Among other “pop stars” of late, Tinashe keeps proving that “becoming a household name” is a slog that can take anywhere from four to six albums (as musicians like Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter are well-aware). Having struck gold with “Nasty” and “No Broke Boys” from 2024’s Quantum Baby, Tinashe is clearly not about to let that success go to waste, capitalizing on the momentum with a forthcoming eighth album called, what else, Popstar.
Fittingly, Tinashe has not only chosen to release Popstar two years after Quantum Baby like Charli XCX releasing Music, Fashion, Film two years after Brat, but she also happens to be on the same number of albums as XCX (because, technically, the latter has eight since she herself said that the Wuthering Heights Soundtrack counts), who got the former to jump on a remix version of Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat’s “B2B.” A track during which Tinashe added the verse, “Didn’t come out of nowhere, they been sleepin’ on me.” However, one person who wasn’t sleeping on Tinashe in the earlier days of her music career was none other than Britney Spears. The irony of her not “sleeping on” Tinashe being that she got to collaborate on “Slumber Party,” the second single from Glory (a.k.a. the last studio album Spears released). In the song’s original form on the album, there’s no feature, but when it was released as a single, it got the full Tinashe treatment, complete with her appearing in the music video (along with Sam Asghari, who began dating Spears soon after they met on the set of the Colin Tilley-directed video).
Tinashe, who has often cited Spears as a core influence on her own music, was obviously “wigless and dead” (as she phrased it in her Instagram post of the two of them on set at the time) over the opportunity to work with “Miss American Dream” herself. And it would seem that Tinashe is going back to Spears as one of her core influences with “Crash Out,” the second single (following “Too Easy”) from Popstar. And it isn’t just the decidedly Blackout-esque beats of Couros’ production, but the lyrics themselves, which serves as Tinashe’s giant “fuck you” to the media, the internet and even the “fans” as she explains right out the gate, “Think I’m ‘bout to lose it/I don’t even care no more/I been on some cool shit/But I’m ‘bout to lose control/I’m about to crash out/Every time I go outside.” If that’s not 2007 Britney energy, then what is?
Indeed, “Crash Out” is something of a modern update to “Piece of Me,” particularly the verse that has Spears singing, “I’m Mrs. You want a piece of me?’/Tryin’ and pissin’ me off/Well, get in line with the paparazzi who’s flippin’ me off/Hopin’ I’ll resort to some havoc, end up settlin’ in court/Now are you sure you want a piece of me?/You want a piece of me?/I’m Mrs. Most likely to get on the TV for strippin’ on the streets/When gettin’ the groceries’/No, for real/Are you kiddin’ me?/No wonder there’s panic in the industry/I mean, please/Do you want a piece of me?” Tinashe is effectively “asking” the same question, only, in her updated version, she’s telling people what’s going to happen, rather than asking permission for her own personal freedom and artistic expression.
This much is made further apparent by Tinashe asserting, “Don’t talk to me/Used to play nice but I’m off of it/Can’t take the bait they offering/And all of that stress on top of it/I just need to get my energy right/What you want from me, I?/They been pressin’ me, I/This can’t be what this life is like/It’s overrated.” And when she talks about “life,” she means, of course, famous life. For, where once it was touted as the end all, be all of goals—particularly in American society—it has now severely declined in cachet, with a recent poll of Gen Z suggesting that seventy-nine percent would “prefer a private life” to being famous. And the way Tinashe is talking about it on “Crash Out,” it seems the “zoomers” have the right idea. Though, like Spears, Tinashe is a millennial. It just so happens that she’s been quite wizened after so much time spent grinding so that she could reach this level of fame, only to have it slap her in the face with its “expectation vs. reality” discrepancies.
In such a way that her take on “I’m Miss American Dream, since I was seventeen” has become the far more nihilistic, “In a city full of people tryna make it/The American dream is outdated.” (Or, more accurately, it was a myth to begin with, mainly reserved for those who already started out with some kind of generational wealth.) And yet, if anyone was a representation of that dream, it was Spears, who once even famously wore a pink(ish) shirt in 2004 that read, “I Am the American Dream.” A mere three years later, that dream would become a nightmare, with Spears’ “head-shaving incident” only being further compounded by her “umbrella violence” one. Hence, a “Piece of Me” line like, “I’m Miss Bad Media Karma/Another day, another drama.”
Tinashe tends to feel the same in the video for “Crash Out,” directed by Erik Saltzman and Cameron Tidball-Sciullo a.k.a. 91 Rules. Much less visually elaborate than “Piece of Me,” the concept for Tinashe’s video is simple enough: she and some backup dancers doing intricate choreo (courtesy of JaQuel Knight, who has, quelle surprise, also worked with Spears in the past—specifically, for the Circus Tour and the Femme Fatale Tour) in between riding scooters in the dead of the L.A. night. And yes, some of those scooter riders are prone to, you guessed it, crashing out.
As for Tinashe, she’s serving up the kind of dance moves that would make Spears proud. After all, elaborate choreo in music videos isn’t exactly “the thing” anymore, and Spears left a bit of a void in that “style” when she essentially decided to “fade out” of the industry (rightly so, of course). What’s more, she also has the same “don’t fuck with me” attitude that Spears conveys on “Piece of Me” (and throughout Blackout in general), taking it one step further with the lyrics, “I don’t wanna be humble/I don’t wanna be sweet no more/I don’t wanna be a good girl/I don’t wanna be nice, fuck bein’ polite/I’m just bein’ real, everybody uptight.” Spears might have said the exact same thing throughout most of the 2000s, when everyone was giving her shit—mostly for the way she dressed and her “oversexed” stage persona.
At which point, Spears should have declared the same thing Tinashe does: “How you talk shit but can’t back it up?/‘Bout to hit the switch, ‘bout to cut ‘em off/All these motherfuckers ‘bout to set me off/I swear, no, I’m not the one.” Alas, it probably wouldn’t have done her any good (which is why she was more into showing than telling), for the world at large seemed to have the kind of obsession with picking her apart—quite literally taking piece after piece of her until all that was left is the shell people see today—that couldn’t be quelled. No matter what type of “fuck off” club banger she released. But perhaps, in this different time, Tinashe will have better luck. And already does to begin with considering that the paparazzi aren’t able to be nearly as voracious and invasive as they were in the 2000s (not least of which is because smartphones essentially put them out of a high-paying job).
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