Britney, Taylor and Beyoncé defined the 2000s and changed pop culture

Growing up in a small town in New Hampshire, Nora Princiotti lived two hours away from the nearest mall, so the Scholastic Book Fair was her lifeline to pop culture purchases.

In fall 2003, the then-9-year-old made a beeline to the fair and bought gum, glitter gel pens and “Metamorphosis,” the second studio album from “Lizzie McGuire” star Hilary Duff.

At that time, Duff was “the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family,” Princiotti writes in “Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade.” “This is the first day of the rest of my life.”

This proclamation is no exaggeration. Duff’s CD was Princiotti’s gateway to the vibrant pop music universe of the 2000s — an era that “Hit Girls” thoroughly examines through the lens of some of the decade’s music icons.

The chronological book opens with Britney Spears reigniting industry interest in mainstream pop after the roaring success of her snappy debut single, 1998’s “…Baby One More Time.” Princiotti subsequently devotes chapters to Rihanna’s world-shifting dance music and savvy use of technology; the scrappy (and occasionally bumpy) pop-punk odyssey of Avril Lavigne; and the complicated relationship between indie rock and pop, exemplified by “American Idol” sweetheart Kelly Clarkson.

She also reexamines with a much kinder eye the music of Ashlee Simpson, whose career cratered after she was caught lip-syncing on “Saturday Night Live,” and then-tabloid fixtures Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.

Princiotti, a staff writer at the Ringer who covers pop music and the NFL and co-hosts the podcast “Every Single Album,” says she was certain which artists needed to be included in “Hit Girls.”

“I had the idea a little bit before the Y2K resurgence that we’ve experienced over the last few years,” she says. “But it was trickling into the ecosystem. And I had this very clear idea that there are all these disparate segments of the pop star world and the version of that world that existed in the 2000s. … Even though that music is different, it all fit together to me really obviously, because I was the fan.”

Princiotti augments her rigorous research with colorful memories from this era, including chatting on AIM (her handle was mangorainbow99), digging up Taylor Swift rarities on YouTube and hearing Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” at a high school dance.

Finding a cohesive story of the 2000s was more challenging. “The question that I had to answer [in the book] was, ‘Other than the audience — and other than having this feeling inside me that a book that covered the rise of Britney Spears also needed to cover ‘Rumors’ by Lindsay Lohan and also needed to cover Ashlee Simpson, because that’s how I lived it — what actually ties these artists together?’”

That uniting thread is Spears. The book deftly traces the parallels between the evolution of Spears’ career and how the decade itself unfolded — from the way her music broadened beyond teen pop (e.g. the electro-disco “Toxic”) to the negative impact the intense tabloid scrutiny had on her mental health.

“She is the artist of the 2000s,” Princiotti says. “If you think of the aughts as a whole, it starts with Britney, [and] she manages to keep it going. There’s so many things that I think just come back to that one woman.”

Princiotti also concludes that the female pop stars of the 2000s helped legitimize pop music.

“There’s something about what all of these women — because it is women in the book — did to chip away at the idea that pop is disposable and unserious music, that somehow got us to this place where it is more often recognized as a serious art form, something that moves culture [and] is worthy of real, deep criticism,” she says.

“You’re seeing every day where there are thesis-driven projects about Taylor Swift and the music of Taylor Swift, and [people asking,] ‘What does she mean to society?’ and ‘What does she mean to culture? The thing that struck me was, ‘Oh, we didn’t have that. It wasn’t like that — and now it is.’”

“I came away with an appreciation of just how early in her career she laid the blueprint of how she would develop her fan base,” Nora Princiotti says of Taylor Swift.

(Ballantine Books)

Given the book’s narrow time frame — “Hit Girls” starts just before Y2K and ends in the early 2010s — the book also takes a different spin on the careers of Swift and fellow superstar Beyoncé.

The latter was newly emerging as a solo artist with 2003’s “Dangerously in Love” after breaking through with Destiny’s Child. Princiotti argues that Beyoncé’s success on the pop charts opened doors for hip-hop and R&B artists, which had a seismic impact on culture as a whole.

Although these genres had started making massive inroads into the pop charts and mainstream music starting in the late 1990s, Princiotti observed in her research that magazine and tabloid covers still largely prioritized white artists.

“While there was a clear relationship between the interest in an artist like Britney Spears’s life and the interest in her music, that feedback loop did not exist for a lot of Black artists,” she writes. “Which meant that hip-hop could dominate popular music while being shut out of the elite celebrity spaces that promote true pop stardom.”

Swift, meanwhile, was an earnest country-pop wunderkind building her fan base one MySpace comment at a time — and even then happened to be a genius at understanding the psychology of fandom and the online habits of her followers.

“I came away with an appreciation of just how early in her career she laid the blueprint of how she would develop her fan base,” Princiotti says. “When it’s all said and done, we will look back at her artistic legacy, yes, as the songwriter of a generation, yes, as the poet laureate of young women.”

“But I do think that the legacy of Taylor Swift is going to start with the communities of people that she brought together within her fan base — and how powerful and sometimes scary and how mobilized that fan community has become, and how she built it to be that way.”

As with Swift, many of the artists in “Hit Girls” remain popular today. Lavigne and Beyoncé are currently on major tours; Clarkson has found success with her daytime talk show; Rihanna is a billionaire business mogul thanks to her brands Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty. And Duff, who now has four kids, starred in the TV show “Younger” and, most recently, the short-lived “How I Met Your Father.”

Near the end of “Hit Girls,” Princiotti explores the ongoing influence of these artists and this decade — from the current crop of young pop stars led by Olivia Rodrigo and nostalgia festivals like When We Were Young to fashion trends such as dark denim, “going-out” tops and butterfly hair clips.

Princiotti herself maintains a love of pop stars and offers solid theories about why this specific era remains such a fascination: a heady mix of nostalgia, second chances and perspective.

“For people like me who lived through at least some of it, it’s the ability to go back a little bit older and wiser,” she says. “We can take the best of it and then reexamine the worst of it with more open eyes. And there’s something to me that’s very satisfying about that.”