolitical, raging against nothing in particular, or so we were told.“The intention was to do something contemporary,” the Woodstock promoter Michael Lang says at the end of the film, summing up the hubris of the original festival’s turn-of-the-millennium update. Woodstock ’99’s catastrophic failures — countless sexual assaults; several preventable deaths; massive, horrifying crowds of white people gleefully rapping the N-word — are presented in the documentary with a comforting assurance that this was the kind of thing that only could have happened in the wacky, angsty late ’90s. Never again! Right?It is surreal to watch this documentary in the aftermath of November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, which led to 10 deaths. The parallels to Woodstock ’99 (or, since time is still kind of a flat circle, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert) are haunting, with security forces that were inadequate to control such large crowds. The past, it seemed, wasn’t even past.At one point in “Woodstock 99,” the music critic Steven Hyden reflects back on the aura surrounding the original 1969 festival, and how much of it was constructed by the idyllic documentary “Woodstock.” “The problem is that instead of learning from mistakes that were made, we instead created this romanticized mythology in the form of the documentary,” Hyden said. “People watched the film, and they chose to believe that’s the way it really was.”Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality. Apple TV+I wonder if something like the opposite is happening now: The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again.But to believe the linear, one-dimensional narrative that Woodstock ’99 or misogynistic media coverage of Britney Spears can only be visible in hindsight is to gloss over the fact that plenty of people felt uncomfortable with these phenomena while they were happening. To dutifully perform belated horror at how tabloids wrote about Spears in the early 2000s, how macho rock culture was in the late ’90s, how blithely racist white people who listen to hip-hop used to be, is in some ways to believe a comforting fiction that all of these problems have been solved once and for all.The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. They invite us to wonder about the blind spots of our current cultural moment, and to watch out for the sorts of behaviors and assumptions that will, in 20 years’ time, look nearsighted enough to appear in a kitschy montage about the way things were.The best movie I saw this year broke this cycle, essentially by presenting another, more harmonious way the past and present coexist. Todd Haynes’s remarkable and immersive documentary “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality — a little bit like Andy Warhol did in his own slow, strange art films.I was not alive in 1967, the year the Velvet Underground released its debut album, but for a heady and hypnotic two hours, I could have sworn I was. Split-screen images suggested the validity of multiple truths. The music’s blaring brilliance rained down self-evidently rather than having to be overexplained by talking heads. Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Moe Tucker all seemed, at various moments, to be both geniuses and jerks. Neither glorified nor condemned, 1967 came flickering alive and seemed about as wonderful and awful a time to be alive as 1999 or 2021. Or, it stands to reason, 2022. More

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      The Moment That Janet Jackson’s Career Stalled and Justin Timberlake’s Soared

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      Jackson was vilified after her 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, while Timberlake’s popularity seemed to take off. Our new documentary examines how the superstars were treated after their unforgettable wardrobe malfunction.Reuters//Gary Hershorn (United States Entertainment)‘Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson’Producer/Director Jodi GomesReporter/Senior Producer Rachel AbramsReporter Alan LightWatch our new documentary on Friday, Nov. 19, at 10 p.m. on FX and streaming on Hulu.The term “wardrobe malfunction” has been part of our vocabulary ever since Janet Jackson’s right breast made a surprise appearance at the end of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.When Justin Timberlake tore off part of Jackson’s bustier in front of 70,000 people in Houston’s Reliant Stadium, over 140 million people watching on TV gasped — if they noticed.It happened so quickly (the moment lasted nine-sixteenths of one second) that even some of the halftime show’s producers missed it until their phones, and phones all over America, started ringing.“Did you see what just happened?” Jim Steeg, the National Football League’s director of special events, asked Salli Frattini, the MTV executive in charge of the halftime show. She had to rewind the tape to be sure.“We looked at the close-up shot. We looked at the wide shot, and we all stood there in shock,” Frattini recalled in a new documentary by The New York Times.Was it an accident? Was it planned? Was it a stunt?The ensuing uproar — from the N.F.L., from the Federal Communications Commission, from politicians and their allies — was the peak of a national debate at the time over what’s acceptable on America’s airwaves, and who gets to decide.In our documentary, premiering Friday at 10 p.m. Eastern time on FX and Hulu, we hear from the former commissioner of the N.F.L., Paul Tagliabue, and the MTV executives who were in charge of producing the halftime show. And we talk to some of the politicians who seized on the moment to try to rein in content that they deemed inappropriate.We also look back at Jackson’s long career, which never seemed to recover, while Timberlake’s soared. And we consider how issues of race and sexism mixed to consume one superstar’s legacy and propel another’s career to the next level.Supervising Producer Liz DayProducers Fred Charleston, Jr., Anthony McLemore, Timothy MoranCo-Producer Melanie BencosmeDirector of Photography Asad FaruqiVideo Editor Geoff O’Brien“The New York Times Presents” is a series of documentaries representing the unparalleled journalism and insight of The New York Times, bringing viewers close to the essential stories of our time. More

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      Justin Timberlake Apologizes to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Britney Spears’s Legal BattleControl of Spears’s Estate‘We’re Sorry, Britney’Justin Timberlake ApologizesWatch ‘Framing Britney Spears’ in the U.S.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJustin Timberlake Apologizes to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson“I understand that I fell short,” he said on Instagram, adding that he “benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism.”A week after the release of a Britney Spears documentary, Justin Timberlake said he was “deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right.”Credit…Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated PressFeb. 12, 2021, 1:10 p.m. ETThe singer and actor Justin Timberlake apologized to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson on Friday in a vague but earnest Instagram post, a week after a New York Times documentary on Spears set off a wave of criticism of Timberlake for how he treated the pop star after their breakup.The apology to Jackson seemed to stem from the infamous Super Bowl halftime performance in 2004, when a closing duet between Timberlake and Jackson ended with Timberlake singing “Bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song” as he tore away more of her costume than had been planned, to reveal — live and televised worldwide — her uncovered breast. In the aftermath, Jackson was the subject of most of the backlash, and Timberlake later conceded that he should have defended her more.Without specifying what exactly he was apologizing for, Timberlake wrote that he had seen all the messages, tags and comments on social media in recent days and that he was “deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right.”“I understand that I fell short in these moments and in many others and benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism,” he said in the post.The documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” which premiered on Hulu and FX on Feb. 5, included a re-examination of the world’s reaction to Timberlake and Spears’s breakup, which was framed in the media as being Spears’s fault — partly because a music video by Timberlake implied that Spears had cheated on him. It included a clip from a radio interview with Timberlake in which he was asked whether he had sex with Spears and he replied, “OK, yeah, I did it,” evoking cheers.The documentary prompted calls on social media for direct apologies from many people who made jokes at Spears’s expense or interviewed her in ways now viewed as insensitive, sexist or simply unfair. But one of the most prominent apologies sought by fans was from Timberlake; others piped up to ask, “What about Janet Jackson?”The mea culpa eventually landed.“I specifically want to apologize to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson both individually, because I care for and respect these women and I know I failed,” the post from Timberlake said. “Because of my ignorance, I didn’t recognize it for all that it was while it was happening in my own life but I do not want to ever benefit from others being pulled down again.”In the aftermath of the Super Bowl halftime show, Timberlake apologized to the program’s audience as well as “anyone offended.” At the Grammy Awards, which that year followed the Super Bowl, he won two awards, while apologizing for the “unintentional” incident. Years later, he said in an interview with MTV, “There could have been ways that I could have gone about it, handled it better.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More