An astonishing fact: it has been only five years since Britney Spears released her debut album, ...Baby One More Time. Sixty months. Less than 2,000 days. That's it. Fifty-five million albums later (that's about 30,000 records a day, if you want to get technical about it), it's hard to imagine what the landscape of pop culture would look like without her. What would have happened if this one Southern belle had decided to be a doctor or lawyer or schoolteacher instead of becoming the biggest pop star of her generation?

When a then-sixteen year-old Britney Spears debuted on MTV dressed in a naughtied-up schoolgirl uniform, no one could have guessed that she would make such an immediate and lasting impact. You want proof that this dame ain't no flash in the pan? There is perhaps no greater testament to Spears' cultural significance — no better symbolic flipping-of-the-bird to naysayers - than the sheer existence of this album. From her coy, bubblegum beginnings with "...Baby One More Time" to the sophisticated techno groove of her recent #1 single "Toxic," this collection of songs demonstrates exactly how Britney has grown up and grown into her larger-than-life persona with the eyes of the world studying and analyzing her every move.

All in just five years. Ponder this: how would you have occupied your time without her? Just think how much more work you could have gotten done if you weren't spending so many hours obsessing about the question that seems to arise every single time Spears steps foot in public: "What has she gone and done now?"

As a journalist who has interviewed and written about Britney Spears on numerous occasions, I've lost track of how many times some tabloid TV program has asked me to come on and talk about whether our dear pop princess has "taken it too far this time." No matter what it was — whether it was a scandalously revealing outfit she had worn in a video or who she was dating (or not dating) or some finger she stuck up at the paparazzi who constantly hound her; the question was the same: "Has Britney gone too far?" The question itself totally misses the point. The job of any major pop star - any of the ones whose legacies loom large, from the Beatles to Madonna, Elvis to Michael Jackson — is not only to be entertaining, but also to be provocative. The more interesting question to be asking is, "What is it about Britney that holds such fascination? How did this young woman from Kentwood, Louisiana become the object of such desire, speculation, and adoration?"

It all started in 1998, when Spears' video for "...Baby One More Time" caused an immediate sensation and heralded the beginning of a nascent teen-pop movement. On the cover of the "...Baby One More Time" album — released in early 1999 — Spears knelt in front of a pink backdrop, with all the sweetness and innocence of an adolescent who had no idea what lie ahead. But this was a distinctly different image from the confident young woman in the video who came up with the idea on her own to knot her school uniform's shirt above her navel. Never has a bellybutton caused such uproar. Nowadays, whenever a teenage girl shows her midriff, red-faced, conservative pundits would have you believe Spears is to blame. As Britney herself might say, it's not that deep. Yet, along with the uproar came an even more overwhelming show of support: "...Baby One More Time" went to #1, the album of the same name sold over a million copies within its first six weeks out, and the follow-up singles, "Sometimes" and "(You Drive Me) Crazy," kept Spears' debut album on the charts for 103 weeks.

Before her first album had even cooled, Britney hit us with the follow-up, 2000's Oops!...I Did It Again. With a nod and a wink to her previous disc's ubiquitous first single, the Max Martin-produced title track opened with a familiar vamp that echoed "...Baby One More Time." The message was clear as soon as she curled her lip and sang, "I think I did it again." Indeed she had done it again. But this wasn't a simple repetition of what she had done before. Rather than the pleading tone of "...Baby One More Time," this #1 hit was devilish and flirtatious and empowering. "Oops!...You think I'm in love / That I'm sent from above / I'm not that innocent," she sang. If her debut album hinted that there was more to Britney Spears than met the eye, "Oops!" made that point crystal clear. Midway through the "Oops!" video, the poor sap who fell for Britney shows her a giant sapphire pendant like the one tossed overboard in Titanic. "I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end?" Britney asks her love slave teasingly. "Well baby, I went down and got it for you," he says. In her red latex bodysuit, Britney was no damsel in need of rescuing - she was beginning to take control and assert her womanhood unapologetically.

Similarly, "Lucky" was a song ostensibly about Spears' alter ego: a young superstar who is miserable in spite of her massive success. And yet the pressure to follow up the blockbuster success of her debut album was immense. "The world is spinning and she keeps on winning," Spears sang in "Lucky." "But tell me what happens when it stops?" It never felt like she was singing about herself, but rather that she was singing about who she might be if she let all the negative energy directed at her actually sink in. And, in "Stronger," she proclaimed that sentiment even more brazenly. Referring back to a lyric in "...Baby One More Time," she announced, "My loneliness ain't killing me no more. I'm stronger than yesterday."

Spears had been letting other writers give her feelings voice up until her third album, Britney. She had co-written one song from "Oops!...I Did It Again" — the confessional ballad "Dear Diary" — but her tastes in music were getting edgier and her sense of her own voice was strengthening. She had learned to play a little bit of guitar, and she had been jotting down lyrics in her spare time. Sometimes in the bath, she said, an idea would bubble up among the soapsuds. Nonetheless, the two songs on the record that best described where Spears' head was at were "Overprotected" and "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman." She was nearly twenty, and in the midst of a difficult transition into adulthood. "I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am," she sang defiantly. "And I don't wanna be so damn protected."

The same fall the album was released, Britney Spears also made her big-screen debut in "Crossroads," the story about three childhood girlfriends who go on a cross-country road trip and learn some dark truths about themselves along the way. Its plot was not entirely removed from what was going on in Spears' head at the time: Here she was, on the verge of releasing her third album and about to leave her teen years behind, but feeling like she had so much more to experience before she could really figure out who she was.

Part of that process involved experimenting with her sound, moving away from the straight-up bubblegum pop and into darker, dancier grooves. "I'm A Slave 4 U" was the most un-Britney-sounding song she'd done yet, but its vaguely Middle Eastern flavor and pulsating rhythm have exerted tremendous influence on her subsequent singles . Produced by the Neptunes' Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, "I'm A Slave 4 U" was twitchy and languid at the same time, like an off-kilter bellydance. In the video, Spears and her dancers are covered in sweat, writhing around in a sauna - which is really not the best place for a dance routine, so don't try that one at home, kiddies. The song, Britney explained, was about being a slave to music, to the beat, to dancing. Of course, it could also be interpreted as an ode to pure sexual attraction. When the song was released, just a few months after Spears had appeared on the MTV Video Music Awards with a giant, flesh-colored snake wrapped around her, many of Spears' detractors deemed it too risqué. But even the song's opening lyric answered that charge: "All you people look at me like I'm a little girl / Well did you ever think it would be okay for me to step into this world."

In 2002, Spears went back to the studio to make In The Zone with producers including Moby, Bloodshy & Avant, Guy Sigsworth, RedZone, and The Matrix. The songs that came out of those sessions — tunes like "Toxic," "Me Against The Music," and "Outrageous" were her most musically daring and deliciously sexy. Full of trance beats, hip-hop flavor, and futuristic samples, "In The Zone" was like a Britney Spears record from outer space. In the action-adventure clip for the chart-topping "Toxic," Spears comes on like a vixen from a James Bond movie, rendered in Japanese anime style. The follow-up single, "Everytime," couldn't have expressed a more divergent point-of-view from the tongue-in-cheek sassiness of the R. Kelly-penned "Outrageous" (which lists among Spears' outrageous qualities, "my sex drive" and "my shopping spree"). With unexpected fragility in "Everytime," Spears sang about being haunted by the memory of a lost lover.

Fans and foes alike have been intent on figuring out whether Spears is an angel or a devil-in-disguise. The answer is obvious, but not simple. She is both. Britney Spears is not what she seems, but it seems that's all part of her plan. When Britney pants "get it, get it," the world pants with her. Oops my ass. She knows exactly what she's doing, each and every time she does it (again). She's not that innocent, indeed. Or, perhaps the explanation is best found in the words she snarls during her brand new version of Bobby Brown's 1988 hit "My Prerogative": "Everybody's talking all this stuff about me / Why don't they just let me live? / I don't need permission, make my own decisions / That's my prerogative."