CANR
WORK TITLE: Hit Girls
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Boston Globe, former reporter; Ringer, staff writer; Every Single Album (music podcast), host.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Nora Princiotti is a writer and culture journalist. As a staff writer at the Ringer, she publishes articles on everything from pop music to sports. Princiotti is also the host of the Every Single Album music podcast.
Princiotti shared her self-proclaimed pop-music obsession in the book, Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyonce, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade. The book focuses on female pop singers of the early twenty-first century and how they reshaped the industry. The book starts with Britney Spears, citing her empowerment of young listeners but also the misogynistic attacks against her from the media and other musicians. The book also considers stars who rose quickly and fell ever faster, such as Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson. The book then moves on to those who maintained their star power, such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Princiotti posits that these artists were never given their due credit for raising the bar of pop music and adopting technology to further their celebrity.
In an interview with Ayesha Rascoe in National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Princiotti discussed the legacy of the pop singers covered in the book. She insisted: “I really think this generation taught the ones that came after them to take pop music seriously and to get over the idea that because there is an inherent manufactured quality to pop–it’s about escapism and fantasy and showmanship and putting on a show, and that performance means that there is something of a facade that’s a part of it–that those things did not make it any less valid or any less real or authentic.”
A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that “it’s a boisterous celebration of how women moved pop forward in the early 21st century.” Booklist contributor Freda Love Smith lauded that “Princiotti’s writing is celebratory and incisive, blending the enthusiasm of a superfan with the precision of a critic.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that “the musical era” covered in the book “was richer and deeper than some give it credit for.” The same critic concluded by calling Hit Girls “a smart and funny look at pop music from a writer who’s crazy in love with the genre.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2025, Freda Love Smith, review of Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyonce, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade, p. 12.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2025, review of Hit Girls.
Publishers Weekly, April 14, 2025, review of Hit Girls, p. 45.
ONLINE
Weekend Edition Sunday, https://www.npr.org/ (June 22, 2025), Ayesha Rascoe, “Author Nora Princiotti on Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, and the 2000s ‘Hit Girls.'”
Writer’s Digest, https://www.writersdigest.com/ (August 19, 2025), Robert Lee Brewer, “Nora Princiotti: Nail Your Elevator Pitch.”
Nora Princiotti is an author and staff writer at The Ringer where she covers culture, from Taylor Swift to the National Football League. She also hosts the pop music podcast Every Single Album. She was previously a reporter for The Boston Globe covering the New England Patriots dynasty. She lives in New York City.
Nora Princiotti: Nail Your Elevator Pitch
In this interview, author Nora Princiotti shares what inspired her book on how female artists redefined pop stardom in the 2000s.
Robert Lee Brewer
Updated Aug 19, 2025 7:06 PM EDT
Nora Princiotti is an author and a staff writer at The Ringer where she covers culture, from Taylor Swift to the National Football League. Princiotti also hosts the pop music podcast Every Single Album. She was previously a reporter for The Boston Globe covering the New England Patriots dynasty. Nora Princiotti lives in New York City.
Nora Princiotti
In this interview, Princiotti shares what inspired her book, the first chat she had with her agent, and more.
Name: Nora Princiotti
Literary agent: Anthony Mattero (CAA)
Book title: Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release date: June 17, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction, music, pop-culture
Elevator pitch for the book: A nostalgic and funny rumination on how female artists in the 2000s redefined pop stardom.
Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]
What prompted you to write this book?
How devastating to start a Writer’s Digest Q&A with a cliché, but I really did write this book because I wanted to read it. There’s so much close reading and analysis of the current era of women in pop that I get so much from as both a writer and a reader, and I wanted to have that for the era I grew up on.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The first chat I had with my agent, Anthony Mattero, about how much fun a book about aughties pop music could be was nearly five years ago, which is hard to believe. In earnest, it took about two years from medium-fleshed-out idea/proposal to publication. The idea—to write about my favorite artists of the 2000s and how they changed the nature of pop stardom—didn’t change much, but the chapters wound up coalescing around three themes of genre, technology, and celebrity that helped provide structure and clarity.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
This is embarrassing, but I didn’t understand how galleys are put together and had a brief hysterical episode when I thought my index was completely ruined.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Going into my first draft, I assumed the way for me to get it done would be to take it slow and steady, writing a little every day. I found pretty quickly that I wasn’t building any momentum. The way I’d get work done was to spend whole weekends writing or take some extra vacation days and get in a groove.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Of course, I hope readers will come away with a deeper respect for the art of being a pop star. But in total honesty, the thing I hope most of all for my readers is that the book makes them laugh and makes them feel confident the next time they go to bar trivia.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Have the elevator pitch version of your thesis nailed from the start. (I have yet to do this.)
Author Nora Princiotti on Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne and the 2000s 'Hit Girls'
June 22, 20258:52 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
By
Ryan Benk
,
Ayesha Rascoe
9-Minute Listen
Transcript
Author and podcaster Nora Princiotti tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about her new book, "Hit Girls," and the pop stars of the turn of the millennium.
Sponsor Message
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
When most people think of the start of the new millennium, they probably remember this.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Back on the Y2K front...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: A simple glitch is threatening a new age of chaos.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Y2K, the movie.
RASCOE: But author and podcaster Nora Princiotti hears something a little different...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "...BABY ONE MORE TIME")
BRITNEY SPEARS: (Singing) Oh, baby, baby.
RASCOE: ...Because for the self-described millennial pop culture obsessive, the 2000s actually started 15 months earlier with the release of Britney Spears' chart-topping album "...Baby One More Time."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "...BABY ONE MORE TIME")
SPEARS: (Singing) My loneliness is killing me, and I, I must confess, I still believe, still believe.
RASCOE: Princiotti's new book "Hit Girls" starts with Britney and moves through the aughts' most dominant female powerhouses, like Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, Beyonce and so many more, definitely too many for us to get to, so don't send us letters. Nora Princiotti joins me now from our studios in New York. Welcome.
NORA PRINCIOTTI: Hi, Ayesha. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here and chat.
RASCOE: Yes, yeah. So I mean, you start off the book with this memory of - and all - a lot of us can remember back to those Scholastic book fairs.
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: But it wasn't a book that you were looking for, right? What was it?
PRINCIOTTI: No. No, I was buying Hilary Duff's first album, "Metamorphosis," which I just remember being sort of the first piece of culture that really taught me what it is to be obsessed with pop culture, which, of course, has gone on to have major impact on my life. So, you know, I had to start the introduction there.
RASCOE: And what was it about that album that really got you, like, kind of obsessed with pop culture and pop stars?
PRINCIOTTI: Well, I think, in part, it was that, you know, Hilary Duff was a core figure in the sort of mid-aughts Disney to post-Disney ecosystem of entertainers who were doing a really, really good job making music and other types of entertainment content that appealed to the sort of preteen microgeneration that I was a part of. The other piece of it, though, is that I really ride for that album. Those songs totally hold up. Like, I will listen to "Come Clean" right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COME CLEAN")
HILARY DUFF: (Singing) Let the rain fall down and wake my dreams. Let it wash away my sanity. 'Cause I want to feel the thunder...
RASCOE: Well, I mean, you talk a lot in the book about how pop music is often viewed with this disdain. Especially, I think, music for - made by women but also music kind of directed and aimed at young women. Would you say that, like, that was part of the disdain that pop music felt, especially in those early aughts?
PRINCIOTTI: Absolutely. Even though young women, you know, from the Beatles to the Backstreet Boys, have always been incredibly astute predictors of where culture is going to go and what's going to be popular and what things that actually end up having real lasting significance in, you know, entertainment history and music history, there is this tendency to sort of look down your nose at, oh, that's teenybopper music. That's not important.
RASCOE: You know, when you think about pop in general, but especially in that decade, you can't talk about that without talking about, like, R&B, hip-hop. And even though it's such a huge component of the pop music, actual R&B singers and rappers - they were not given the same platforms for the most part. Why was that?
PRINCIOTTI: I mean, I think that it's mostly just sort of straight-up racism. The chapter about Beyonce in the book spends a lot of time sort of tracing how hip-hop and R&B was the most mainstream musical style in all of America. But what was sort of closed off was these upper echelons of celebrity. It's getting the Vogue cover. It's, you know, going to the Met Gala. That was being reserved for mostly white and more traditional pop artists, despite the fact that those artists were often borrowing the sounds that they were using to stay current from hip-hop and R&B. And Beyonce, I think, is the figure who breaks through that ceiling for the first time and particularly by turning the narrative of her relationship with Jay-Z into something that people obsessed over.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "03' BONNIE & CLYDE")
JAY-Z: (Singing) All I need in this life of sin is me and my girlfriend, me and my girlfriend.
BEYONCE: (Singing) Down to ride 'til the very end is me and my boyfriend, me and my boyfriend.
JAY-Z: (Singing) That's right. All I need in this life...
RASCOE: Well, you know, the thing about that decade is - you talk about this in the book - is how you had these women and young women who were, like, really charting this new course for music. But then you also have this kind of moralizing double standard. Like, talk to me about, like, all that double standard that these women faced.
PRINCIOTTI: Well, I think culturally, particularly around a lot of the early Britney Spears' stuff, it started to sink in for me that progress is not always linear in society. And there's sort of a reflexive return to lowercase-c conservatism in some ways, around the beginning of the 2000s. And there are some sort of galaxy brain ideas around there that things like the Monica Lewinsky scandal kind of reintroduced the idea of moralizing about sex as something that was OK to do in more serious areas of media. And therefore, it was just suddenly kind of acceptable dinner table conversation to be casting these judgments about what people are doing in their personal lives, that really found a way to pick up some steam. The other piece of it is just tabloid culture reaching a real fever pitch.
RASCOE: Do you think, as a society, we've reckoned with the pressure and the ridicule that we put on these young artists?
PRINCIOTTI: Not really. I think the place where there's been a real reckoning is within professional media, though I don't think professional celebrity media has the same type of power that it did in the 2000s. It's still a gatekeeper. It's still a tone setter for the people who consume it. So I do think that that's a meaningful change. I just think that the sort of most aggressive tendencies of the paparazzi in, say, 2006 have mostly been taken over by just, you know, anybody with an iPhone.
RASCOE: What do you see ultimately as the legacy of these hit girls, you know, of the Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, you know, Beyonce, Avril Lavigne? What is their legacy?
PRINCIOTTI: I really think this generation taught the ones that came after them to take pop music seriously and to get over the idea that because there is an inherent manufactured quality to pop - it's about escapism and fantasy and showmanship and putting on a show, and that performance means that there is something of a facade that's a part of it - that those things did not make it any less valid or any less real or authentic.
RASCOE: That's Nora Princiotti. Her book "Hit Girls" is out now. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
PRINCIOTTI: Thank you, Ayesha. Thanks so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRONGER")
SPEARS: (Singing) ...own, but now I'm stronger than yesterday.
Princiotti, Nora HIT GIRLS Ballantine (NonFiction None) $29.00 6, 17 ISBN: 9780593725085
A journalist takes a new look at the pop stars of the early 2000s.
Journalist and podcaster Princiotti isn't ashamed of her pop-music obsession, and thinks you shouldn't be, either. She traces her love of the genre back to 2003, when she was 9, and "Hilary Duff was the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family." The subject of Princiotti's book is the female pop stars of the early 21st century, who, she says, "expanded our understanding of what a pop star could be and forced the industry around them to take them seriously." First among equals in this cohort is Britney Spears, who introduced young fans to "independence, agency, and self-expression" and who was the subject of misogynistic sneers from the media and "girl-on-girl crime and slut-shaming" by some of her peers. Princiotti considers the rise and fall of other pop singers, including Avril Lavigne, who claimed to have "created punk for this day and age," and Ashlee Simpson, whose career was derailed by a disastrousSaturday Night Live performance. She also writes about the singers who maintained their star power, including Beyoncé, whose "Crazy in Love" launched her solo career, and, of course, Taylor Swift, who along with her fans and the internet "built modern fandom to be massive, persistent, and motivated." Princiotti's argument is that these stars never got the respect they deserved for "confronting old assumptions about genre, challenging the perception of celebrity and utilizing new technologies and the burgeoning internet to its fullest," and she argues it very well, drawing on cultural history and journalism to prove that the singers were sui generis and not just retreads of earlier entertainers. As she convincingly asserts, the musical era was richer and deeper than some give it credit for.
A smart and funny look at pop music from a writer who's crazy in love with the genre.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Princiotti, Nora: HIT GIRLS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213209/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bb65a297. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
* Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyonce, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade. By Nora Princiotti. June 2025. 240p. Ballantine, $29 (9780593725085); e-book (9780593725092). 782.42.
Princiotti, staff writer at The Ringer and host of the Every Single Album podcast, explores how major technological and social shifts in the 2000s shaped modern pop music, with female artists at the forefront. This compelling study is both a deep cultural analysis and a "love letter to those millennial middle school jams we're still scream-singing at wedding receptions." Princiotti highlights that the aughts remain the only decade in U.S. music history when women comprised over half of the 25 top-grossing artists. Yet while these women dominated, they were also confined by rigid industry expectations--ones they worked tirelessly to dismantle. Each chapter examines an artist's impact, weaving insightful analysis with vivid storytelling. In "How Taylor Swift Invented the Internet," Princiotti traces Swift's early MySpace strategy, illustrating how she pioneered the intimate, interactive fan-artist dynamic that defines modern pop. In "When Rihanna Met Reverb," she credits Rihanna as the essential catalyst for EDM's mainstream explosion, leveraging new digital tools like Auto-Tune and GarageBand to become the "beating heart thumping at the center of the dance floor." Princiotti's writing is celebratory and incisive, blending the enthusiasm of a superfan with the precision of a critic. A must-read for pop music lovers. --Freda Love Smith
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Smith, Freda Love. "Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyonce, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211502/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d1c1ef45. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
Nora Princiotti. Ballantine, $29 (240p)
ISBN 978-0-593-72508-5
Every Single Album podcaster Princiotti throws it back to the early aughts in this nostalgic debut essay collection analyzing how the era's female musicians redefined what it meant to be a pop star. The opening chapter details how Britney Spears rose from Mickey Mouse Club cast member to adolescent superstar, precipitating a "surge in resources and enthusiasm for young, female pop singers." Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" marked the moment that indie music went mainstream, Princiotti contends, discussing how producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke wrote the song as a popified version of "Maps" by indie rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Exploring how other stars distinguished themselves with new technologies, Princiotti discusses how a teenage Taylor Swift changed how artists interact with their fans through her MySpace page, and how Rihanna harnessed the possibilities of digital recording software to move pop in a more dance-centric direction. Princiotti's voice is akin to gabbing with an erudite friend who doles out insight and humor with equal aplomb (she writes of Spears's idiosyncratic phonetics in "...Baby One More Time" that "it's as if she took a look at the lyric sheet and thought, I have better plans for these vowel sounds"). It's a boisterous celebration of how women moved pop forward in the early 21st century. Agent: Anthony Mattero, CAA. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyonce, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 15, 14 Apr. 2025, pp. 45+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836572503/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=15539aae. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.