Britney Spears saw clips of Sabrina Carpenter’s otherworldly VMAs performance — and she has some important questions.
In an Instagram reel posted Thursday, the pop legend admitted she hadn’t seen the 2024 Video Music Awards in full, but that she had watched YouTube clips of the “Espresso” singer’s medley of summer hits. At one point during “Taste,” Carpenter took time away from dancing with a bunch of hot male astronauts to make out with a rather voluptuous bug-eyed alien.
Twitter immediately joked that the extraterrestrial hottie was one of the “transgender aliens” so prominently mentioned in Tuesday night’s presidential debate, but Britney is refreshingly less online than the rest of us, so her response was less brain-rotted.
“Why is she kissing an alien on stage?” Spears asked her followers. “I adore her. I love her to death. I didn’t understand that part. Why didn’t she kiss a girl? Like, that was weird. But I also thought that the whole thing was kind of weird altogether.”
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Spears, no stranger to dancing with astronauts herself, makes some important points. The performance was “weird” although I suspect most fans think it was probably the good kind of weird, not the bad Republican kind. And I fully support more sapphic PDA on the VMAs stage — which Spears, in fact, helped pioneer with her legendary 2003 three-way kiss with Madonna and Christina Aguilera, which sent right-wingers into a tizzy at the time.
But if I could gently offer a couple of correctives to my beloved aughties icon, I would point out that Carpenter did kiss Jenna Ortega in the music video for “Taste” and that the alien may, in fact, have been a girl! They (probably) have genders on other planets, too!
Although it might have seemed like Spears was throwing a bit of shade Carpenter’s way, she made it clear later in the same Instagram reel that she was really just flattered the younger singer had mentioned her at the VMAs.
“This Sabrina girl,” Spears said. “She said my name on the red carpet and I thought that was kind of cool because I forget I’m famous sometimes, because I’m a mom [and] I’m kind of old.”
Maybe Britney forgets she’s famous but we will never forget the time she kissed a girl.
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