Britney Spears SLAMS 2004 Onyx Hotel Tour As ‘Stupid’

Pop star Britney Spears is speaking out against the 2004 Onyx Hotel Tour, which she felt was "stupid" and "too sexual" for audiences.

The 41-year-old pop star has been reflecting on a lot of key moments in her life in her memoir, "The Woman In Me," which was released on Tuesday, October 24, 2023. Although the tell-all book focuses on her high-profile relationships and fractured history with her family, it also opens up on some key moments in her career.

Pop star Britney Spears is making it known that she was not a fan of her 2004 Onyx Hotel Tour, which started years before her controversial 13-year conservatorship started in February 2008. The conservatorship would eventually run until November 2021, when it was finally struck down by a judge.

In her memoir, Britney describes the show as “rough” noting that it was “too sexual, for a start.” She explained how she wanted to push the envelope because her ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, who she had dated from 1999 to 2002, had “embarrassed” her publicly by claiming that she had cheated on him.

“My rebuttal onstage was to kind of go there a little bit,” she shared in her memoir, via Page Six. “But it was absolutely horrible. I hated it in the moment.” She went on to call the tour “stupid” and admitted that she prayed “every night” that she would break a bone so they could cancel the rest of the tour.

Britney did actually fall and hurt her knee on the set of her “Outrageous” music video, which caused her team to pull the plug on the final two months of the Onyx Hotel Tour. Although she did need surgery to repair her knee, Britney did feel a certain sense of relief.

“I felt like I’d been manipulated into going straight back to work after the breakup with Justin because it was all I knew,” she wrote. “The Onyx tour was a mistake. But in my mind, I thought I should just do what I was supposed to do, which was work.”

Although Britney wasn’t a big fan of the performance, fans loved the tour, as did critics. The tour featured some of her greatest hit songs, such as “…Baby One More Time” and “I’m A Slave 4 U.” Britney also talks about the latter song and her performance at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards, in which she danced with a giant snake wrapped around her shoulders.

In an excerpt from “The Woman In Me” published by People magazine released one week before the tell-all book was released, the “Toxic” singer described what it was like performing with a giant snake wrapped around her shoulders at the 2001 MTV VMAs.

“The plan was for me to sing ‘I’m a Slave 4 U,’ and we decided I would use a snake as a prop. It’s become an iconic moment in VMAs history, but it was even more terrifying than it appeared,” Britney wrote in her memoir. “All I knew was to look down, because I felt if I looked up and caught its eye, it would kill me.”

"In my head I was saying, Just perform, just use your legs and perform. But what nobody knows is that as I was singing, the snake brought its head right around to my face, right up to me, and started hissing,” she continued. “I was thinking, Are you f---ing serious right now? The f---ing god--- snake’s tongue is flicking out at me. Right. Now. Finally, I got to the part where I handed it back, thank God."

In 2021, for the performance’s twentieth anniversary, the snake handler, Michael Hano, told the TODAY show that it was actually not an albino python at all. “It's an amelanistic Burmese python, not albino, because albino is lacking all pigments and that type is lacking only the black pigments, so it's amelanistic,” Hano explained. “Totally albino would be the all white." He also doesn’t remember the snake’s name, but said that it was not Banana, noting that people “love to make stuff up.”

Britney Spears' memoir "The Woman In Me" was officially released on Tuesday, October 24, 2023.