Britney Spears‘ musical sensibilities as a performer have changed now that she’s a mom. The pop icon opened up to The TJ Show on Thursday, Oct. 3, and admitted that after she found the first cut of her racy new music video for “Work Bitch” was too sexy, had it edited to tone it down a bit.
“Oh my god, we showed way more skin and did way more stuff for the video than what is actually there,” she told The TJ Show hosts TJ and Loren. “Like, I cut out half the video because I am a mother and because, you know, I have children, and it’s just hard to play sexy mom while you’re being a pop star as well.”
“I just have to be true to myself and you know, feel it out when I do stuff,” she added. The singer is mom to Sean, 8, and Jayden, 7, with ex-husband Kevin Federline.
Spears, 31, debuted her music video just past midnight on Wednesday, Oct. 2, and in it, the pop star seems nearly back at her peak, donning skimpy bra tops and short-shorts that show off her fit figure in various scenarios — dancing energetically in a desert, at an S&M club, on top of a platform surrounded by menacing sharks.
“A lot of sex goes into what I do,” she admitted Thursday. “But sometimes I would like to bring it back to the old days when there was like one outfit through the whole video, and you’re dancing the whole video, and there’s like not that much sex stuff going on.”
“It’s about the dance and it’s about being old school, it’s like keeping it real and just making it about the dance,” she continued. “I’d love to do a video like that.”
Spears’ father Jamie Spears and manager Larry Rudolph deny that Spears was ever forced into being overly sexy for her videos, telling TMZ that “Britney is never pressured into anything. She reviews all creative and for her ‘Work Bitch’ video, she discussed toning down some parts in finding a balance of sexy and being a mom.”
Spears’ influence as a sex symbol in pop culture has already made a major impact on at least one current star, however. In Miley Cyrus‘ new documentary, Miley: The Movement, the “Wrecking Ball” singer tells Spears that she idolized Spears as a youngster.
“I want to be hot like Britney,” the 20-year-old singer said she told her dad Billy Ray Cyrus after watching Spears’ sultry “I’m a Slave 4 U” video as an 8-year-old, later adding that “the way I am about Britney, that is the way people are about me.”
“She was my first record,” Cyrus gushes in the documentary. “I was a lot of people’s first idol. I’ll be a die hard fan of Britney always.”
