...Baby One More Time

Britney Spears 

1999

Listened: 01/28/24

Grade: D

This album is ensconced in the images of freshman year. Trying to get home in time to see the countdown of the 10 hottest music videos on TRL(Total Request Live), hoping that the world would prove just and that my favorites were honored properly. Although that didn’t matter so much as it was socially necessary to stay engaged with the list even if you didn’t care for any of the acts thereon.  

I have vivid and not unpleasant memories of this iteration of the teen pop explosion starting with a promo cassette of the Backstreet Boys(an item frustratingly absent from the Archive at this moment)*Adendum...a wonderful example has since been found on Ebay.

that came as a gift with my subscription to Teen Beat Magazine-circa 1995. I didn’t know it then, but it was in fact my first introduction to Max Martin who was a signal architect of both this album and the millennium dance-pop revolution that sprouted in the waning years of the early 90s grunge movement. 

What little musical identity I had at the time was either inherited from my mother or focused on a few sporadic albums such as the first Train album, the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Dizzy Up the Girl”, and Matchbox Twenty’s “Yourself or Someone Like You”(at least until I got caught up in the Bon Jovi renaissance in 2000 with the release of “Crush”). The truth is I did not think deeply or often about popular music as I had no personal collection to speak of and no means of playing it if I had. My musical awakening had to wait until the summer of my sophomore year and my job at Leslie’s Pool Supplies and Services gave me the opportunity to begin to explore properly. 

Prior to this, I have vivid memories of attempting to gain social acceptance by collecting song and band information that I could not-so-casually drop into conversation with those from whom I so desperately sought approval. This, predictably, led to a humiliating incident where I tried to name drop REM not realizing that it was an acronym and not a word…30 years later and that one still stings.

The honest truth is that somewhere between my completely adopted love for the christian contemporary greats (Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, Al Denson, Philip Sandifur, Ray Boltz, etc.) and my socially acceptable turn to classic rock (The Who, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Van Halen, etc.) there was a unique moment, not wholly divorced from my brief dream of one day being a professional actor, where I embraced fully the cotton-candy melodies of a powerful machine that churned out infectious teen-age pop. 

I can’t claim to have been in on the ground floor here as my true appreciation for the Princess of Pop was years away, and I was hardly secure enough to wear openly an opinion held in such scorn by my male peers (There is a larger discussion to be had about the tendency of society at large to have a low opinion of works perceived as being marketed to women, but that’s perhaps a tangent too far for today). I don’t know if it was condescending disinterest or cowardly reluctance that is most responsible for not engaging further at the time, but privately I was a teenager of a rather inflated self opinion with regard to my own taste (some burdens are lifelong), and publicly I was not built of stern enough stuff to be a brazen Britney Spears fan. I was too stereotypical a teenage boy to see the deep value of shallow water.

What I can say is that while my attention was not wholly uninfluenced by the fact that I found Britney to be one of the most stunningly beautiful women I had ever seen, were that the beginning and end of the tale I’d not have bothered, then or after, to give her albums a second thought, let alone a thorough listen. Beyond being a pivotal historical marker for the Archive, I think it’s important to realize that lyrical depth and musical complexity are not monopolies of value. The ability to conjure a place and a time, like a magical clock turned back upon itself, is a power not unworthy of reverence, and it is here in spades. Even more than that, I’m fascinated by tracks that have largely been forgotten by living memory. Many will remember the title track, a few will remember the singles, but the fight against disposable culture begins with not letting obscurity be confused with irrelevancy.  

1. …Baby One More Time: 

Iconic visuals and a three note introduction for the ages. I’ve always had an affinity for the layered vocals on the chorus, and the climb into the major key just before the tremendous tagline lands hits me right in my Jim Steinman. I will reserve comment on the lyrics for the album until the end as any comment made for one track will hold for most here, but from the first I’ve wondered as to what the tagline was actually referring? I have ever read it as a sort of blackjack allusion with the narrator asking for another card and another chance to get closer to winning. Of course nothing else in the text supports that reading other than the pleading tone of the rest of the song, but in 1999 it felt uncharitable to chalk it up to an irrelevant line chosen for its pleasing aesthetics and despite its extremely tenuous relationship with the content of the song. 

1.   (You Drive Me) Crazy

I actually prefer this track slightly to the one previous and not simply because it doubled as an advertisement for a little known Melissa Joan Hart vehicle of the same name. Another distinctive opening which is intended to spike excitement on the dance floor, but this time it has a much more metallic and industrial edge to it. A solid and catchy drop before the chorus and another strategically placed minor-major mood change that is going to work for me every time. While the choreography in the video isn’t as distinctly Britney Spears, I much preferred the routines here and couldn’t help but feel the influence of Michael Jackson. 

1. Sometimes

From the power pop of the first two tracks, the album slows down to drop its first pseudo-ballad. I only hedge my assessment as the driving-uptempo base, while milder, is still present and danceable despite the softer instrumentation, lyric, and vocals. Britney’s voice gets to stand out a little more here and demonstrate a sweetness that’s not quite present in its anthemic predecessors. This track, bright throughout, keeps the album’s tendency to employ dramatic drops. However, this time it effectively instigates a half-step-to-heaven key change (or what my piano teacher would playfully refer to as a Barry Manilow key change) for the elevated chorus and finale of the song. Perhaps designed as connective tissue between the heavy-pop early tracks and the proper ballad later, or simply a sweet in-between kind of song. 

1. Soda Pop

The first track not to be paired with a video, this one has a bouncy island feel to it that is stripped down compared to the other tracks so far. Very teenage-summer both in content and execution, there’s enough innuendo in the lyric to suspect there might be something going on just below the surface. If there is, it's rather inexpertly done. I can only hope that “Like a great boy, all my other women are insoles” is a colloquial expression that I lack context to understand properly. On its face it appears to suggest the narrator’s collection of women are designed for his comfort and to be trod upon. That aside it gives a nice bit of tonal and rhythmic variety to the album.

1. Born to Make you Happy

I’m of two minds each time I come to this track. The title simultaneously conveys the very real experience of love from the teenage perspective, but it also smacks of dangerous co-dependence and low self worth. However, I also have to remember that it was not written by a teenage girl but for a teenage girl from the hands of a pair of Swedish men in their 20s(Kristian Lundin and Andreas Carlsson). In other words, its not enough to say that this is another near ballad with a driven beat like “Sometimes” though drawn in slightly darker colors. The text plays like the narrator’s conversation with herself while she’s “sitting…alone up in [her] room” and the video tangentially recreates this conversation though choosing to frame Britney on an abstract silver staircase to nowhere in a room backlit with deep blues wherein she’s both confined and isolated. The reading is pleasantly complicated by the line, “'Cause living in a dream of you and me/Is not the way my life should be” which is this wonderfully self reflective moment almost like the speaker, just for a moment, has a mature moment that looks beyond her teenage infatuation before falling back into her previous thought. Clearly worth a bit more thought than first glance would suggest. 

1. From the Bottom of my Broken Heart

Two for one here as we get our first true ballad and a music video that tells a complete and largely complementary story. It’s a comfortable mix of adult contemporary sensibilities and teenage heartbreak. It doesn’t try anything too dramatic; I’m a little disappointed by the mixing which does make it fit nicely with the other tracks but rather drowns a lovely little guitar track that is hidden underneath. I know the drum machine and backing beats are a feature of the R&B inspired stylings that the album as a whole has adopted, but I wonder what this song would have been as an acoustic arrangement perhaps stripped all the way down to vocal and guitar.  Again Britney’s voice is given a little more room to be the center of attention and delivers in a mature fashion, but the song doesn’t ask for much in return by way of complexity or range. 

1. I Will Be There

I’ve been waiting almost two days to talk about this song as I can say without reservation it’s my favorite track on the album…and I was shocked to find out that it was entirely predictable. From the early conversation between the acoustic rhythm guitar and electric lead, the brilliant build and momentary minor key detour before the uplifting chorus, and joyous vocal delivery are hallmarks of a great pop song. However, there’s even more to this song. I had an immediate connection with it because of its striking resemblance to “The One” by The Backstreet Boys(arguably my favorite piece in the whole genre). I then found that both tracks were Max Martin works and that “The One”(in an early form) was partially included on early pressings of …Baby One More Time! I’m not suggesting that one song is a copy of another, or even that I’ve looked under the hood to see if the theory holds under close scrutiny. However, when the chorus for “I Will Be There” drops, it’s hard for me not to layer the chorus of “The One” on top as I listen. Now Max Martin can hardly be said to have a limited musical vocabulary, so I like to think that he felt this idea somehow incompletely realized and took a second swing at it. As someone with an extremely limited musical vocabulary I not-so-secretly hope this is the case as it has constantly been my practice to try time and again to successfully translate the music in my head to the music I play and write. This is why the structure of nearly all my works are certainly of a kind. It seems to have only taken Martin two attempts as the movement between “I Will Be There” to “The One” can certainly be called the movement from promise to fulfillment. That’s not to say that I don’t like the first work in its own right because I certainly do; I just like it all the more as I see it as part of a larger artistic endeavor. 

1. I Will Still Love You

I’ve never been a fan of spoken word introductions or interludes. They’ve just never quite landed with me for whatever reason. Otherwise, this is a rather harmless little duet, and Don Philip joins, adding at least a little wrinkle to the formula to this point. The bridge does have a very intriguing walking key change, a slight variation on the half-step-to-heaven from the songwriter armory. Again, unfortunately, the drum machine and mixing seems to be intrusive again as in “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart”. At this point in the album I’m beginning to beg for an actual drum kit (this is going to be part of my closing thoughts, but to have four photographers credited and zero drummers is telling). I know there is a value in consistency over the course of an album and that engineers have their specific preferences and tendencies, but it still feels like a missed opportunity to branch out. If these are logistical or budgetary considerations I beg a complaint of ignorance.

1. Thinkin’ About You

One of the most interesting things about this jaunty little tune is the rhythmic vocal used for the tagline. It's not a very complex piece either musically or lyrically, but if saying something simple simply wasn’t beneath the Beatles I don’t know that it’s fair to let the criticism stand alone. I’ve been making my best effort to dodge the word “filler”, and this is the closest I’ve come to being unable to avoid it. It doesn’t even take the stock effort of a key change or pre-chorus drop. There’s nothing particularly offensive about it; it’s bouncy and light and harmless, but I’m afraid that within the larger context of the whole work it would be better for this song to actually be much worse as then it wouldn’t be so likely to be forgotten entirely. I don’t relish this thought, but this might be the low point of the album. 

1. E-Mail My Heart

Before I start here I want to preface my response with the fact that anything I say is said with nothing but love and knowing that the content of this song was destined to be condemned by the passage of time. Now I doubt that this thought was met with any grand applause even within its historical context, but to use the current IT thing as a focus for an artistic work is to unnecessarily expose it to the savage gaze of hindsight. I know this song was not meant to cause laughter, and I’ve felt guilty about it every time I’ve heard it over the past few days. I don’t get any sense of cynicism here but rather one of innocence like when an adult misuses some phrase of modern parlance. I think the best practice here is to do our best to listen for intent and with a sympathetic ear. Listen for the sincerity of our young narrator’s appeal to be forgiven rather than parsing the language with which that appeal is made. Understand what she means even if it isn’t what she says and remember there’s no one more ridiculous than ourselves…yesterday.

1. The Beat Goes On

This is a very interesting endnote for the album in a couple of ways. The acoustic flourishes(faux vinyl scratches), the echoing vocals, and choosing to close with a cover are all worthy of comment. The fact that the cover was of a Sonny Bono song from a generation before might explain the attempt to give it the air of an archaic mix and perhaps appeal to the parents of the young girls buying this album in 1999. It may also be a smooth fade to black that indicates that this is only the beginning of a career signing off of its first album with cool confidence in the success of the current work. I will say I don’t care for the vocal mix at all as I can’t help but hear the influence of Madonna, of whom I am certainly not a fan. The much larger discussion of the female performer pantheon and their family tree of influences is a contentious debate for another day. The song itself is fine, quirky, and a bit repetitive. I’m not sure, were I given the option, if I would make the same choice to let the album sort of saunter off behind a curtain especially since so much of it has had an eye toward the DJ and her dance floor, but I can’t say I don’t see the logic. 

Final Thoughts

This has turned out to be much more of a project than I had originally intended. I figured I would have a nice complete album listen on Sunday night, knock out my thoughts after work on Monday, and be done with it. Now it’s three days later, I’ve heard every track multiple times(in context and out), and I’m flashing through page seven of a two page review. Going back through it now, I’m more convinced than ever that review is just a veil for biography as the content here reveals more about me than it does about the text it purports to examine. 

Before I go I do want to talk holistically about the lyrical content. As I found these topics to be largely consistent throughout the album I didn’t want to find myself repeating them over and over for every track. It is tempting to simply dismiss most of the lyrical content here as trite platitudes and farcical hyperbole. Metaphors that find a way to be plain and mixed simultaneously. Honestly I lost track of how many times words like forever and always were used. All of these things are true. I was alternatingly tempted at times to claim these were weaknesses caused by songs written in a non-native language by Swedish authors(an ignorant argument) and at others to claim that they were vaguely and broadly written with intentionality and to be as generically acceptable as any statement can possibly be(an ungenerous argument). However, I’ve decided, arbitrarily as is my wont, to see it as the language of a teenage girl and perhaps in some instances specifically that lovely teenage girl who once upon a time gave voice to these hyperboles. If she does overuse forever it’s because its the only word she has, and she uses it because it's a big word, it carries weight, and even though the seasoned will shake their heads pityingly at her when she says she was “born to make” some boy “happy” and tell her she’ll grow out of it, we doubt her sincerity at our peril and in complete denial of our own teenage experience.

These songs can be seen as silly, vain, frivolous, and generic. Referencing no specific instance or experience and relying solely on the most commonly shared human emotions. And I guess some find value in that. I prefer to go back, because of course you can, to a time when every love was forever, every emotion was always, and you didn’t have a tenth the words that you needed to express the myriad of ways you were bursting out of every seam, so you just flung every superlative you could think of at it and hoped that someone could hear you. 

I know that fundamentally the genesis of this project is somewhere in the cold calculation of someone(or more likely group of someones) who saw dollar signs behind the combination of these songs and Britney’s charisma and presence. Not that it was in the end a parasitical endeavor as for Britney it was a chance to realize a dream, for the songwriters and engineers a chance to practice their craft on the largest of canvases, and for the monied interests the fruit of some 30,000,000 albums sold. But what of we the audience? For those who like to look down their nose at cynically commercial and emotionally insincere pop-art targeted at unsuspecting and easily manipulated mobs of teenagers, there will be enough smug to blot out the sun. For the die-hard Britney purist there’s an historic moment that saw the birth of an entertainment icon. But what is there for a man on top of the hill who spends his time answering questions no one bothered to ask? The answer to that is simple: three days in January. Three days remembering to listen sympathetically as though the speaker’s intentions are good. To be generous enough to hear past the words and into the meaning as we would others would do for us, to find value in every created thing, and to prevent, even for a moment, a thing from passing from all memory. Are not these worthy endeavors? We may not be able to unlock the secrets of the universe from the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper, but that shouldn’t stop us trying. 

Bonus

I made the mistake of letting my second run through the album be through Apple Music, and I was not careful enough to recognize that the deluxe edition found there had tracks that were not included on my physical original. This is a cardinal sin for the Archive of course. However, as it was available on some editions in the original release window I thought I’d add my thoughts here by way of footnote rather than discard them completely. 

Deep In My Heart

A bouncy dance tune that seems to have shades of disco sew into its DNA. I wonder if the European dance scene held on to some of those conventions and incorporated them into the late 90s pop resurgence? I can’t speak authoritatively as it was before my time, but that is the impression that this track gives me. Also, there is an almost video game synthesizer here that for some reason or another conjures memories of Sonic the Hedgehog and the Green Hill Zone theme. Not that they are melodically similar, but that Sega sound is simply where my mind went when that electric backing track kicked in. Another liberal use of the half-step-to-heaven key change which in this case might, were I much of a dancer, add a little life to the floor toward the end of the song, however if this is the intention the soft fall of the song’s end seems counterintuitive. It seems as though a nice punchy ending would be more fitting.