21 February 1999
Anyone born after February 1999 may disagree, but this feels like our first present-day number one. In chart pop terms, we’ve been living in a Britney and ‘…Baby One More Time’ world ever since. The song made Britney Spears an instant icon and new type of pop star: the real-life girl whose everyday heartache was now turbo-charged with the glamour and pressure of immense public fame and scrutiny. Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo all subsequently stepped into that role. The tension between Britney’s sexualised content and her public declarations of pre-marriage chasteness further fuelled prurient and invasive fascination, just in time to make her the first real Internet super-celebrity. On top of that, I wonder if her brand of pop stardom and especially her ‘…Baby One More Time’ video performance—schoolkid by day, popstar by day too—inspired the wildfire popularity of ’00s and ’10s reality TV pop idol audition shows built around the young hopeful’s personal and emotional journey. So that’s ‘…Baby One More Time’, the record that has shaped 21st-century chart pop.
You’d laugh to think of this song had Simon Cowell succeeded in nabbing it for Five, a boyband cloned from DNA of the lads standing at the back of other boybands; the success of ‘…Baby One More Time’ is so obviously down to Britney. She’s sensational here: an unprecedented and compelling mix of gulping sobs, confused yearning, and stage-school confidence. That said, it’s a great song too. The mid-section in which the previous verses collapse into rearranged fragments (“I must confess / that my loneliness / is killing me now”) is inspired. Add to that the non-Anglophone Max Martin’s lyrics, best known by his quaint belief that “hit me” meant “call me” but also apparent in their melodramatic starkness: “My loneliness is killing me” is Scandi-noir bleak as well as US-teen angsty. And between Martin’s lyrics and Spears’s performance, nearly every line is a pop hook unto itself, in much the same way that the video now feels like a succession of ready-made memes, reaction GIFs and TikTok clips.
We now know that ‘…Baby One More Time’ ushers in a new golden age of pop music. In the UK, the scene closest to us for observation, writer-producers like Richard X, Cathy Dennis and especially Xenomania step up to the Swedish challenge and make their own brilliant pop music to be performed by equally strong and compelling young women. Britney herself becomes the template for new generations of young pop stars and their music, for the ’00s and beyond. To take just one pop gem from the ’10s as an example, Carly Rae Jepsen’s peerless ‘Call Me Maybe’ is like a wittier, giddier reboot of ‘…Baby One More Time’: my loneliness is thrilling me; call me maybe one more time. Britney’s signature hit is that wondrous thing: a brilliant pop record that begat generations of other equally brilliant pop records. Who needs dreary Irish boybands?
