How Pop Pantheon Created One of the Richest Texts to Date on Britney Spears
A chat with DJ Louie XIV about his one-of-one deep dive on one of pop’s must enduring icons.
It’s a commonly held belief, particularly among pop culture obsessives, that Britney Spears is among the richest texts in not only pop music, but pop culture as a whole. It’s a thought pattern that drove Pop Pantheon’s DJ Louie XIV to create an expansive five-part series exploring her career from its origins to her current status, culminating in an episode dedicated to assigning her status within the pantheon. Pop Pantheon contains four main tiers ranging from Tier 1: Icons (example: Madonna) to Tier 4: Working Class Pop Stars (example: Normani). There’s Tier 5, which is quite literally for everyone else, as well as a Niche Legend category that essentially is a holding ground for pop stars who don’t neatly fit into the rubric (example: Robyn). I won’t spoil where DJ Louie XIV and his panel of experts ultimately ranked Spears — though I will say it was quite a contentious debate — but I will say that every episode felt like mandatory listening.
What separates DJ Louie XIV from the pack in the most obvious sense is his meticulous research. He spent four months in the lead-up to recording digging into the annals of Spears’s public life to excavate every stone, those turned over and over again as well as those less picked over. Beyond that, he went to great lengths to situate listeners on where the culture was at that time. Because to understand Britney Spears is also to examine American history and the rise of neoconservatism alongside her early career and how much that dictated how she was metabolized by the general public. It’s also a study in control: how much she had at any given time based off of what we know, and how to look at the work, particularly the back half of her catalogue, knowing that her late career successes came at a harsh cost to her wellbeing.
What I love about this series — and there’s a lot to love about it — is the way DJ Louie XIV balances his clear and obsessive fandom for her, one that is so clearly formative, with top tier research and a purposeful effort toward objectivity. It’s the combination of the two that makes this series so uniquely of DJ Louie XIV design, and one that surely should not be missed. In a media ecosystem that too often devalues the work of journalism and a society moving frighteningly away from critical thought and analysis, Pop Pantheon is consistently a beacon. In celebration of this milestone series, I sat down with DJ Louie XIV to discuss how the sauce was made, and what he learned about his beloved in the process.
I know you mentioned that this took around four months of research, and I think that's one of the things that really distinguishes both you and Pop Pantheon as a podcast: the meticulous research that goes into it. I think a lot of people get on the microphone and sound off about Britney, and those aren't bad, but this is different. It's a craft. How did you go about researching her?
I start with a really detailed outline that I make for myself and for the guests, because we want to prepare the best we can for the people that are coming on the show who are usually some degree of expert in what they're talking about. I want to make sure that they know what I'm going to be asking them and they can come prepared to answer all of the in-depth questions we're going to ask. We often get comments from guests about how these are some of the most in-depth outlines they've ever seen. This is not your average fluff interview. You really do have to come with the goods. I can't thank everybody that comes on the show enough — yourself included — for the work that they put into this because it's insane to me.
But the research process for me — I honestly just move through it completely chronologically. I’ll start with their early life, read as much as I can and look at as much as I can, try to piece together the answers to the questions that I’ve posed for myself. And it’s really fun in a series like this where we're getting to do multiple episodes on them because you can just go so deep. Sometimes, when we're trying to compact things into one or two episodes, I've got to figure out what I'm putting my attention on, what I'm not putting my attention on, on what feels the most germane. But with Britney, we wanted to spread it out as much as we possibly could which gave me the opportunity to go into every nook and cranny possible.
I read everything that I possibly can biographically. I will dig up every review, every profile that was written on them during that period, contemporary retrospectives. I watch every music video, I watch every performance. I just want to understand what people were thinking about it and then how people have reassessed it over time. I make copious notes to myself ranging from the most inane and then every once in a while, I’ll come up with some idea that will reframe the other things I've listened to. That's true of every episode, but with Britney, I didn't have to make any of the time constraint concessions that I have to make when we're trying to condense. Once all the research is done, I come up with a more grand theory for the case that I can apply across all of the episodes, and then in speaking to all these people, I get re-oriented and I get to learn as much in that moment as I did in the weeks of research that went into prepping for the episodes.
Britney's early career existed before the Internet came to prominence, so I assume it could be difficult to find archival pieces of media. How do you excavate those artifacts?
I'm honestly just digging through the Internet. As I'm editing the episodes, I'll instinctually try to think about when it will be instructive and helpful to the episode to hear supporting content. And especially with Britney, she is someone that is really pored over by fans. This is somebody of immense cultural fascination. Forget her tier ranking in the Pop Pantheon in terms of celebrity — she’s somebody that is just raked over. In Britney’s story, agency is such a huge question that hangs over the whole thing; what was her decision? What wasn't her decision? What was put upon her? How much is her own vision? I wanted to make sure, especially with her, to include her own voice and perspective as much as I could using these archival clips. One thing that’s an icky process of this with Britney is that she's uniquely stripped of agency in a lot of the cultural dialogue about her. In some ways, that’s the story of her career.
There’s this “cautionary tale” angle to her story.
Right. How much of this was her own making and how much of this was just a little girl that was thrust into something that was way bigger than her and then had to shoulder the burden of so much culture and expectation. I will dig through the Internet to find things that I feel emotionally capture, things that I want to hear from her or help place the audience in a contemporary context. The other thing about podcasts is that it can be a lot of people chatting, but my aim is to viscerally place people in moments as much as I possibly can, so I’ll go on YouTube and just watch any Total Request Live appearance. I’ll just spend hours digging on the Internet, trying to find sometimes just a five-to-ten-second sound bite that will illuminate the moment as much as possible.
I went back recently and rewatched Britney: For the Record and was so struck by that moment where she calls her dad an asshole to her friend. That hits really different now knowing what we know. In your research, were there any interviews or moments that felt particularly warped with the context we have today?
One of the things that really interests me about Britney is that her career coincides with the rise of neoconservatism and the George W. Bush administration. I see the TRL cohort as a retrenchment towards conservatism in a lot of ways. It's so fascinating because Britney is seen by a lot of people as an oversexualized, boundary pusher in certain ways, which is true, but I also feel the way that she pushed buttons was in a mid-century kind of way that was oppositional to some of the more empowered female sexual presentations of the people that inspired her, like Madonna and Cher — people who spent decades trying to get rid of this “wink wink” sexuality and tried to take on more of a “I am actually being sexual and I'm talking about that and there are thoughts behind that and I'm doing that for a reason. I want to present women in this way.” Britney and that whole TRL cohort went back into a little bit more of a mid-century coded “I'm doing one thing but I'm wearing the purity ring and I want to make sure that Christians approve of me.” Madonna didn't care! In fact, Madonna loved Christians not approving of her.
So one of the things that really stuck out to me was these few clips. There was one from the press tour for Oops!... I Did It Again where the 2000 election is on the boiler and numerous times, reporters are asking, “Britney, who are you supporting in the election?” and Britney constantly just says, “I defer to my dad. My dad is really smart and I'm not that involved in politics so whoever my dad votes for, I’ll vote for.” She repeats that line in at least three separate interviews that I saw and I just found that really interesting in terms of how it points to where we were culturally at that moment. You have a mainstream pop star that's probably codedly supporting a Republican presidential candidate in that way and there’s this deference towards her father. She was the most famous person on earth at that moment and her PR people told her to say that dad line. I think it speaks to how they were positioning her as a teenager who wasn't a full grown adult and needed to ask Daddy for permission.
You called this series maybe the most important that you’ve done on the show as far as listeners are concerned. What feedback led you to this conclusion?
I think that our main demographics are in our age group, and then I think to those younger than us, Britney just looms really, really large. I think the idea of Britney as the generic ideal of a pop star for our generation has showed in how big this series has been for us and how excited our listeners have been to hear it and how deeply meaningful it is for them. I knew that was gonna happen because I feel this way about Britney, too, but I'm also trying to bring a lens of objectivity and try to get out of my own experience as much as I can to see this from more of a bird's eye view that is the Pop Pantheon.
That’s part of what’s so endearing about you: We all, as listeners, feel that you’re recognizing that you have an affection for this person while still giving us the objective story.
At the end of the day, I want to look back on the work that we did here and feel like we came out with a canon that feels broadly recognizable to people. I make decisions sometimes that people don't agree with and that sometimes go against my own inclinations. There are so many artists that I love that if it was the Louie Pantheon, the whole thing would be totally different, but I try to get out of that. So sometimes I'm dealing with artists that I really didn't experience in real time, like Tina Turner or Little Richard or Cher, and I didn't have a visceral experience with their peak success. I don't know what it felt like to be 25 when Cher was in The Sonny and Cher Show. But there’s the flip side with Britney and Beyoncé and Christina and all these people that formed my identity and who I have deep personal connections to. I literally pretended to be Britney in my bedroom when I was nine. My entire journey into my own femininity and queerness and all that kind of stuff was totally informed by looking up to these women. It's that queer to pop diva worship thing. I just try my best to share that with the audience but also to make sure that I try to be as omniscient as I can be.
One name that did not come up on the podcast was Christina Aguilera, who famously was pitted against Britney in the media. There's this unknown lore about what went down with Christina and the Coke commercial, and I always wonder if she had created something in an attempt to match what Britney did for Pepsi.
What's interesting about Britney and Christina to me in retrospect is how much everything in pop for a long time was reactionary to Britney. Christina effectively spent a large part of her post-debut career attempting to telegraph to us that she is not Britney and that they are different artists. Once you get out of that kind of explosive first moment where everything appears to be happening in the wake of “...Baby One More Time,” the entire pop cultural landscape appears reactionary to that. Christina achieved a bifurcation away from that debate with Stripped and I think that it's one of her most effective moves. I'm sure in the moment, people were comparing everything, but after that first moment, it feels like they went on very different trajectories.
Did any part of this process change your feelings on Britney?
The chart success of Femme Fatale is really interesting to me because Britney actually had her most sustained singles chart success during the conservatorship era, during Circus and Femme Fatale in terms of pure hits on the Hot 100. Something that got highlighted to me through the process of making this is that even though she had success for such a long time, I experienced anew just how much of that success is tainted and uncomfortable. Britney had all of these hits all the way through the mid-2010s and that is really unique and impressive and something that pretty much nobody else in her TRL core cohort besides Beyoncé really pulled off, and that does elevate her into the highest echelon of pop stardom, and I love Circus and Femme Fatale years, but I felt kind of weird about all of it in a way that I never did in the moment, even though I knew instinctively something was off during that time. I think now, having read her memoir and just having gone as in depth and watching what a passionate and emotionally evocative performer I found her to be in that early time period and just seeing that slip away over the course of doing this research, it made me think about the second half of her career differently than I had before — again, not to take away from the commercial success of it, but it made the commercial success feel almost icky to me.
I wanted to ask you about the 2021 court appearance because I feel that's a watershed Britney moment that doesn't get talked about enough. I remember hearing that for the first time and finding it so striking how coherent she was. But it's then confusing because Britney’s subsequent return to Instagram feels different than how she came off in that audio recording.
I completely agree with you and I do think this is really hard to talk about. I have so much empathy for her and there’s a fierce desire to protect this person. That’s a huge, pervasive feeling in our culture right now, which I'm happy about. I would way rather have this than what we had in 2006 when everyone was making fun of her. But I agree that there was a real fire in that moment. It was her return to the fiery passion that we really hadn't seen since 2003 or 2004 in her performances. It was direct, it was clear, it was embodied. She clearly had been waiting to say that stuff for a really, really long time. She was fucking pissed and she still seems very angry. There's a lot of anger in Britney’s music writ large from the beginning, and understandably so. But that moment — I remember where I was when I listened to it live. It was incredible and very cathartic.
But the fact that Britney’s recent Instagram posts don’t seem to reflect the cogent state that she was in at that moment kind of gets at the heart of what this series left me with, which is that I don't believe we're getting a happy ending — not that Britney won't be a happy person. I hope she finds everything that she's looking for. I think there's something really powerful and really empowered of her to stop making music and get off the pop star train. Even the dancing on Instagram — there's something interesting about the fact that she is doing this freeform dancing that’s the opposite of the tightly controlled, constricted choreography that was part of her signature in her early career. One spin on it is that she's taking back her own life and her agency. Why she is performing that for us every day in front of the camera is a darker thing. For me, there’s just no neat ending to the story. We're not getting the fairytale ending that we might want. We do get this burst of catharsis in that speech, but at the same time, we don't get to walk into the sunset together.
How cognizant or fearful, perhaps, were you of the Britney fan army?
I'd be lying if I told you that I'm not always anxious about stan armies. I am a Jew with anxiety. And if you're talking about pop stars, you are making yourself susceptible to people on the Internet that are extremely passionate about them. But what I come back to is my hope that everybody that listens to it can feel the genuine love that [my producer] Russ and I approach this with. I wouldn't want to betray my own integrity by not sharing honestly some of the stuff that I feel about the situation that maybe aren't things that the stan army wants to hear. I express criticism as an act of love because that's what I feel. If you want to hold Britney up amongst the top pop stars in the world, she should be as available for fair cultural criticism as anybody else. You can't give her special treatment as if we have to put her in a glass box. There will always be people that only want to hear positive things and only want to hear their version of events, but at the end of the day, I hope that this podcast can be a beacon of cultural criticism in a time when that feels under threat in general because of the reactions of fans online. I think criticism is such an important part of how we process and understand art and thus ourselves and thus our world, and I feel that is getting squashed out in a lot of instances by the folding of media companies and the lack of money in the media industry and this pervasive fear of what we can and can’t say without getting attacked.
Chappell called “Scream & Shout” her favorite song of all time during a recent appearance on Call Her Daddy. I know from listening to the pod you strongly disagree. Why do you think this song is regarded so highly by Britney casuals and why do you think Britney loyalists tend to feel differently?
I think because Britney casuals probably have the joyous experience of just thinking about her work as: “Is this catchy and fun?” And of course, “Scream and Shout” is an earworm. I think people that are more engaged with Britney are more interested in where Britney was in 2012. And it was probably not a good place. I'm so glad that we have her memoir because as much as Britney fans were right about Free Britney, we also have Britney's own voice talking about her own coercion and her own lack of agency and engagement in a lot of those particular moments, so I'm really happy we have that too because I think that also neutralizes the idea that you can't criticize any of that stuff. She emphasizes that she is critical of elements of that as well. So I think when it comes to “Scream and Shout,” if you're engaged enough, you're burdened with knowing that was a period of Britney's career where she was less in control of what she was doing. She didn't speak about that song in particular, but I think for me personally that song feels like a collaboration with an artist who doesn't necessarily appreciate what makes the best Britney song. I think the more Britney is into what she's making, the better her music. By her own admission, she talks about Blackout being the best thing she ever made. She talks about how in the zone she was and how much she cared about that record, and it shows.
Have you thought about any ways that you might want to revisit Britney on the pod in the future?
For sure. If she ever does anything new, we will be covering it with haste. We're currently exploring new ways to revisit artists that we've already done series on. We recently ranked all of Lady Gaga's albums. I think there will be episodes in the future where we revisit Britney from different angles. Hers is one of the richest texts in pop music history. Even with the 12, 13 hours of Britney content that we put out, I still feel there's stuff we couldn't address, so we will definitely be revisiting. There's still so much to say.