Nora Princiotti is a podcast host for The Ringer who was mainly covering the NFL until her and Nathan Hubbard started hosting the Every Single Album podcast, on which, per the title, they would cover the careers of the biggest pop stars alive, one album at a time. I started listening to the podcast as a relative latecomer to Taylor Swift’s discography, and their episodes on her career are some of their best. In 2024, the Year of the Pop Girl, they greatly expanded their purview, covering the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, and have continued that expanded output in 2025, even as the search for a “Song of the Summer” drags on.
Princiotti’s book, however, turns back the page to an earlier decade, the 2000s, or, as she refuses to call them, the Aughts. As someone who spent that decade aging from a high school student to a college graduate, you might think I’d be the target audience for Hit Girls, but I was very much not a pop music fan back then. Still, I enjoy Princiotti’s audio output enough that when I saw the audiobook version was available on Spotify, I decided to give it a listen. At worst, it would just be a very long episode of her podcast.
And that is pretty much what I got. I may not have been a pop music fan during the age of Britney and the rest, but I was a sentient being, so even I couldn’t really escape their biggest hits and their cultural impact. So there’s not much new in Princiotti’s book for anyone who was there. It was a little odd to have the Britney-Christina-Madonna kiss at the VMAs treated with the same scrutiny a historian would give to something like Watergate.
More interesting to me was Princiotti’s breakdown of the founding of Poptimism, in which critics began to take pop music seriously and evaluate it on it’s own merits, as opposed to constantly judging it by the standards of rock music. As rock music declined, rock-oriented critics who insisted on the supremacy of the genre lost control of popular opinion. Princiotti makes a compelling case that the constant complaints of pop music being “inauthentic” are rooted in genre bias, though she occasionally goes a little too far in defense, like when she defends Ashlee Simpson for lip-synching on SNL.
I struggled to maintain interest in the chapters covering artists I wasn’t a fan of, or whose music never really penetrated my bubble. There’s a chapter on Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton, and while those two certainly highlight the absurdities of media coverage in the 2000s, their lackluster recording careers makes them an extreme outlier. On the opposite end of the spectrum, her chapter on Taylor Swift contained a lot of information, but hardly any of it new to a fan.
Hit Girls is such a quick read that I can’t say I regret reading it, but I don’t think I can really recommend it very strongly either.