Siggy Soriano

Abigail Boggs

Sociology and Social Theory

December 15th, 2022

“I’m A Slave 4 U”: Exploitation in the Music Industry

Britney Spears is an iconic figure in American pop music and culture; almost everyone in

America knows her name and her most popular songs. However, behind the music, all the tours,

and merchandise, is a Britney behind bars - a “slave” to the “toxic” music industry (Spears “I’m

a Slave 4 U” 1:10 and Spears “Toxic” 1:01). Ending in 2021, Spears’ father placed her under a

conservatorship for thirteen years which gave him full control over her life and finances. For my

Sociology and Social Theory final, I will explain how capitalism affects and exploits the lives of

musicians, like Britney Spears, in the music industry while grounding my arguments in

theoretical readings from class and applying them to the modern world. This paper accompanies

a ten-minute recording of my radio show entitled “E-SIG” where I play Britney Spears’ song

“I’m a Slave 4 U” followed by a brief summary of Spears’ conservatorship and how it connects

to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of individuality. By using my radio show,

I am able to use a platform that gives me pleasure - in broadcasting my favorite songs to my

listeners - to show how even activities for pleasure, such as making music, are commodified for

capital.

My project mostly parallels with Karl Marx’s “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” in that

Britney Spears’ conservatorship reminds me of a lot of the key concepts described in Marx’s

work. Marx describes primitive accumulation as “the process which divorces the worker from

the ownership of the conditions of his own labour…whereby the social means of subsistence and
production are turned into capital…” (Marx 874). In other words, it is the point at which

capitalists commodify the basic necessities of sustaining human life, which in this case, is music

and creativity. Through Britney Spears’ conservatorship, she was no longer in control of her

music nor herself. She was forced to produce music, go on tour, and sell merchandise all for the

preservation of the Britney Spears empire. She received little to no money from her labor since

her father took over her finances. Britney Spears’ conservatorship is a modern example of how

labor is exploited for profit in almost every organization under capitalism, including the music

industry.

Uday Mehta’s Liberal Strategies of Exclusion and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the

Witch, in congruence with my project and in addition to Marx’s ideas of alienation, demonstrates

how Britney Spears’ conservatorship may have came to be. Mehta writes about the “social

credentials that constitute the real bases of political inclusion” as well as what it means to be

excluded. While he does reference political exclusion, such as voting rights and property

ownership, the idea of exclusionary practices can also apply to Britney Spears’ conservatorship

and the music industry. Federici discusses the ways in which “women’s bodies have been the

main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power techniques and power-relations”

through referencing the Salem witch trials as prime examples of exclusionary practices from the

past (Federici 15). As a woman, a group that was previously excluded from basic rights and

considered subordinate beings throughout history, it is easy to consider someone like Britney

Spears incapable of autonomy and of possessing “deficiencies” since she had many public

breakdowns and issues with her mental health such as shaving her head in 2007 (Mehta 62).

Such breakdowns led her to be a “main target” for exploitation, for any quality that strayed from

what it went to be “included” made her automatically “excluded” because of persistent “male
dominance” (Federici 15) (Mehta 62). Thus, this historical exclusion and separation of women

from the capitalistic structures is seen existing today through conservatorships, which permits

men like Spears’ father to own her and profit off of the Britney Spears name through the music

industry.

The main arguments of Mehta and Federici act as the basis for how conservatorships

exist in the modern world as a mode of exploitation. In congruence with the Marx reading,

conservatorships, such as Britney Spears’, are used to alienate the individual from themselves so

that they may be exploited. For my project, I wanted to show how the readings we discussed in

class are accumulative, in that, their arguments often build off of and extend the ideas of the

previous author. I also wanted to explore their arguments in another context other than the

government, which is why I chose to look at the music industry: an exploitative industry hiding

behind creative artists like Britney Spears.

Workshop Write-Up: I helped workshop Kieran and Lauren’s final projects. Kieran chose to go

the route of creating a syllabus of a hypothetical Sociology course. From his project, I learned

how Kieran understands and perceives theory in a sociological context, which is different from

how I perceive it. While he did choose to keep many canonical authors such as Marx and

Rousseau, he also chose to include more contemporary authors like Landecker and Berlant and

Stewart. His course syllabus evokes existentialism intensely, which is something that Sociology

and Social Theory did for me. Lauren went the creative route and created a bunch of TikToks.

When I met with her, she did not have any TikToks made but her idea sounded super interesting!

From meeting with both of them, I learned how to coherently intertwine my ideas with course

readings which was something that I was struggling with. They both also helped me to gain a

better understanding of the course material so that I correctly use them in my final.