Hit Girls

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 saw female artists, specifically pop stars, make up more than half of the highest-grossing musicians of the decade—the only time in the history of recorded music. Artists such as Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Beyoncé were leading the charge—their success not only reflecting a new investment in female-led music, but also major cultural changes.

In Hit Girls, Nora Princiotti examines how these artists built the modern music industry by redefining its relationship to genre, technology, and celebrity. She unpacks when Brit wore pigtails and opened the bubblegum floodgates for Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson to run through them, leading to the emergence of Avril, P!nk, and Paramore as a (no-less-poppy) punk antidote to the first wave of pop. Innovations in technology lead to the rise of EDM, as artists like Rihanna experimented with sound while artists like Ke$ha and Katy Perry embraced the “party anthem.” Along the way, Princiotti explores how celebrity evolved alongside the shift in media from tabloids to MySpace to Instagram and how Taylor ultimately created one of the largest, most dedicated fandoms the world has ever seen.

With passion, energy, and a slew of fun facts, Hit Girls shows how this decade of pop became a major cultural signifier continues to have a lasting impact today.