So you're a Barely Legal former child star. Welcome to adulthood! Legal cigarettes, voting and porn await you! But dag-gone, you've built your whole career on singing PG-rated love songs to your teddy bears. What are you gonna do? How can you let the world know that you are legally legit? Here are some novel ways to shed the baby fat and jump-start a new life.
5. Twerk on your old toys If you spent your 'tween years singing at and/or around teddy bears, maybe grinding up against them will let people know you're not a kid anymore, or that you're into furries, which is also cool (who are we to judge?). Ol' Miley's making it easy to forget that just a few years ago she was still Hannah Montana. She's turned awkward transitions to adulthood into an art form.
4. Star in a sexy crime-spree movie You think you've got it rough? Selena Gomez looks like an eleven-year-old playing (un)dress-up. The girl is of legal drinking age. Selena and J-Biebs are a modern-day Britney and Justin: former child stars formerly in love who just want a little grown-up attention. For Selena, that came in the form of a rebelling in a bikini opposite James Franco.
3. Fuck it! Pee in a bucket! Okay, so flaunting your sexuality may not be an enticing path to adulthood for everybody. Some might prefer something a little bit more avant-garde. In that case, how about peeing in a bucket? Too crass? Okay, there's always getting a DUI in the hot-rod car you're just barely old enough to drive. Or desecrating the memory of a treasured, near-holy historical figure. With news that Justin allegedly sucked on a stripper's nipple, it's safe to say that the Biebs is truly going rogue.
2. Develop a debilitating drug addiction It's a sad tale and one as old as time, starring a former child star going off the deep end into addiction. There are endless examples of this, but let's revisit one of the classics. Stepping into the wayback machine, we travel to the year 1984, when a pastel sweats-clad Bobby Brown still sounded like a dainty angel singing middle-school love songs from heaven above. Who would have ever imagined that this sweet young lad would stop walking girls home from school and start walking on the wild side? Uh, wait, never mind.
1. Shave your head
When sweet lil' Britney threw away her mouse ears and joined the pop-star ranks with "...Baby One More Time," she still had a long way to go before we were ready for her to be All Sexy, All The Time. Remember, despite her Lolita-esque grinding in the naughty schoolgirl outfit, she was allegedly still a virgin. Four years after her breakaway single in 1998, Britney starred in a horrorscape of bad filmmaking heartfelt film about growing up, "Crossroads." Her standout single from that movie was "Not a Girl...Not Yet a Woman." She was so serious about her transition to adulthood that she sang it from a mountaintop in a bikini top and bell bottoms! But, nay, that was not enough. Too much is never enough, as Billy Idol once said. The ex-Ms. K-Fed's inner child screamed "Fuck it, I'm going to flash my hoo-ha and shave my head." And thus, the caterpillar became a butterfly.
• BACKBEAT'S GREATEST HITS • - The fifty best rap lyrics of all time - The ten biggest concert buzzkills - Five more concert buzzkills - From Phish to Floyd, the ten best light shows
Follow @Westword_Music
