2005-01-21 - 3:00 p.m.

i'm going to make a confession to you. i love britney spears.

i can't entirely explain it. but i remember very clearly the first time i heard her. i was curious about what her music sounds like. i've known since working at y! that her name is often at the top of the most-searched terms. can so many fifteen-year-old girls be wrong? (that's a rhetorical question, btw). so i bought a bootleg of her third album, 'britney' on canal street and popped it on the stereo.

the first song (i'm a slave 4 U) is pretty good, your standard professionally overproduced single. but the second song, 'overprotected' almost reduced me to tears. somehow the production hits exactly every emotional note for my inner fifteen-year-old. all of a sudden i felt the same stunted rage against my parents, the same optimistic frustration with the world. i had to sit down.

there are certainly some clunkers on that album. for instance, i don't think britney spears belongs anywhere near a ballad. even her ex- justin timberlake has a better voice. but by the time her cover of joan jett's 'i love rock 'n' roll' came on i had fallen deeply in love.

is it her midriff? her sassiness? her ability to go from vegas marriage to tabloid divorce in 60 seconds flat? the fact that she kissed madonna? (i know that christina aguilera also kissed madonna, but like the rest of the world, i hardly noticed). i can't explain it. i downloaded her recent greatest hits album, with an amazing cover of bobby brown's 'my perogative', and deleted all the ballads. everytime i have to run an errand or do something i don't really want to do i just put britney on my iPod and strut about my business,

on a recent crate-digging mission to the vinyl academy, i noticed a couple of britney DJ singles in the dollar bin (!). i've already managed to dig up 'me against the music' and 'outrageous', and there in front of me for the low low price of $2 were both 'everytime' and 'overprotected'! but i'd have to endure the scorn of the record store employees to get them out the door, and if you've ever dug crates you know that's no small thing.

i looked lovingly at britney's bared midriff on the cover of 'overprotected'. i looked around the vinyl shop and i knew what i had to do. i slipped the records to the bottom of my pile. later that evening, i danced around my apartment to 'overprotected' like i was fifteen again.

o britney! speak for the teenager in all of us. or at least take off some more of your clothes.

in case you're wondering, i also have some timberlake vinyl. and you can take it from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands.