Britney Jeau Spears was born Dec. 2, 1981 in the small Southern town of Kentwood, Louisiana (population: 1,200), where has she lived most of her life. She started performing at a very young age, first in local stage productions and church choirs, later in national commercials and off-Broadway plays, and finally, starting at age 11, in two seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club TV show alongside future 'N Sync members Joshua "JC" Chasez and Justin Timberlake. After leaving MMC in '94, she auditioned for an all-girl singing group but instead wound up with a solo recording deal with Jive Records.

Jive savvily and aggressively marketed Britney to the Backstreet Boys crowd, by including her songs on a Backstreet Boys CD sampler, offering free previews of her video (which features the pop starlet doing her best Lolita impression in a very short plaid Catholic schoolgirl skirt and skintight baby tee) to anyone who requested the Backstreet Boys' "I'll Never Break Your Heart" video on cable music channel the Box, getting her a slot alongside the Boys on the Sabrina The Teenage Witch soundtrack, and landing her generous coverage in US teenybopper mags like Superteen, Bop, Teen Machine and Teen People--all this before her debut album, the somewhat suggestively titled ...Baby One More Time, even came out! (Rumors of Britney's romances with 'N Sync's Timberlake and Backstreet's Nick Carter--which Britney has denied, though she admits that Justin gave her her first kiss back in the MMC days--probably helped generate interest as well.) The boy-band connections didn't end there, either; Britney toured with 'N Sync, and also enlisted the management team of Johnny and Donna Wright, the Backstreet Boys' former managers and the current managers of--you guessed it--'N Sync.

All this cross-marketing obviously paid off, as ...Baby One More Time's first single (the title track) went to No. 1 in a number of key world markets including the US and United Kingdom, and the album also debuted in the top spot on the Billboard charts, making Britney the youngest female artist in Billboard history to have her first single and first album go to No. 1 in the same week. The album went to No. 1 in Canada as well, and has continued to sell over 100,000 units a week since its release, assuring it a safe place in the top 10.

With cutesy song titles like "Soda Pop," "Email My Heart" and "Born To Make You Happy"--not to mention appearances on the teen-friendly TV drama Dawson's Creek and McDonald's commercials, plus a modeling contract with Tommy Hilfiger--it's easy to dismiss Britney Spears as a pretty puppet whose sole purpose in the mega-marketing food chain is to push products of any kind, be they record albums, Big Macs or various pieces of merchandise bearing her perky blonde likeness. And truthfully, it'll take the 17-year-old "baby diva" at least a couple more albums to prove herself as a lasting and credible artist, not just a Backstreet Girl. But when so many young, impressionable girls are worshipping at the altar of boy-boppers like the Backstreeters, 'N Sync, 98 Degrees and Boyzone, it's nice to see those girls paying some attention to one of their own--i.e., another female. True, the Spice Girls have been big with the female teenybop crowd for a while now, but the Spices are all in their twenties and are getting married and having babies; Britney, on the other hand, is just a teenager herself, and despite her penchant for shrunken schoolgirl miniskirts, she has a wholesome image that young teen girls can relate to. Whether her fans will outgrow her--or whether she'll outgrow her simple style of dance-pop--still remains to be seen, but for now, she's adding a little extra girl power to the teen scene, and that's not a bad thing.