Hit Girls
Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade
-
- Pre-Order
-
- Expected Jun 17, 2025
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
An entertaining and deeply nostalgic dive into how female pop stars broke through the music industry in the 2000s and altered the cultural landscape forever, from the Ringer writer and Every Single Album podcast cohost
“Hit Girls bridges our butterfly-clipped, bedazzled past with today’s music world, revealing how the pop songs we belted in our bedrooms shaped everything we’re streaming now.”—Kate Kennedy, New York Times bestselling author of One in a Millennial
Low-rise jeans, butterfly clips, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Paris Hilton’s nights out. The early 2000s were a time of major moments in fashion, media, celebrity culture, and especially music. The aughts were a particularly fruitful era for female artists—still the only decade in the history of recorded music when women made up more than half the list of highest-grossing performers—and especially pop stars. Artists such as Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Beyoncé were leading the charge—their success not only leading to a new respect for female artists, but for pop stardom itself.
In Hit Girls, Nora Princiotti examines how these artists redefined the role of the pop star within the music industry and culture more broadly, and fundamentally set the stage for the women who top the charts today. Princiotti unpacks the shifts in genre, technology, and celebrity culture that sparked this evolution through the stories of the biggest names in aughties pop. Like how Britney opened the bubblegum floodgates at the start of the decade, inspiring both copycats like Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson and mall punk antagonists like Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson. Or how innovations in technology led to the rise of EDM as Rihanna experimented with sound while Ke$ha and Katy Perry embraced the “party anthem.”
Along the way, Princiotti explores how celebrity evolved alongside the changes in media from the tabloid days à la Lindsay Lohan to MySpace, Instagram and how Taylor created one of the largest, most dedicated fandoms the world has ever seen.
The ultimate love letter to pop music, Hit Girls celebrates the women who revolutionized the genre, inspired the next generation, and—in some cases—are burning brighter than ever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Every Single Album podcaster Princiotti throws it back to the early aughts in this nostalgic debut essay collection analyzing how the era's female musicians redefined what it meant to be a pop star. The opening chapter details how Britney Spears rose from Mickey Mouse Club cast member to adolescent superstar, precipitating a "surge in resources and enthusiasm for young, female pop singers." Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" marked the moment that indie music went mainstream, Princiotti contends, discussing how producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke wrote the song as a popified version of "Maps" by indie rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Exploring how other stars distinguished themselves with new technologies, Princiotti discusses how a teenage Taylor Swift changed how artists interact with their fans through her MySpace page, and how Rihanna harnessed the possibilities of digital recording software to move pop in a more dance-centric direction. Princiotti's voice is akin to gabbing with an erudite friend who doles out insight and humor with equal aplomb (she writes of Spears's idiosyncratic phonetics in "...Baby One More Time" that "it's as if she took a look at the lyric sheet and thought, I have better plans for these vowel sounds"). It's a boisterous celebration of how women moved pop forward in the early 21st century.
