Being a generational mascot brings with it certain responsibilities. "You want to be a good example for kids out there and not do something stupid," Spears says. "Kids have low self-esteem, and then the peer pressures come and they go into a wrong crowd. That's when all the bad stuff starts happening, drugs and stuff. I think if they find something that keeps them happy — writing, drawing, anything like that then they'll have confidence."

Spears, who won her first talent show when she was six, sounds more middle-aged than teenage as she delivers this brisk message. Doesn't she think that people her age are struggling with self-esteem because of a torrent of media images that promote feelings of inadequacy? Spears thinks about this for a moment. "When people see things on TV that they can't do," she ventures, "that should make them want to go out there and make something of themselves. That's how I looked at it."

The very first low, aching "Ooh bay-by bay-by" that Britney Spears whispered into the public's ear strongly suggested that this wasn't your average seventeen-year-old. It's still hard to equate those salacious syllables with the basketball-playing, churchgoing schoolkid who would travel an hour to shop at her nearest Abercrombie and Fitch. As Max Martin says, "People like the song — then they see the video and it's like, `Fuck!'" You can see that kid in the family photographs and Britney-bilia that dominate the walls of the Spears household. Nestled among them — near the picture of Britney with Ed McMahon from her Star Search performance, in 1992 — is a picture of the star with her prom date, a gangly youth wearing moccasins with his dress pants. This is Reg, Britney's only boyfriend, with whom she had a two-year relationship. It came to an end when the strains of her budding career began to take their toll.

"It wasn't that I was changing," says Spears. "We broke up before any of my success had happened. He became insecure with himself, I felt. I wasn't gonna do anything — I'm a straight-up, honest person, and if I was gonna do something, I'd tell him before I'd do it and end the relationship. I was really head over heels in love. I don't think I'll ever love somebody like that again . . . I just woke up one day and click, it was gone." Spears shrugs off the rumors linking her with both Lance Bass and Justin Timberlake of 'N Sync. "Overseas they say it's Nick Carter of Backstreet Boys," she notes wryly. Right now, she says, she prefers to concentrate on her work rather than romance. "I have," she says, "no feelings at all."

Despite her position as Queen of Teen, Spears does not fully endorse the current wealth of youthful movies that her friends flock to. "Party movies," she calls them. She prefers Kleenex-intensive fodder like Stepmom and Steel Magnolias. She reads Cosmopolitan.

She used to follow Dawson's Creek, but she finds that regular habits like television watching and churchgoing are impossible to maintain on the road. Spears does pray nightly, however, and she catches random bits of TV. She has seen one episode of South Park, which she found "sacrilegious." Tonight, the opening titles of Felicity appear on the family television as she talks. The show is a touch too neurotic for Spears' tastes.

The Spears' house itself resembles a sitcom set, with several neighbors and relatives making unannounced cameos. Britney's eight-year-old sister, Jamie Lynn, drags a broom into the middle of the floor and treats everyone to a spirited reading of "It's a Hard-Knock Life" — the version from Annie, not Jay-Z's hip-hop revision. Above the kid's head, on top of the TV cabinet, is a forest of trophies. Many represent the athletic feats of Jamie Lynn's big brother, Bryan, now twenty-one, but most were won by Britney at talent shows and gymnastics meets (that's Britney back-flipping in the ". . . Baby One More Time" video).

As Mrs. Spears dishes out portions of a neighbor's Mississippi mud pie, Britney quietly listens to one of Felicity's soliloquies. "Isn't she breathtaking? So cute!" Britney says. She met the show's star, Keri Russell, when they were Mouseketeers together.

The Britney Spears phenomenon is no overnight creation. Even before she tasted the hard-knock life of children's talent shows, Spears was preparing for greatness. From age two she would hog the family bathroom, singing passionately into a hairbrush. "I was in my own world," she says. She made her stage debut at five, singing "What Child Is This" at her kindergarten graduation. "I found out what I'm supposed to do at an early age," she explains.

"She was always singing — she would never hush," coos Britney's mom, a diminutive forty-three-year-old with large brown eyes. Kinesiology student Bryan Spears remembers his sister dancing in front of the TV, trilling Madonna's "Like a Prayer." "It was very annoying," he confirms.

Before she was ten, Spears had pretty much nailed the talent-show racket. "Those little competitions got really old," she says. At age eight she impressed judges at an open call for the Disney Channel's revival of the Mickey Mouse Club, but she was deemed too young for the show. So she did TV ads and an off-Broadway play, Ruthless, attending New York's storied Professional Performing Arts School for three summers. Then, finally, came a two-season Mouseketeer stint in Orlando, where Spears palled around with Russell and future 'N Sync members JC Chasez and Timberlake.

In contrast to most child performer scenarios, it was Spears who got her parents to set up the Mickey Mouse audition. Jeff Fenster, Jive Records' senior vice president of A&R, who signed Spears, was quite surprised when he saw the family dynamic at work. "Her parents were not pushing her at all," he says. In other words, Britney Spears is her own stage mother.

Upon the show's cancellation, Spears handed back her mouse ears and returned to Kentwood, enrolling at the private Park Lane school in nearby McComb, Mississippi. Park Lane's rules felt stuffy, and Spears' fellow pupils seemed, frankly, a bit provincial. "Remember that opening scene in Clueless with all the cliques? That's what it was like," says Spears, who made friends with cheerleaders and burnouts alike.

Britney Spears is well-regarded in Kentwood, a closeknit community of 2,600 where one can feel like a Satanist just for living in the wrong ZIP code. A local high school has a sign outside: DRIVE CAREFULLY, LIVE PRAYERFULLY. Pretty much everybody here likes her," says Kentwood High student Lucas Thornton, 17. "When I went down to Mardi Gras, I had a Kentwood jacket on, and lots of people were asking did I know her."

Spears' ticket out of Kentwood arrived when music-business lawyer Larry Rudolph got her — in timeless showbiz style — an audition for Fenster. "It's very rare to hear someone that age who can deliver emotional content and commercial appeal," says Fenster of his first impressions.

There was more. "For any artist, the motivation — the `eye of the tiger' — is extremely important," says Fenster. "And Britney had that. This is clearly a self-motivating person from a very young age."

From the second that Jive heard Britney Spears' first sessions with appointed producer-writer Eric Foster White, her fate was sealed. The singer's development deal was ramped up to a recording contract, and Jive began the kind of capital-intensive promo blitz more commonly associated with new products from Disney or Coca-Cola.

First came the Britney Web site, e-mail address and phone number, advertised on several hundred thousand postcards. In summer I998, about six months before she released her record, Spears performed at twenty-six malls across the country, schlepping with her two dancers and multiple costume changes. The outing was underwritten by leading teen magazines — Spears was signing autographs before she had ever been on the radio.