In July 2014, an anonymous source leaked the raw audio of Britney Spears’s confessional ballad “Alien.” Haters pounced on this star’s denuded voice, gleefully seizing on the viral artifact as a smoking gun for Spears’s deficits and for the pop industry’s artistic fakeries more broadly. My paper situates this flashpoint of Spears-shaming within late-capitalist archives of public humiliation, cyberleaks, and the paternalistic scrutiny of women’s bodies and voices.
© 2018 by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch (IASPM-US). All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
2018
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University of California Press