Britney’s freedom was the most important pop culture story of 2021

The Independent says in August 2018, Britney Spears arrived in London for her first touring show in the capital for seven years. She’d spent much of the intervening time in Las Vegas, where her concert residency, Piece of Me, had earned millions, and had now embarked on a world tour. Spears had become such a mirage by the time she brought the show to London, a shimmying, largely voiceless spectre haunting the Nevada desert, that the air in the O2 arena was thick with uncertainty. Would she sing a Bonnie Raitt song live, like she did that one night in Vegas? Or go off script and express thinly veiled swipes at… someone… like those handful of times during Piece of Me? Ultimately she did neither. She hit her marks, flipped her hair, and stomped back and forth. She didn’t say much at all.

In June 2021, amid a fight for freedom from the conservatorship she’d been under for 13 years, Spears told a Los Angeles court that she hadn’t wanted to go on that world tour at all. She claimed that she was forced into it by her management, and that they threatened to sue her if she refused. One night in Vegas, she recalled, she was handed a contract to sign, and she was scared. “Out of fear, I went ahead and did the tour.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/britney-conservatorship-timeline-b1972040.html