Britney Spears Debut Album Unleashed On World 15 Years Ago

Britney Spears debut album was released 15 years ago yesterday, January 12, 1999 — immediately turning the then-17-year-old singer/dancer into a worldwide star, becoming the best selling album by a teenage artist in history and the best selling first album by any artist of any age.

But the album and the accompanying video for its title track also did exactly what music for and by young people is supposed to: outraged adults and created moral panic over teenage sexuality.

According to MTV News, Britney Spears …Baby One More Time album and the way it skyrocketed the teen singer to seemingly unimaginable heights of fame and influence carried important cultural significance.

“The then-17-year-old not only ushered in a new wave of enthusiasm for pop music,” said MTV writer Jocelyn Vena, “but also shaped the way a generation of tween and teen girls looked, danced and expressed themselves.”

The album sold 13 million copies in the United States, hit number one in 15 different countries and went on to sell a total of 30 million copies, according to the Huffington Post U.K.

But as happens with many stars who experience overwhelming fame and money at an early age, the road was not all smooth for Britney Spears. By 2007 she underwent a very public emotional breakdown, in which she admitted herself to various treatment facilities.

That period in her life was perhaps best exemplified by the image of a bald Britney Spears, who had inexplicably shaved her head at a salon near her home in Los Angeles San Fernando Valley, attacking a photographer’s vehicle with an umbrella.

When her debt album, …Baby One More Time, was unleashed on the world, however, the controversy centered around Britney Spears’ carefully crafted public image as an “innocent” schoolgirl who was at the same time highly sexualized.

The full title of the song, “…Baby One More Time” was stated in the lyrics, “Hit me baby one more time,” which seemed to present Spears as a sexually frustrated teenage girl longing for rough sex with an unnamed object of her desire.

The video for the song, which can be viewed above, did nothing to dispel that impression, showing Britney Spears with pigtails in a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, but with her shirt cropped high to display her midriff as she performed a highly choreographed dance number while suggestively crooning to an anonymous young man, “Boy you’ve got me blinded / Oh baby baby / There’s nothin’ that I wouldn’t do,” and other similar lyrics.

As it turned out, though during the early stages of her fame Britney Spears often asserted her intention to remain a virgin until marriage, her mother revealed in a memoir that Britney in fact lost her virginity at age 14 to a high school football player.

In 2008, as Britney Spears recovered from her emotional troubles, her father Jamie Spears was appointed by a court to be conservator to his daughter. He received a $16,000 per month salary for taking care of her and, he told a court, handling Britney Spears’ business deals.