What will it take to finally #FreeBritney?

This week, at long last, Britney Spears took the opportunity to make her own voice heard, and the world won’t soon forget it. Rachel Brodsky takes a look back at the recent, tumultuous years of the singer’s remarkable career and considers whether she may finally be able to take back control of her life

‘I worked seven days a week, no days off, which in California, the only similar thing to this is called sex trafficking,’ Spears said in a bombshell 23-minute speech (AFP/Getty)

Earlier this week, pop music icon Britney Spears shared a video of her holiday in Maui on her Instagram. On the surface, the footage contains all the hallmarks of a pop star on holiday: the camera pans across a stunning view from a penthouse suite; the singer relaxes by the pool with boyfriend, Sam Asghari; Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut” soundtracks a mellow car ride through tropical paradise; Spears is handed a fruity drink. Later, she rides Asghari piggyback through crystal-clear water, excitedly yelling, “I’m a minnow, baby, I’m a minnow!” As the clip wraps up, though, Spears is doing something else: there are no bodies of water or sunshine-dappled trees. She’s dancing, twirling and flipping her long, blonde hair in what appears to be a windowless studio.

Before 23 June, this might have seemed like a totally normal thing for Spears to do. Most of her Instagram videos are of her dancing with abandon to classic pop songs by Prince or Aerosmith. (Dancing is one of the many reasons Spears is still so famous decades after her career first took off in the late Nineties, with legions of pop performers echoing her finely tuned moves in their own visual setups.) Now, however, this brief moment of Spears undulating her arms and torso in front of an iPhone – while on vacation, no less – echoes the horrifying testimony she gave to Judge Brenda Penny during a special open hearing addressing the singer’s long-standing legal conservatorship. Despite taking a holiday, despite ending her popular Las Vegas residency in 2019, despite not recording new music since her last album in 2016, Spears is never not working.