Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyonc, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Deca [Hardcover]

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 innovationslc(