Songoftheday 7/13/21 - How was I supposed to know that something wasn't right here?

 

 

"...Baby One More Time" - Britney Spears

from the album ...Baby One More Time (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 29

 

Today's song of the day comes from Britney Spears, who got her start on television, appears on the talent competition show Star Search and then as a cast member of the revamped New Mickey Mouse Club for four years in the 1990s. Spears was brought under the wing of manager Lou Pearlman, who was responsible to starting up the careers of the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. Inititally a member of a girl-group counterpart to that, Innosense, Britney was soon signed on her own to Jive Records, where she released her debut album ...Baby One More Time at the start of 1999. The title track, released a couple months prior in 1998, was written and produced with Rami Yacoub by Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin, part of the Cheiron hit factory in that country that was beginning to churn out hits like automobiles in Detroit with American successes from Backstreet Boys, Robyn, and NSYNC. The midtempo dance-pop nugget took the template for boy-bands - singing about someone leaving them lonely and wanting them back - and turned it on its head coming from a (very) young female voice. The result was a bop that connected with young female listeners, but what was striking, for good or for bad, was the imagery, casting Britney as a naive young (and assumingly virginal) waif that enticed probably too many men much older than they should be. The music video, supposedly suggested by Spears herself, delved way deep into that fantasy, putting her in Catholic school, with her uniform shirt tied up like a halter top to expose her midriff (which Shania Twain would also catch notice about). But the thing is, despite the flagrant sexual marketing, things like that were a dime a dozen in the pop music world, and it was the song that really drove this home. It's combination of coy seductiveness and assertive demanding on the chorus with a melody that sticks in your brains like velcro, and it turns out Britney and Martin produced something even greater than the boy-bands before...

 

 "...Baby One More Time" climbed all the way to the top of the American pop chart in January of 1999. The single also made it to #25 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio format in Billboard magazine, proving its hold (albeit nefariously) on the older crowd. Internationally, the single was massive, topping the singles charts in the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Norway, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Greece. The ...Baby One More Time album, released as the single was peaking in January of 1999, came in at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, spending six weeks on top and going on to selling over twelve million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2000, "...Baby One More Time" was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, losing out to Sarah McLachlan's live version of "I Will Remember You". She was also up for Best New Artist, which went to fellow New Mickey Mouse Club castmate Christina Aguilera. Britney will of course be back many times to this series.

(9/10)

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Here's Britney appearing on the Donny & Marie talk show to promote the single...

Next up, live in concert on her Oops I Did It Again tour in 2000...

Fast forward to Britney's Vegas residency in 2013...

and lastly, at the Apple Music Festival in 2016...

#FREEBRITNEY

Up tomorrow: Two decades before "Old Town Road", this rap collective goes to the Wild Wild West.