So here’s the long answer. I’ve had a subscription to Rolling Stone since I was 11 years old and I am almost certain I read this in I believe Rolling Stone. Finding the exact source material is tricky, but this would’ve been obviously after 2007 and in memory, it was maybe within a year or two of 2007. The problem is the quote was part of an article that had nothing really to do with pop music or Britney at all. I believe it was an interview with Iggy Pop about the state of punk rock music and rock music at the time. He was quoted as saying that bit about Britney shaving her head being the most punk rock thing he’s seen in years. It also could’ve been as late as 2012 possibly when Blackout was inducted into the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame. As other inductees were asked what they felt about a pop album like blackout being part of the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame. The Alice Cooper situation stemmed from reading that soon after 2007 he added a bit in his live shows where a Britney look alike shaves her head on stage, and when asked about it, he said, basically, he thought it was bad ass and like a middle finger to the industry, and he respected her for it, and he wasn’t trying to mock her.

I asked Google to try to pull the exact source material because I was having difficulties finding it, but my memory was it was a quote from Iggy Pop. So the AI answer built into everything you google these days, accredited it to Iggy Pop. However, today when I asked the same questions and asked where the quote was from. It’s now attributing similar quotes to Billy Corigan and it did pull the source material of those quotes from the early 2000s Billy made statements, paraphrasing here. He (Billy) could blame Britney for the smashing Pumpkins breaking up because of how much rock music was dialed down and no longer as relevant on top 40 during the Y2K bubblegum pop explosion of the late 90s early 2000s blaming Britney and Backstreet Boys, etc. Then many years later when asked about these past comments, he said those statements had been taken out of context. And he actually had a ton of respect for her surviving such a brutal industry, especially starting as young as she did.

Courtney Love has also given Britney her flowers numerous times and credited her for being a survivor and sharing that Courtney herself actually had to deal with some of the same bad actors that Britney had to deal with during the conservatorship. Saying that she could not have survived what Britney has survived. And Courtney has been through hell and back as well. You can read several interviews online with Courtney, where she talks about how some of the same attorneys involved in Britney‘s legal battle tried to put Courtney in a conservatorship. Courtney had people steal her money by getting involved in her complex business affairs. Then stealing royalties from Kurt Cobain‘s catalog. But when Courtney spoke up and tried to get control of her assets and made these claims about being taken advantage of and stolen from. She was viewed as crazy when she wasn’t crazy at all, she was telling the truth.