Greetings pop pickers and please be welcome to tonight’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday and another of our fortnightly dibbers in the gently sloped gardens of musical magnificence.
Tonight’s article was inspired by the siren voice of Chrissie (of this Parish) – a voice that rattles around the inside of my head whenever I settle down to scribble a missive for this august organ. Many moons ago, Chrissie quite rightly berated me for writing a string of dim and dismal articles about a range of relatively obscure musicians, artists and deeply nerdy topics. I believe the primary thrust of her cutting remarks was something along the lines of “oh for goodness sake, just write about someone we know!” So this week, as we respectfully mark both International Riesling Day and World Kidney Day, we shall stick firmly to the mainstream and take a look at the rapid and not-so-regal rise of the poptastically poptastic Pop Princess. Not arf!
So who, in musical terms, do we think was the original Pop Princess? Who was the very first pop poppet to be crowned with that particular musical moniker? Well, to my surprise at least, our tale begins in the late 1980s and seems to have started with none other than the then 15-year-old Tiffany Darwish. Known simply and mononymously as Tiffany.
Ms. Darwish released her first album, Tiffany, in 1987. Unfortunately, the first promotional single from her album, Danny, failed utterly and completely to disturb the restful slumbers of the US chart compilers. In light of this bitter disappointment, her management team had a bit of a rethink and shrewdly decided to send their young charge on an extensive nationwide tour of, um… shopping malls. This novel and reasonably inventive promotional adventure was surprisingly successful and managed to achieve at least two things of note: it landed her with the unfortunate and derogatory tag of mall-rat brat; but it also managed to propel her second single, I Think We’re Alone Now (with, quite frankly, some astonishingly naff and cheesy ’80s production), all the way to the prestigious No.1 spot on the US singles chart. Kerching! Job done.
Soon after this triumph, young Tiff was booked to perform at Disney World in Orlando. It was the promotional fluff and publicity around these gigs that contained what seems to be the earliest industry use, in relation to a young female musical artist, of the term “Pop Princess”. It’s a term that does make sense within the context of the time and location. It tied in neatly with the popular concept of the Disney Princess and also worked well with the globally successful Madonna, who at that time was being marketed as the all-conquering “Queen of Pop”. Given that backdrop, the copywriter who thought up the Princess of Pop angle for Tiffany was clearly having a very good day.
Young Tiffany enjoyed her (very short-lived) career as an international Pop Princess, before fading into the background without leaving, to be quite honest, much of a mark on contemporary culture. From my perspective (and purely for artistic reasons, you understand) I found her later Playboy Magazine appearance to be a much more memorable second run of celebrity.
Anyway, the Pop Princess title had been coined and duly began to catch on. As a result, the UK tabloid press picked up on the term and soon started referring to the one and only Kylie Minogue as a Pop Princess.
Famously, of course, Ms. Minogue has a terrible cross to bare – she’s part Welsh. Her mum emigrated from Wales to Australia in 1958, apparently on the very same ship that simultaneously contained the also-emigrating Gibb family of Bee Gees fame. Anyway, despite the cruel handicap of her immediate ancestry, young Kylie showed early promise in the performing arts and, after just a few false starts, rose to fame as Charlene, the pert-bottomed, motor-mechanic star of the Australian TV soap, Neighbours.
It’s easy now to forget what a big deal that show was. It was absolutely huge down under (fnarr, fnarr) and quickly achieved enormous popularity in the UK. By 1987 the show’s popularity was such that when a somewhat unlikely romantic story arc between the characters played by Kylie and Jason Donovan culminated in a wedding episode, it managed to attract an audience of well over 20 million viewers in the UK alone.
Not wishing to waste this significant promotional opportunity, just a week after the Neighbours wedding episode aired in Australia, Kylie’s management team released Locomotion as her debut single. It was an immediate success, became the best-selling Australian single of the decade and, hey presto, her career as a teeny pop star was up and running.
Famously, of course, Kylie quickly relocated to Blighty and signed on with the relentlessly and ruthlessly efficient poptastic hit machine known as SAW (Stock Aitken & Waterman). According to industry legend, her first hit single with SAW, I Should Be So Lucky, was written, arranged, performed, recorded and mixed in under 40 minutes – if that’s true, it really is quite an achievement.
The song was an enormous international hit, reaching No.1 in a decent number of territories, including her key markets of Australia and the UK. Her eponymous debut album followed in 1988, quickly hit the No.1 spot and was a whopping success, spending more than a year on the UK album chart. It eventually became the UK’s best-selling album of the 1980s (by a female artist) and firmly cemented Kylie’s position as a bona fide international Pop Princess.
Once the Pop Princess term had been established in the public consciousness, it inevitably began to be applied retrospectively to earlier female artists and pop stars who happened to conveniently fit the bill. In fact, you can now find references to female artists as far back as the 1950s being described as Pop Princesses (e.g. Brenda Lee).
Two high-profile examples of this retrospective career labelling were a couple of New York’s finest 1980’s throat-warblers: Cindi Lauper and Debbie Gibson. To be fair, it does Ms. Gibson no favours at all to be labelled as a Pop Princess. Although her output is most definitely not my cup of tea, she is a singer/songwriter of genuine talent. She released Out Of The Blue, her debut album, when she was aged just 16, writing and largely producing the material herself. The album produced several international hits and went on to achieve triple platinum certification. She became the youngest female artist to write, produce, and perform a No.1 US single and is the sole songwriter of every single one of her numerous Top 20 singles. Deservedly, in 1989, she was recognized as Songwriter of the Year by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. The Pop Princess term suggests (to me at least) superficiality and disposability. These are not terms I would associate with Ms. Gibson.
Cindy Lauper (who, to my astonishment, is now 72) is as much an actress as she is a singer. She possessed, in her prime, a voice with a magnificent 4-octave range that could almost certainly make bats fly into brick walls. In addition to her splendid voice and her very successful recording career, she also has a long list of film and TV appearances to her name. Her 1983 debut album, She’s So Unusual, was apparently the first debut album by a female artist to achieve four top-five hit singles on the US charts. It also earned her a 1985 Grammy for Best New Artist at the 27th Annual Awards. However, I think her most startling appearance, for me at least, was when she popped up to play the part of Pink on Roger Waters’ spectacularly overblown (but very entertaining) 1990 live Berlin performance of The Wall.
And now, *drum roll*, to the delight of all Puffins of sound musical mind – It’s Tay Tay time! YAAAAAAY!!
Taylor Swift (blessings be upon her) is quite simply a pop music phenomenon: a multi-Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter and one of the world’s best-selling artists. With well over 200 million records sold, she is currently the most successful singer/songwriter on the planet.
However, the poptastic Tay Tay (named after James Taylor, don’tcha know) actually began her career as a country and western singer. Her first three albums were chock full of banjos, boots an’ good ol’ boys; lap-steels, denim jeans and chunky big-boy pick-up trucks. It was certainly pop, but it was finger-licking, yee-ha, country pop. She stayed pretty true to her C&W roots for about the first three albums. But then, encouraged by her production team, began her journey towards the bland and bouncy Pop Princess we all know, love and unashamedly worship (well, on Fridays, at least).
Musically, she’s a very bland Pop Princess, but it’s hard to be critical because, duh! – it’s Tay Tay. Plus, in addition to her thoroughly-deserved status as a true Puffin icon, she has also managed to achieve (at least in music industry terms) pretty much complete and utter world domination. I remember checking the UK album chart sometime last year for a previous article and was astonished to note it contained no less than eight Taylor Swift albums. That really is some seriously impressive poptastic success: country girl done good; Pop Princess done way, way better.
And as we’ve considered an artist who abandoned one genre to become a Pop Princess, let us now consider a (somewhat minor) Pop Princess who abandoned that career path completely. One who changed direction radically and almost immediately became a global star of adult oriented rock (AOR): Alanis Morissette.
Morissette released her first song aged 10, signed her first record deal aged just 14 and then embarked on a moderately successful career (in Canada) as a teeny pop star and junior Pop Princess. Her early efforts possessed a somewhat similar mall-rat vibe as young Tiffany, and there is some frankly embarrassing Canadian TV footage online if you wish to see just how different her early Canadian career was. Unfortunately, during her poptastically formative years, Morissette’s career allegedly included some deeply inappropriate professional guidance and um… handling.
Morissette has expounded on her early music industry experiences in a very frank (and highly recommended) HBO documentary. The programme details her unfortunate music industry misadventures and her subsequent struggles with feelings of shame, humiliation and self-loathing. It is the bile, anger and trauma of this period that drips from Jagged Little Pill, her third and thoroughly cathartic breakthrough album. The album was recorded when she was just 19, and to say it was a radical departure from her previous work is an understatement of epic proportions. She took her dark and deeply personal experiences, made them resonate universally and created a raw, scathing and explicit album that sold in frankly astonishing quantities.
Propelled by lavish helpings of angst, bile and furious indignation, Jagged Little Pill sold over 33 million copies, became the 12th best-selling album of all time, with no less than half the tracks on the album becoming international hit singles. It was a humongous international success that transformed a somewhat obscure North American proto-Pop Princess into a global AOR superstar of the post-grunge era.
And I think we’ll wrap things up for tonight with quite possibly the greatest (though not necessarily the most stable) Pop Princess of all: Britney Spears.
Young Britney was certainly a bony lass, oft’ credited for the international revival of a somewhat moribund teeny-pop market in the late 1990s. Over the course of her career, Spears has sold well over 150 million records worldwide and is therefore one of the world’s all-time, best-selling, music artists.
She signed her first record deal in 1997 – aged just fifteen – and was an almost immediate success. Rolling Stone magazine called her debut single, Baby One More Time, “the greatest debut single of all time” (a touch hyperbolic, methinks) and her first two albums, …Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!… I Did It Again (2000), are ranked as two of the best-selling albums of all time. Her sophomore album held the US record for the fastest-selling album by a female artist for about a decade and a half, and when taken together her first two albums make Britney Spears the best-selling teenage artist of all time. That’s really not too bad an effort at all.
Unfortunately, this early and almost immediate rise to fame, fortune and global superstardom, was not particularly kind to young Britney. Sadly – and to the untrammelled glee of the tabloid press – her subsequent struggles with mental health have been well (and in fact luridly) documented. Allegedly, the singer began behaving somewhat erratically after her 2007 divorce and the subsequent loss of custody with regard to her two children. Others, however, point the finger at a long and various list of behavioural shenanigans that seem to have started much earlier in her troubled career.
Anyway, after her divorce, a series of public incidents followed, which in turn raised concerns about her mental health. Sadly, she was eventually admitted to hospital for psychiatric assessment and a “conservatorship” was established (a court order issued for the protection of individuals who are unable to make their own decisions due to illness or mental incapacity).
The order was put in place to protect both Britney and her career. Her father’s lawyers successfully argued the conservatorship was necessary because Britney’s “life was a shambles” and she was in significant physical, emotional and mental distress. Ms. Spears’ legal team strongly disputed this version of events. Nevertheless, the conservatorship was put in place and lasted for well over a decade, with most aspects of Ms. Spears’ personal, financial and professional career being controlled by her father and his representatives.
The singer, for now at least, is back in control of her professional career. Unfortunately, however, questions about her health and well-being have started, once again, to appear in the music and tabloid press; and of course she has recently been arrested (and later released) near her home in California on suspicion of driving under the influence (DUI). After her release, her representatives issued a press statement calling for “the long overdue change that needs to occur in Britney’s life”. So, will our Pop Princess get the fairytale ending she so clearly desires? Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Anyway, I think that’s probably quite enough of my inane wittering for this evening. So I shall say TTFN to one and all. May all your pillows be tasty, your gardens inclined and your puddles well jumped.
Goodnight, and may your frog go with you – Not ‘arf!
Featured Image: Prinses Margriet zelf aan de leidsels van een tweespan paarden voor haar koets, Bestanddeelnr By Rob Bogaerts / Anefo CCO, via Wikimedia Commons
© Ivory Cutlery 2026
