Natasha Lasky, "Britney Spears's Blackout" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst of her public breakdown, she managed to record an album,\xa0Blackout. Critics thought it spelled the end for Britney Spears' career.\nBut\xa0Blackout\xa0turned out to be one of the most influential albums of the aughts. It not only brought glitchy digital noise and dubstep into the Top 40, but also transformed Britney into a new kind of pop star, one who shrugged off mainstream ubiquity for the devotion of smaller groups of fans who worshipped her idiosyncratic sound.\nBritney Spears\u2019s Blackout\xa0(Bloomsbury, 2022)\xa0returns to the grimy clubs and paparazzi hangouts of LA in the 2000s as well as the blogs and forums of the early internet to show how Blackout was a crucial hinge between twentieth and twenty-first-century pop.\nNatasha Lasky is a writer and filmmaker living in Chicago, USA.\nNatasha on\xa0Instagram.\nBradley Morgan\xa0is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of\xa0U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley on\xa0Twitter.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies