The tortured pop it-girl and what really makes a generational pop icon 

Pop singer Tate McRae is still riding the wave of success from her September single release “It’s ok I’m ok”. Although the single isn’t much of a departure from her sound and image up to this point, the music video for the track went semi-viral for its super sexy imagery and the song’s fierceness. Between the addictive choreography, nude underwear, and explicit “good girl gone bad” narrative, many have compared the artist’s latest venture to previous pop it girls, with some calling her “this generation's Britney Spears”. But the relatively unanimous appraisal of Tate’s most recent performance with statements such as this directly contradicts them – what set Britney apart, what made her the icon of her generation, is that her hypersexual aesthetic had to be frowned upon and scrutinised endlessly to be finally accepted as a cultural landmark.  

This is not to invalidate Tate McRae’s performance abilities, or persona in general. The total performance element of pop – the arduous choreography, the overdramatic fanning of the hair, the little headset microphone, the outrageously sexy stage outfits – is a element of entertainment crucial to the genre whose comeback has been long overdue. But when Britney did it, although she wasn’t the first, she did so in a far more unforgiving period of pop culture – between tabloid culture and the inception of social media, diet culture and unattainable beauty standards were at an all time high. There was no public discussion of mental health either, and although the “good girl gone bad” archetype already existed thanks to people like Madonna, Britney’s transition from Mouseketeer to “I’m a Slave 4 U” put a target on her back for public censorship and scrutiny. In spite of all of it, she’s still recognized as one of the greatest pop artists of all time. 

The first super sexy era of Britney (not necessarily when she was first sexualized, unfortunately, but when she began singing about sexuality and stopped being infantilized by schoolgirl uniforms), was the song and video for “I’m a Slave 4 U” in 2001. The provocative lyrics, belly dancing, and outfits sparked intense criticism from conservative outlets and the Parents Association of America, with the governor of Maryland at the time even claiming that he would “shoot her” if given the chance. Britney was nineteen at the time. “Britney Spears started a new trend. The now clichéd trend of a young girl transitioning from the Disney Channel to a squeaky clean pop image than into overtly sexual 'femme fatale'" wrote Peter Travers for Rolling Stone in 2017. 

The song’s accompanying VMAs performance, in which Britney balanced a live python on her shoulders and belly danced in an iconic green and teal draping two piece, became instantly iconic, with the fit being replicated for years in the media and for halloween. It has also become the sort of metric by which the impressiveness of other VMAs performances are measured. 

In 2007, when Britney was still only 25, she suffered an extremely public mental lapse, which saw her transform physically in the form of shaving her head and gaining weight. The star was suffering both from public scrutiny regarding her divorce, as well as the constant hounding by the paparazzi, and postpartum depression. As a result, there was a period of time when Britney was viewed more as a public spectacle of a woman having a nervous breakdown than what she was: an artist. What today would have sparked a somewhat sympathetic discourse on the mental wellbeing of people constantly in the public eye then warranted a court-ordered conservatorship under her father, despite her objections. Although she was placed on temporary psychiatric hold in 2008, this conservatorship, which only controlled her finances, interpersonal life, and career image, was seen as the viable solution to Britney’s turmoil, as opposed to meeting her needs. 

When she did return to the public eye with a performance of “Gimme More” from the album Blackout at the 2007 VMAs, her dishevelled nature during the performance, as well as her body not being as toned as it once was (although clearly still a healthy body), made her the media’s biggest target for ridicule. Major news outlets like E! and the New York Post came out with cruel headlines about her physical appearance, and editor of US Weekly Janice Min said of the two-piece set she wore “In that ensemble, you just can’t have anything extra…she’s built a career on an image of sexiness”. While there was an inkling that this attitude towards her body was wrong to many, few were thinking critically enough yet about the association between a declining mental state and its correlation to physical appearance and behaviour, so her performance was criticised as if it was another isolated incident, another tick on the list of ways Britney’s public image had “failed”, as per Min’s comments. 

Similarly to Britney, Tate McRae had a career in show business before becoming a high-profile pop girl as a professional dancer. However, she was never a “public figure” in the same way Britney was, nor was she known writ large for a family-friendly, girl-next-door image produced by the Disney channel. At present, the comparisons to early Britney make sense, at least intrinsically – the outfits, the desire to be more provocative, the demanding choreography, and over-the-top performances. But the kind of sexiness she demonstrated most recently in the “It’s ok I’m ok” video – the self-aware, good girl gone bad, autonomous sexiness inspired directly by Britney – would not be embraced without the likes of “I’m a Slave 4 U”, and the sexual freedom female pop stars have been allowed to exhibit since. 

And while Tate McRae’s music isn’t immune to criticism (it’s been called homogenous and one-dimensional, and she’s been accused of being an “industry plant”), a lot of which is motivated simply by the sexist hatred people will always have for successful pop girls being successful pop girls, no major outlets attack her personally, in ways that concern her body and mental health. 

Granted, she hasn’t experienced the same kind of physical transformation or public breakdown that Britney has, but even her public relationships don’t receive the same kind of invasive dissection Britney’s did. Tate sings about tumultuous past relationships and being cheated on, but Britney’s romantic life was thrust into the public eye against her will, specifically with her breakup from Justin Timberlake, her divorce from Kevin Federline, and the loss of custody of her children. 

And yes, Britney, like Tate, did chart incredibly high as she was releasing music. “Gimme More” went number three on Billboard after the infamous VMAs performance. But her commercial popularity didn’t mean the industry was friendly to her or on her side, not in the way it is to Tate McRae. If anything, Blackout was treated as a sort of musical accompaniment to the spectacle the world made of Britney’s personal life. In fact, the idea of a public scandal the magnitude of Britney’s being received as it was is so unfathomable to Gen Z’s collective social consciousness that it has been reduced to a nostalgia-inducing aesthetic, as it is in the “It’s ok I’m ok” music video when Tate acts out being arrested naked on a cop car. Tate may be able to embody it in performance, but Britney did so as she was also living it.  

It’s not that there are no boundaries left to push in pop music and no pop girls have the ability to do so, both at the level of production and performance, as well as representation. LGBTQ+ pop stars exhibiting the same kind of sexiness and hyper-femininity as people like Tate McRae and Britney, for instance, Kim Petras and Tove Lo, are breaking the internalised association between femininity, heterosexuality, and gender normativity through their aesthetics. And, at the level of the music itself,  people like Charli XCX are relocating the sound of pop to accessible and countercultural spaces like clubs and raves, bringing extremely textured electronic production pioneered by people like the late great SOPHIE into the mainstream. What is also significant about Charli is that her extensive discography before Brat received a fraction of the success, but was just as experimental and conveyed the same values. Thus Charli’s image and career were never curated for mainstream success, and it’s the public that had to catch up with her vision. I don’t know if the same can be said for someone like Tate McRae, who was marketable from the beginning of her music career.  

What would make someone on par with icons of pop music innovation like Britney or Madonna isn’t merely a replication of performance style that has only come to be accepted through their careers. If anything, it’s a departure from the pop innovators we’ve seen before that would mark someone as a generational pop icon, something that is being facilitated by opening the door in pop to women of colour, queer women, and plus-sized women. So, while Tate McRae no doubt has the performing chops and style of someone like Britney, it’s because of people like Britney, that this performance style (being young and unapologetically sexy) can be so well received in the mainstream. But nothing is being challenged, or changed, by Tate McRae doing what Britney has already done.