And so “Rebellion” took on further significance, becoming emblematic of the situation that fans believed Spears now found herself in.
Concern among fans about the validity and necessity of the conservatorship grew, especially as Spears herself had expressed her desire to terminate the arrangement. “Rebellion” lingered on in the background, the song’s paranoid lyrics playing out in real-time. “With ‘Rebellion‘, fans are now searching for answers to questions they have about their favourite pop star and what led to a situation where they were gaslighted by those involved in the conservatorship into complicity” Larry Rudolph returned to manage her, and by November 2008 she had a new album out and a world tour planned. Spears was placed under the conservatorship less than five months after the album’s release. This brief glimpse of freedom, which made space for Spears to release her most adventurous and cohesive record yet with Blackout, was short-lived.
“I am now more mature and feel like I am finally ‘free’,” she wrote. In one letter published at the beginning of 2007, around the same time that Spears briefly fired Rudolph as her manager, she spoke about “where I want to go with myself as an entertainer with absolutely no strings attached”. But she continued to connect with her fans via her website, sporadically posting letters where she chastised the tabloids, discussing motherhood and giving her side of the story. In the years that followed, the singer’s behaviour became more concerning, as did the media circus that grew around her. Should we talk to her like we did when she was 16 or like the icon everyone says she is?”
#Preference manager from digital rebellion how to#
“With this newly found freedom, it’s like people don’t know how to act around me. “I’ve actually learned to say NO!” she wrote. Spears also spoke about the restraints enforced by her label and those around her in a letter she posted on her website in 2004. “She just wanted somebody to say I believe in you beyond this pop machine.” “She said nobody really listens to her,” songwriter Michelle Bell, who worked with Spears before the release of 2003’s In the Zone album, told BuzzFeed. Still, Spears talked about wanting to be taken more seriously as an artist, according to people who worked with her during that time. (Rudolph, who had managed Spears for over 25 years – aside from a brief period between 20 – resigned as her manager in 2021 amid the legal proceedings surrounding the dissolution of the conservatorship.) A reworked version of “Mona Lisa” later appeared on the EP Britney and Kevin: Chaotic. Speaking to BuzzFeed in 2014, Spears’s manager, Larry Rudolph, also dubbed reports of the album “a bullshit story with zero factual basis”. The singer’s label, Jive, later denied its existence. She told the radio hosts that the song was from her upcoming album called Original Doll. “They want her to breakdown / Be a legend of her fall,” Spears sings in the second verse in another spine-chillingly prophetic lyric. The track, recorded with her band while she was on tour, is about the demise of a famous woman, the consumption of her downfall as entertainment and her quest for freedom. On December 30, 2004, Britney Spears appeared as a surprise guest on Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM, where she debuted a rough mix of a new song called “Mona Lisa”. Instead, the song speaks to another form of control that Spears was battling against, one that perhaps coalesced with the players of the conservatorship and led to the singer’s imprisonment in her own life. It even arrived before the events of 20, which led up to its formations – including allegations that Sam Lutfi, Spears’s manager during that period, was drugging and manipulating her (Lufti denies these allegations). But “Rebellion” predates the conservatorship. This lyrical nugget is scarily prescient given the horrors that came to light during the reports and disputes about the controversial conservatorship that controlled the singer’s life for nearly 14 years. But in rebellion / There’s a sparkle of truth / Don’t just stand there / Do what you got to do.” “ The poison they feed you / And the voodoo that they do. “ Be wary of others / The ones closest to you,” Spears sings in the opening verse over a gloomy beat and claustrophobic strings, her voice quiet with paranoia. Yet what makes “Rebellion” significant is not its obscurity but its lyrical content.
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