“Mind Your Business” Has the “Piece of Me” Tone That Keeps Britney Spears Firmly Associated With the 00s

For those who were worried that the 2000s might never come back authentically (instead having to settle for ersatz imitations like the makeup aesthetic on Euphoria), Britney Spears, the decade’s foremost representative, has decided to return with non-remake music (no shade at “Hold Me Closer”). Though, depending on who you ask, it’s some “fake version” of her still being controlled by members of her family and/or her new husband, Sam Asghari (or maybe even her gay bestie du moment, Cade Hudson). In short, that she hasn’t “returned” at all. Worse still, that the vocals on “Mind Your Business” are recycled from what Myah Marie, a singer who recorded many of the demos on 2013’s Britney Jean (which will.i.am executive produced), already did.

And yes, 2013 was the last time Spears and will.i.am collaborated via “It Should Be Easy,” another EDM-centric ditty for Britney Jean that was released as the final single. However, “Big Fat Bass,” from 2011’s Femme Fatale, was not. Perhaps because both Brit and Will knew they would have something better to offer in their 2012 collaboration, “Scream & Shout” (from which “Mind Your Business” takes many sonic cues). A song wherein Britney repurposes (most of) her immortal 2007 line, “It’s Britney, bitch.” This hailing from “Gimme More,” the lead single on her fifth album, Blackout. The one her then-paparazzo boyfriend, Adnan Ghalib, says she wrote portions of on a Starbucks napkin (“iconic,” as Paris Hilton would remark). And it was “Piece of Me” that came after “Gimme More,” both songs exuding a tongue-in-cheek irreverence that showcased just how little Spears could bother to give a shit about her public image anymore. One that had been tarnished and tainted into oblivion by that point already anyway. After all, the head-shaving incident had occurred in February ‘07, along with her lip-syncing flop of a VMA performance in September, making “Piece of Me” an ideal track to unleash later that year in November. 

It is the spirit and sound of “Mind Your Business” that echoes, once more, Spears’ “fuck you” defiance on “Piece of Me.” Nevertheless, it has to be said that the frozen in time quality of Spears’ sound on “Mind Your Business” makes one wonder if she is truly still “relevant” or simply catering to what longtime fans continue to want from her. We won’t use the term “cashing in,” for that’s a bit too crass in this case. Britney, after all, has been given the tacit sanction to cash in all she wants after being exploited for so many years. But, in all those years of being “handled,” forced to do things without being allowed to put in much creative input of her own, did she become trapped in the age she was effectively enslaved at (twenty-six) and in (2008)? Is that, in the end, what “Mind Your Business” embodies about Spears returning to the music business as a free agent? 

It was Taylor Swift who once said, “There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they’re frozen at the age they got famous.” In Spears’ scenario, not only does that hold true (based on her perpetually childlike nature), but it also applies to the age she got frozen at before losing her agency. The age she last recognized herself as, well, herself. Not to mention one of the last instances where she had more control over the music she released (even if it wasn’t enough control to get Original Doll out there). So it’s only natural to want to return to that state (as natural as Britney wanting to revert to being twelve years old on her forty-first birthday). “Mind Your Business,” for precisely that reason, sounds like it could be straight outta 2007 far more than it sounds like “fresh content.” The same goes for the puzzling cover art, which makes some of the half-assed PicsArt offerings Lana Del Rey has been known to “create” look positively effort-laden. Where “Mind Your Business” is concerned, the image for the single is confirmed to feature a photo of Spears (or at least her face) from 2003 taken by Mark Liddell (from the same photoshoot Spears favors using an image from for her Instagram profile). Which, again, speaks to all the ways that everything about this single seems to want to freeze Spears in that decade. A freezing that appears to be of her own making. 

And, as alluded to before, it might not technically even be “fresh content,” with the possibility that it was first “generated” in the Britney Jean era and “laid down” by Myah Marie. A woman, incidentally, who once uploaded a parody of “Piece of Me” called “Don’t Take the Kids From Me.” Removed at some point after it was initially posted in 2011, the purported lyrics doing a sendup of Spears’ original song include, “I was miss preteen wet dream when I was seventeen/I lip-sang and pretended to sing/Got breast implants and a wedding ring/Then I flashed all my privates, they put pictures in the magazines/Don’t take the kids from me, don’t take the kids from me.” Then there was also the verse, “I started hittin’ the bottle/Lost all the titles of role model/Hitched in Vegas, forgot it/Did all the things that I wanted/And with a kid in the car/Don’t need a seat belt for protection/Don’t take the kids from me.” For a parody that came out in 2011, it has all the crisp mean-spiritedness that was plaguing Spears in ‘07-‘08. A time that would have also prompted Spears to repeat, “Mind your B, mind your B, mind your B” (the “B” obviously playing on the first initial of her infamous name—so infamous, in fact, that she often gets the “icon treatment” of being referred to by the mononym of “Britney”). 

To that point, as Spears enters a new decade as a liberated woman, “Mind Your Business” feels decidedly “old hat” (though she did have some fire flat caps and fedoras in the 00s). By the same token, everything about it is “giving the people what they want”: 2000s hauntology. Although no one really wants something truly “new” from Spears, her uncanny ability to deliver the same themes and sounds from the 00s doesn’t quite work as well within the context of now, an era when, sure, she’s still occasionally “stalked” by paparazzi, but nowhere near the swarming level that was happening to her in 2007. To boot, those magazines that could once make so much coin off tracking her movements are no longer selling the way they used to. And websites like TMZ and Perez Hilton certainly have nothing close to their 00s-level influence. So, who then, is “Mind Your Business” really speaking to? Other than a need to dust off the time period in which Spears can last recall herself at her “best.” Or maybe she’s redirecting some of her ire toward the comments section (which she’s turned off at this point), where trolls abound in innovatively hateful ways. 

And so it is that “Piece of Me” lyrics like, “Don’t matter if I step on the scene/Or sneak away to the Philippines/They still gon’ put pictures of my derrière in the magazine/You want a piece of me?/You want a piece of me” transmogrify into “Mind Your Business” lyrics like, “Uptown, downtown, everywhere I turn around/Hollywood, London, snap-snap is the sound/Paparazzi shot me, I am the economy [the “Britney economy” being the name of the entire career that cropped up out of documenting her in the aughts]/Follow me, follow me, follow me/Follow, follow me.” That last line having new meaning in the social media epoch. 

This perpetual feeling of being hunted (like Diana) might still hold true for Spears in the form of the conspiracy theories surrounding her (even more so in the wake of the conservatorship) that make people obsessed with knowing her “real” location (or why she hasn’t gone anywhere at all). But it’s no longer as resonant as it was in the mid-aughts when she could scarcely walk down the street without risking some version of an assault. Indeed, it was her inability to do so that eventually led to the first major anti-paparazzi law getting passed after they ambushed her while she was being escorted by ambulance to the hospital in 2008. 

Of course, a song like “Mind Your Business” exemplifies the great dichotomy of fame. Of how, on the one hand, a celebrity craves the kind of attention that secures them millions (or even billions of dollars), yet on the other, they just want to be treated like a “regular person.” A.k.a. have the financial/influence-related benefits of fame, along with anonymity and privacy in their “off” hours. Alas, being famous is a 24/7 occupation (but at least the pay grade somewhat matches that grueling schedule more accordingly than it does for others). 

Britney once likened her life to a “Circus” and having all eyes on her in the center of the ring. To some extent, that’s made her world-weary. To another, it’s part of the “I’m paid attention to, therefore I am” mentality that many celebrities can’t ever shake once they find their fame. And, talking of circuses, the intro to “Mind Your Business” has a very circus-y, zany type of sound—with a sinister undertone that the Joker could probably get on board with. For that’s what belies the “glitz” and “glamor” of fame: a seedy, nightmarish underbelly. It then concludes with a choir-y repetition of “mind your B.” This after the final verse delivered by Spears that somewhat unfortunately echoes another 00s song: Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?” Namely, when Spears, likely referring to her current coterie of canines, warns, “If they don’t get up out my face, then send the dogs out (woof)/Five seconds and then the dogs come out (woof)/You know what happens when the dogs come out/None of your business-ness.” The playful nonsensicality of it harkens back to Spears’ tone on “Work Bitch” (among the few standout tracks from Britney Jean) when she says, “I bring the treble, don’t mean to trouble ya/I make it bubble up, call me the bubbler/I am the bad bitch, the bitch that you’re lovin’ up.”

Elsewhere, it’s not as though will.i.am’s lyrics do much to update the sound of the song either, with Big Brother-y nods like, “They watchin’ me, they watchin’ ya/They got eyes up in the sky/So pose for that camera” channeling Snoop Dogg and Justin Timberlake’s 2005 single, “Signs,” on which the former raps, “Now you stepping wit a G, from Los Angeles/Where the helicopters got cameras/Just to get a glimpse of our Chucks/And our khakis and our bouncer cars.” Much as they tried to get a glimpse of Britney doing just about anything banal (usually leaving Starbucks)…circa the 00s.

In the present, Spears still refers to unflattering paparazzi photos she sees of herself (though it’s hard to say where), as though despising, more than anything, not being able to sustain the image she has of herself as that twenty-two-year-old from 2003 (hence, the picture chosen for the “Mind Your Business” cover art). Madonna, too, has a similar problem, but in contrast to Britney’s idol, there seems, here, to be a lack of any attempt at reinvention (both image-wise and in terms of experimenting with a different sound), so much as a leaning further into the decade that made her an icon in the first place. Because maybe, in the end, the early and mid-aughts are the last time she can remember, like so many of us, feeling any sense of “normalcy.” For, as skewed as her (and humanity’s) “normal” was back then, it’s undoubtedly even more oblique now.