60 Songs That Explain the '90s - " ... Baby One More Time"—Britney Spears

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

'60 Songs' returns for another batch of songs by covering the Big Bang of late '90s teen pop, Britney Spears's " ... Baby One More Time." Rob breaks down Britney's early career, how the media handled the young star, the song's perfect chorus, and much more. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Doreen St. Félix Producers: Jonathan Kermah and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Sean Fennessey. We've got something special cooking on the prestige TV podcast. I'll be recapping one of my favorite shows, HBO's Barry, every Sunday night with the writer-director star of the show, The Great Bill Hater. We'll talk about the show's wild twists and turns, its special brand of dark comedy, and how it all came together. So on Sunday nights, immediately after a new episode airs, you can hear Bill and I break it all down on the Prestige TV pod. Subscribe on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. In the summer of 1989, new kids on the podcast. Block performed live at the Medina County Fair. That's Medina County, Ohio.

Spelled like Medina, it's the Burbs. I grew up there, half hour south of Cleveland. I was not in attendance at the New Kids Show, but I heard the jubilant screams of the amassed hordes of primarily teenage girls. I heard these screams from my house 2.5 miles away. That song holds up the right stuff. Sorry, you got it, parentheses, the right stuff. I've been looking into whether I'm lying about this.

This claim sounds hyperbolic. Yes, did I, at the time an 11-year-old boy of Unremarkable? Some people on Twitter now might even say mediocre hearing ability. Could I physically hear the jubilant screams of primarily teenage girls who would not talk to me? Could I hear those girls jubilantly screaming from 2.5 miles away? Yes. Yes, I could. Yes, I did. I looked into it. I found some concert noise equations. Equations that factored in the weather. I just remember my mom standing at her open bedroom window and being like, hey, Robbie, come here, listen. And I heard it. I heard them. Primarily the girls. They're jubilant screams, their elation, and perhaps their nascent lust, which I could not inspire, ignited by new kids on the block and born on a tempestuous Ohio summer wind. Ah!

And I thought, ah, so that's where they all went. Could I talk you into that last line being even when you fart? I feel like I could. That's not what he says. That's not what Jordan says. saying that. That's ridiculous. No one is saying that he says even when you fart, but that could be what he's saying. That's all I'm saying. Not a prestigious gig, the Medina County Fair. A nondescripts, a replacement level county fair. No offense. They got accomplished cows and deep fried Twinkies and demolition

derbies and insulting clown dunk tanks and shit. I seem to recall some years later taking a silent awkward desultory ferris wheel ride with a soon-to-be ex-girlfriend at the Medina County Fair. That's what you get for talking to me, ladies. That's a bummer of a memory. What are you going to do? I seem to recall competing in a weekend-long rolling leaderboard free-throw shooting contest at the Medina County Fair, who could make the most free throws in a row? I made like 19 in a row or something.

Respectable. Somebody beat me later that day. Made like 35. Fuck that guy. I was a free throw specialist when I played basketball in junior high in early high school. You know what that means? That means I was trash. That's what it means.

In technical sports jargon in basketball terms, I was back then what's known as an oaf. And even now, in several crucial respects, an oaf I remain new kids on the block formed in 1984 under the ages of songwriter, producer, and teen pop impresario Maurice Starr. who'd spent much of the early 80s shepherding New Edition to crossover pop stardom. Johnny Gill was the best member of New Edition. I know he joined up later. I don't care.

Johnny Gil was the best. The goal for any aspiring teen pop impresario is to create a boy band so popular and lucrative that the boys themselves grow to resent you and ultimately excommunicate you for taking all the money. Mission accomplished Maurice twice. Maurice's original concept for new kids

on the block was, what if? New edition, but white. Enter Joey, Danny, Donnie, Jonathan, and Jordan, five bad brothers from the Bean Town Land. That's Boston, Dorchester. The self-title debut from New Kids on the Block came out in 1986 and features way more rapping than I thought. So that's where the Beastie boys got it. I take that as a personal challenge. Donnie, I'm doing it. I'm going at least 20 lines without a cuss. Fuck it. 20 lines. Starting now, the first thing you noticed about the cover of the first new kids record is

Joey's braces. These Boston boys were not an overnight success. They were not industry plants. The critic and author Maria Sherman, a friend of the program, I have previously mentioned her excellent book called Larger Than Life, a history of boy bands from NKOTB to BTS. Maria writes that in their early days, back when they were still known by the early band name,

Nynuk, NYNUK, the kids, quote, rehearsed incessantly and took on any gig they could, including stints in retirement homes, schools, community centers, roller rinks, and the prison where one of Donnie's brothers was incarcerated. Not Marky Mark, presumably. Another brother. Their retirement home days were over, also presumably, by the time of the second New Kids album, 1989's Hanging Tough, which kicks off with. the right stuff and eventually sold 14 million copies worldwide.

Hanging Tough, of course, exemplifies the boy band phenomenon where you got to get tougher and harder and ruder and more mature and mercurial and dangerous on each new record so as to transcend the squeaky clean boy band stigma. Unfortunately, the hanging part of the title negates the toughness of the tough part. of the title in my opinion nobody asked me nobody asked me about anything but nobody asked me about this in particular on the other hand if you're in a boy band that plays a show in a prison you're certainly tougher than me i'm convinced a lot of crying teenage girls in the hangin tough video maria sherman in her book also shouts out joey's top hat in that video with the top ripped off so that

his luscious curls might flourish lusciously. Concrete personal new kids memory number two. One time, right around this time. While on vacation in Missouri, I stayed with my family in a hotel that was also a nursing home. Not a retirement home, which implies some degree of activity and vigor, hence the occasional early new kids gig, a nursing home. I'm at the cheap hotel. I'm at the nursing home.

I'm at the combination cheap hotel and nursing home. I will not be looking into whether I'm lying about this. Take it or leave it. This feels true to me. This falls into the hallowed, why would I make that up category? I remember a door, a heavy hallway door with a square portal window of thick glass. I remember looking through this glass to get a peek at the nursing home. The door's purpose, of course, being to emphatically divide.

the hotel section of the hotel from the nursing home section of the hotel to contain via its thickness and heaviness the smell one might associate with a nursing home the door was insufficient i just remember my mom turning to me at one point being like well this hotel sucks i just asked my mom about this it's real this really happened it wasn't missouri though. It was Pennsylvania. Of course it was. So I'm lying on my bed in our room at the nursing home hotel and I'm watching Nick Rocks on Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon's squeaky clean music video show. And here come new kids on the block doing you got it parentheses the right stuff in a bowling alley in Michigan. Each new kid got his own bowling lane to dance in. I was quite impressed by their

dance moves as I understood bowling lanes to be quite slippery. Super charismatic. For the last chorus, the boys mingle with some wholesome and uncomfortable-looking Michigan teens, and Donnie and Jordan pretend to sing into a bowling pin, winsome. I enjoyed this performance very much. I found this performance to be transportive, escapist, transcendent. I don't mean that in any cosmic, life-changing,

over-rock critic type way. I just mean it was lovely to transcend my meager circumstances and spend four minutes or so forgetting that I was sitting in a nursing home hotel. He totally says, even when you fart, I changed my mind. That is 100% what he says. That is canon. Right after this, I'm going to genius and Wikipedia to change it to even when you fart. As a nascent teen, I was a teen pop agnostic, I think.

I didn't actively seek out music like this, but I'd like to think I didn't actively look down on it. The jubilant screams of teenage girls are not to be scoffed at or condescended to. A little quote from Rolling Stone for you. Who's to say that young girls who like pop music, short for popular, right?

Have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy. That's not up to you to say. Music is something that's always changing. There's no goalposts. Young girls like the Beatles. You're going to tell me they're not serious? End quote.

You know who said, that, Harry Styles. That's who. So yes, I myself, as a preteen, 30-year-old hipster guy in training, occasionally a song like The Right Stuff would stop me dead in my tracks and activate my own meager supply of jubilence, a breezy little joy bomb that could penetrate even the thickest of skulls. You want a jam? You want an all-time jam? You want an all-time Latin freestyle adjacent teen pop jam? Debbie Gibson 1987 Only in My Dreams

song clips on this show can only be so long so I have to break up the chorus of Only in My Dreams to play it for you and I truly feel bad about having to break up a chorus this perfect but I'd feel worse if I didn't play it for you at all we're all doing the best we can Not a care in the world Not a snooty music critic

Within sight or with an earshot But you can't keep the haters at bay forever. There comes a time to set aside childish things. There comes a time to put all those haters in their place. Oh yeah, we're going to send this one out to all those jealous, no good knucklehead. We're trying to keep us down. Concrete personal new kids memory number three on January 28th, 1991. New Kids on the Block performed live at the American Music Awards. They performed a song called Games. And Donnie, in particular, had a few thoughts to share. But I'm going to tell you what, we ain't going out like. The journey from jealous, no good

knuckleheads to you can kiss my butt is tremendous. tremendously amusing to me. I don't mind telling you. It's pure Dorchester. The man is hanging tough. Okay, let's orient ourselves. Yes, the American Music Awards. The Betamax Grammys.

The Hydrox, the R.C., call it, the Zoon of Award shows. A Michael Bolton-based Ponzi scheme perpetrated by the music industry to this day, I personally won an American music award. Ward for coming in second in a free throw shooting contest at the Medina County Fair. That's not true. I didn't even come in second. Donnie's dressed all in black with white sneakers. He's rocking a bucket hat and holding a cane. He looks alarmingly like kid rock. This actually explains a lot. I'll think more about that later. Donnie, in fact, is wearing a sleeveless black t-shirt that says war sucks in giant white letters. This is January 91. This is in the midst of Operation Desert Storm.

which is going to solve all our problems. As Donnie dances and gesticulates and whatnot, his shirt ripples. And in those fleeting moments when the first S in Sucks disappears, you can imagine, if you like, that it's actually an F. Games is a deep cut on the third Blockbuster New Kids album, released in June 1990 and called Step by Step. You remember the song, Step by Step. I don't have to play that one for you.

you. Step one. We can have lots of fun. Step two. I forget step two. No one remembers step two. Step two is lost to history. Pretty good album. Step by step. Pretty weird album. Those two statements are not incompatible, though sometimes they are. Here's Donnie trying at a fake patois on a wildly inappropriate reggae jam called Stay With Me Baby. The only thing you have to be know for sure. So that's where Sublime got it. Games is a spunky and bare-knuckled little tune about how the new kids are through playing games

with all the jealous, no-good knuckleheads who've been trying to keep them down. Those knuckleheads often accuse the new kids of lip-syncing. And so for this American Music Awards performance, the fellas are very much not lip-syncing. And there's something compelling and empowering about how out-of-breath they often sound. hit it jordan

when you put us down it ain't gonna get to nowhere we're positive and no matter what you think way really care later on he break dances it's rad so for whatever reason

I had videotaped on our VCR the 1991 American Music Awards and I watched just this performance of games over and over and over

you got to rewind the VHS tape laborious process not really But I was fascinated. This is easily the new kids' song that I've spent the most time with. I'm a 12-year-old knucklehead by now, and I feel like this is the precise moment where I truly grasp the concept of pop music haters. The psychic damage critics, professional and otherwise, can inflict on very young pop stars in particular.

The notion of pop star backlash and backlash to the backlash, the indignance, the intensity with which those pop stars might respond. The way very young pop stars in particular are forced to toughen up and grow up too fast and too soon. We're not boys, not yet men. The awkwardness that often accompanies this light speed stumbling sprint toward maturity and uneasy adulthood. For their fourth album, 1994's semi-disasterous faced the music, New Kids on the Block will rebrand as NKOTB, reasoning that the acronym will minimize the whole kids' aspect of their name. Much like Kentucky Fried Chicken in

1991, rebranded as KFC, partly due to a copyright issue, but also partly to avoid any negative connotations with the word Kentucky. New kids in this moment also showed me the way a teen pop star might convey his or her

newfound rushed maturity and perhaps legitimacy by aligning with an older, more mature, more institutionally respected pop star. In fact, you know who joins New Kids on the Block on stage for their performance of games at the 1991 American Music Awards? Guess. Just guess.

Spoken and now the games were cease. Into the non-believers, I say peace. Yeah, boy. Games. Flava Flave. Wow. Listen to Public Enemy's Apocalypse, 91. The enemy strikes back today, my friends.

New Kids do not appear. on Apoclos 91 or any other public enemy album. It's too bad. But with this single, fraught, disconcerting, not especially beloved, but forever fascinating to me live performance, Donnie and his fellow new kids get their point across. It's a pretty simple point.

If I had to summarize Donnie's thesis in one four-word declarative sentence, that sentence would be, I'm not that innocent. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 61st episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s, and I've been stalling. I've been putting this off for a year and a half.

In fact, even as we speak, I'm still putting it off. And it's over. Everything I just described, every phase of the frantic and treacherous young pop star experience, the gritty and humble origins, the meteoric rise, the overnight success, the arduous and endless years-long trudge that precedes the overnight success, the jubilant screaming fans audible from miles away, the sneering haters, some of whom are screaming even louder, the snide accusations of lip-sinking and other alleged inauthenticities. The backlash, the backlash to the backlash, the whiplash that comes with growing up in comically

exaggerated fast forward. The withering light and stultifying pitch darkness of trusses super stardom. The innocence you lose when you insist you're not innocent. And last but not least, the pulverizing grossness of slobbering adults who get paid to treat a child like an adult. You cream through all of that. The rise in the fall and the rise in the fall in three seconds. Three words, three seconds. Two of those words are baby. The most spectacular and iconic and morally fraught delivery of the word baby since Ronnie Spector. That percussive beat right there, it sounds like panting, doesn't it? Like a dog panting?

Like society collectively panting? I think I mentioned at some point that I've been dreading this. I have been afraid to do this if we're honest. If I'm honest, enough, let's do it. This week it's Britney Spears. It's baby one more time. It's time. Here in April 2020,

Brittany Spears, more than any single human I have even mentioned in the previous 60 installments of this enterprise, Brittany is a tremendously complicated present tense concern. She is a walking, talking,

dancing, Instagram, dominating minefield, a personal and professional and emotional and emotional and moral and ethical conundrums. She is a troubling, though occasionally quite heartening, ongoing saga.

How quickly do you think I can summarize that saga? Okay. In 2007, while fighting for custody of her two children with soon-to-be ex-husband, Kevin Federline, Britney Spears suffered through a high-profile public meltdown. Leave it at that. For her own protection, scare quote, she was put under a legal conservatorship, a dystopian and infantilizing arrangement, wherein an armada of lawyers, led primarily by her father, Jamie Spears, controlled Brittany's multi-million dollar finances, her career, and by extension, pretty much her entire life. Brittany says now she was not permitted to get remarried or have another baby. Brittany now openly describes treatment under this arrangement as abusive. That conservatorship,

which started in early 2008, nonetheless remained in place for the next 13 years. She put out a bunch more albums. Peace of Me, off her fifth album, Blackout from 2007, Peace of Me is the best Britney Spears song. Just sneaking that in here. In 2013, she hit Vegas. In 2016, the New York Times published a deep dive into that conservatorship, which galvanized the free Britney movement. A multi-front legal and sociocultural battle raged in courtrooms and on the sidewalks outside courtrooms and on TikTok and what have you for the next five years. Meanwhile, the Britney Spears streaming service documentary industrial complex sprung up to document these affairs. And these films often doubled as an opportunity to revisit the mega gross first five years or so of Britney's career in particular, full of slobbering interviewers and other avatars of what I will euphemistically describe as one-handed journalism and predatory paparazzi and fucking Justin Timberlake.

Brittany prevailed and her conservatorship was dissolved in November 2021. And she will most likely spend the next several years gleefully suing the bejesus out of some motherfuckers. That wasn't that quick as summaries go. But what are you going to do? There are, most likely there will always be hourly updates in the life and times of Britney Spears. In fact, we better check real quick to see if anything's up with her today. as I'm writing this, it's Monday, April 11, 2022. Probably there's nothing new to report.

She's pregnant. We found this out today. That's fantastic. Sincerely, that's fantastic. Congratulations, Brittany. And Sam, her husband. See, though, this is the shit I'm talking about. Partly my dread is just a function of not wanting to be out of date.

I cannot write, let alone write and then record a Britney Spears thing, fast enough to keep up with the torrent of Britney Spears news. By the time you actually hear this, Britney Spears will probably have single-handedly terraformed and colonized Mars. That's fantastic, Brittany. Congrats on that as well. Also, yo, I went like 300 lines without a cuss, by the way. Eat it, Donnie.

They're going to mail me another American music award. Okay, so why am I doing this if I'm so afraid to do it? Because this song is perfect. That's why. Objectively perfect. Objectively cataclysmic. The exhilarating breathlessness of the ascent. The melodic and dramatic assent of this fucking chorus alone.

Leave me alone, Donnie. For song clip length reasons, I got to break up this chorus too, but no way we're not listening to this whole chorus. It's a total anachronism by like eight years. But this chorus, hearing it now, I picture a desperate, love-lorn young person. Pick your gender, customize your circumstances,

tapping these lines out in a desperate love-lorn iPhone text messages. My loneliness is killing me. I can hear the little as the words cross the screen and then get deleted

and then cross the screen again. The thirst, the unease, the escalating desperation, the typos, the terrible suspicion that you're going to be left on red,

as the kids say, or as the kids used to say at some point in the past decade, I think, never mind. Listen, a chorus this objectively perfect and cataclysmic tends to cataclysmically resolve. The chorus tends to peak melodically and dramatically with a single word. And so it is, in this case, with the word sign. And ideally, you bring it on home with a title that is somehow both cheerfully bewildering and flagrantly ominous. That line hits for the first time

exactly 60 seconds into this song. The whole song is exactly three and a half minutes long plus one extra second to gather yourself. 3.31. I am not willing to accept that as a coincidence. That feels precise to me.

That feels mathematical. You can somehow sense the equation. So, baby one more time. Technically there's an ellipsis. It's dot, dot, dot, baby one more time. That ellipsis is ominous and bewildering as well. Baby One More Time is the ultra-Blackbuster debut single from one Britney Spears, a Mickey Mouse Club alumnus and native of Macomb, Mississippi.

She grew up mostly in Kentwood, Louisiana. The song is released in September 1998 when Britney is 16 years old. She is 17 when the song hits number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in January of 1999. It is the number one song in America and ultimately 20 odd other countries. That same month, January 99, it serves as the leadoff track to Brittany's Ultra Blockbuster debut album.

Also called Dot, dot, dot, dot, baby one more time, which also hits number one in the Billboard album chart and ultimately sells 14 million copies in the United States alone. That's enough math. Baby one more time, the song, as you may be aware, was written by burgeoning Swedish mega producer, Max Martin, who co-produced it with fellow prolific swede, Rami Yakub.

Between Baby one more time and the 1999 Backstreet Boys Smash, I Want It That Way, which we discussed on this show back when our episodes were roughly one-third, one-fifth, as long as they are now. Based on those two songs alone, Max Martin will more or less single-handedly define the sound of global blockbuster pop well into the 21st century, the ecstasy, the exuberance, The lyrical bafflement, the precision, the math. He's a math guy, melodic math. But I said enough math.

Enough Max Martin, too. We make arbitrary decisions on this show as to what interests us and what does not. No offense to Max, but I would much rather talk about, say, Britney's triumphantly apocalyptic diction on the song, Baby, one more time. The megatone explosiveness of her syllables. Each syllable triggers an aftershock. Each syllable leaves a... crater. Every breath is a bomb. Oh, by them, baby, the reason that breathe is you.

The reason not breathe is you. Michael Jackson. Pure Michael Jackson. The podcast switched on pop. Them fellas did a run of Britney episodes a while back, starting with Baby one more time, of course, and they talk up the Michael Jackson of it all. What they admiringly describe as Britney's cage match. with the English language. Doesn't matter what she's saying. How she says it reigns eternal.

And I do mean eternal. Think about how well you know, baby one more time. Even if you don't like it, how ingrained this song is in your psyche, even if you've never once listened to it by choice. Think about how thoroughly you've internalized every melodic and percussive detail of this song. Even if you're still not quite sure

if the last line here is, it's not the way I planned it or what? The stomping liquid staircase glide of, There's nothing that I wouldn't do love it. I'm indulging in this level of granular detail as a defense mechanism. Here's another part of this story I've been dreading. My usual strategy when there's a dark road ahead for the artist in question after the song in question is to confine our conversation to the song, to the year of the song. But widening the scope here even slightly is remarkably unpleasant. Okay, let's stick with 1999. Let's use 1999 media sources only. What do we have here?

Aha, it's 17-year-old Britney Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone in April 1999. Ah, the telotubby, no thank you. The David La Cappell photos, I will otherwise not even attend. to describe Cinemax ass photo shoot private browsing tab ass photo shoot could have been worse could have been Terry Richardson look I was going to play some funk music

and do a dramatic reading from that Rolling Stone article which is far from the grotiest thing anybody wrote about Britney Spears in 1999 but that feels pointless and cheap and self-aggrandizing like I'm Mr. Enlightened 2022 guy forget it seriously baby one more time what a song huh the pre-chorus the syllables, the command, the immaculately deployed rhyme,

show me how you want it to be? Let's take a breath. Let's calm down. You're fine. I need to calm down. Let's pivot. Let's listen to a few other songs by a few other people. What do we think Britney Spears would want to hear?

Let's take an educated guess as to what Britney Spears would want to hear. Let's listen to Mariah Carey's Always Be My Baby. I'm part of me. Gotta break up this chorus, too. We're getting a raw deal with the chorus lengths and tempos this time. Always Be My Baby is from 1995, Mariah's Daydream album. This was also a number one hit, of course. If you're not reading Tom Bryan's Stereo Gum column,

the number ones where he writes about every number one song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, you got to get on that. He just did Always Be My Baby. He talks about how ominous this song is lyrically. I'm part of you indefinitely. and so forth, which I confess I'd never really noticed, on account of this song being so flagrantly lovely. So Brittany, in 2020, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her second album,

oops, exclamation point, dot, dot, dot, I did it again. Brittany curated a playlist of her favorite songs from the mid to late 90s and early 2000s. Technically, she took over album music's, I miss Y2K Pop playlist. but don't hold that against her. She also listed her three favorite songs from this list of her favorite songs, and Always Be My Baby was her favorite. She said, Mariah is one of the main reasons I started singing.

She is simply amazing. Brittany also shouted out, Cowboy Take Me Away by the Dixie Chicks from 99, which, quote, makes me think of being outside and falling in love, of course. This song does indeed make you want to fall in love on the Ferris wheel at a way above replacement level county fair.

Mariah, though, that's what I wanted. A sense of where Britney Spears came from. A sense of why she started singing. Mariah's Daydream album is an excellent choice if you're choosing when and why to start singing. You may recall that the daydream album begins with the song Fantasy, which is arguably one of the most important songs

in modern pop history. Fantasy, of course, which samples the Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love from 1981, a God Tier sample of a God Tier song. I saw Tom Tom Club live once, and Genius of Love deaged everyone in the audience by a solid quarter century. Speaking of Joy Bombs. Fantasy, of course, featuring at Mariah Carey's insistence, old dirty bastard on the remix, Obligatory. Go back like babies will pass the fires. You could hear fantasy now is Mariah's Declaration of Independence. Mariah Carey was 21 when her first album, the Mariah Carey album, came out in 1990. And of course it's fantastic, but it's also super adult, adult contemporary.

Vision of Love, I Don't Want to Cry, Love Takes Time. These are all-time great songs. But when people complain about the Grammys, how the Grammys force, fearless and vivacious and ambitious young artists to basically impersonate old people and put on evening gowns and get a grand piano and play real music. Early Mariah Carey is the best case scenario

for that. Read Mariah's memoir and she'll tell you that from the beginning, she wanted to bring in more R&B. She wanted to bring in hip-hop. She wanted to embody genre-fluid pop music as an actual young person in the 90s might conceive it and desire it. But the music industry,

Her handlers, her label, and eventually her husband wouldn't let her. It gets ugly, her arrangement. It gets to feeling like a soft conservatorship. So fantasy is a major milestone in Mariah Carey finally getting to do what Mariah Carey always wanted to do. And ODB verse is the ultimate act of defiance. And so she sounds happier and freer. And in a spiritual sense, she almost sounds younger. Take the first six or seven Mariah Carey records from 1990 to 1999.

and it's almost as if she's aging in reverse. In 1999, she puts out her rainbow album, which features Jay-Z and DeBrat and Missy Elliott and Usher and Snoop Dog and 98 degrees and a Phil Collins cover, but Phil Collins is timeless. What a journey Mariah Carey took in her first decade. What a series of journeys,

including the journey from indefinitely to incessantly. So take Mariah's slow motion emancipation, starting in 1995, is a major influence on Britney Spears. Now add Robin. The first Robin record, Robin is here, came out in 1995. She was 16. She was a bigger deal in her native Sweden at first, but for her debut, Robin co-wrote two top 10 U.S. hits. Show Me Love and Do You Know, Parentheses, what it takes with good old Max Martin. Robin would go on to have our own fraught music industry.

Saga is the ultra-simplified way to put it. But her saga is ultimately triumphant, too. The raw material for that triumph is all here on Robin is here. I hear a ton of meticulously elegant Max Martin-style megapop, of course, but I hear a ton of sultry American R&B as well. The first thing I wanted to hear after finishing Robin's debut album was Monica's debut album. Miss Thang, also from 1995. Don't take it personal in before you walk out of my life and so forth.

But young Robin also sounds like the euphoric and globally dominant ideal to which a young Britney Spears would soon aspire. That radiant jackhammer of a keyboard line, do do do do do do that's the beating heart of baby one more time to me. Listen, all I wanted here was a quick, oversimplified context for 17-year-old Britney Spears that didn't make me want to call the cops. So start with the mid to late 80s teen pop heavyweights. Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, our buddies, and NKOTB.

Did teen pop back then feel sweeter and safer and less flakantly sensual? Were teenage pop stars in that era less openly preyed upon? Or is that distortion and projection? I'll think more about that later as well. Hit 1990 and for the rest of the decade, Mariah Carey is your blueprint, both as a pop hitmaker fighting for her own freedom and as a pure active volcano singer,

Mariah and Whitney Houston are your paragon's for pure singing, and ain't nobody getting anywhere near either of them, but don't take it so hard. Now add Cheryl Crow? Absolutely. In that Rolling Stone article, Brittany says that originally she wanted to sing Cheryl Crow music,

but younger, more adult contemporary. But her label pushed her toward Max Martin, and eventually she got it. She says, it made more sense to go pop because I can dance to it. It's more me. So they pushed Mariah Carey toward adult contemporary and they pushed Britney Spears away from it. Maybe when you're an aspiring pop star and you get signed to a major label, they reject your first conception of yourself no matter what it is on principle as like a tactic. They reflexively deny whatever claim you make. Like they're an insurance company.

Nevertheless, they persisted by 1999, running parallel to the revamped boy band boom with Backstreet Boys and in sync and 98 degrees. By 1999, you got a sudden feeling deluge of young female pop stars, all staking out their territory somewhere along that spectrum of maximalist pop and R&B and Latin pop and hip hop, if only mostly in spirit. And, yes, even our dreaded adult contemporary, a loaded freshman class. of promising singers ready to carry us into the 21st century, even as we ogle them. Debut albums from Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez and Mandy Moore and Jessica Simpson. And last but not least, That would be crazy by Britney Spears,

co-written and co-produced by Max Martin and ringing in at Track 2 on her debut album, Baby One More Time. Sorry, parentheses, you drive me close. parentheses, crazy. The video for crazy, and to an unfathomably greater, extend the video for baby one more time, these early Brittany videos are cataclysmic and society altering all on their own for, yes, for their service to the one-handed journalism industry, but just as much for the choreography. My favorite recent event in the Daily Britney Spears news cycle was in March 22, when she posted a lengthy Instagram video of herself dancing, and this is what she wrote for

a caption. I recorded 30 videos of dance when I was in Maui Island emoji. That's fun to me, three exclamation points. I know I'm not the best dancer. A lot of people make fun of the way I move. But honestly, as long as I'm moving and expressing my body outwardly in some way at this point, that's healing to me. Three exclamation points. Therapy is all mind work. Blown mind emoji. I did that 10 hours a day, seven days a week, when I was. was abused. There's nothing worse than torture of the mind. I'd rather someone slap my face than fuck with my mind. Three exclamation points. Dancing, dancing woman emoji, you don't think at all. I know my actions are not perfect, but if you only knew how good it feels to feel with my body,

I think most would get it. Three exclamation points. Bear with me, I'm learning books emoji. Three exclamation points. God bless you all. Three exclamation points. And then everyone rushed to inform Britney Spears that she was a fantastic and perfect and iconic dancer, including Nikki Minaj, who wrote, mostly in all caps, Britney, put your crown back on and leave it there, baby. You are the best dancer. Settled that. What's next?

Okay. That's settled. Listen, the final thing I dreaded for the year and a half that I dreaded doing a Britney Spears episode was I dreaded how to end it. how poignant and melodramatic and pretentious I would instinctively try to get. I feared that I would fall into the trap of trying to convince you that baby one more time

is actually a sad song, a tragedy based on 60% of the shit that happened to Britney Spears afterward. Me getting all weepy about it, right? I didn't want to do that and I still don't. But I couldn't work out an alternate path to wrapping this up that wasn't just me being like, man, the bridge to this song sure kicks a.

which it does, by the way. But you don't need me to tell you that. What do you need for me? You don't need anything for me. But what can I at least pretend that you might need from me? I'd like to end by exploring the most ridiculous answer to that question that I could devise. I'd like to speak with you now about another song on the Britney Spears album, Baby, one more time. I'm going to regret this, and so are you.

but I have to register my eternal frustration, my disappointment with the song, email my heart. E-hyphen mail my heart, super sappy power ballad, deep cut, like a molten core of the earth deep cut, not a success. Email my heart as a pop song, as a love song, as a power ballad, as a B-side, as an artistic statement, as a technological statement. I do is check. So when people write about the first Britney record now, every time baby one more time, it's a round number age, right? Five years, 10 years, 15, 20.

People write about this record. And generally, an anniversary piece like that is going to be 75% Baby one more time, the song. 23% whatever else interests the writer and 2% L.O.L. Email My Heart. Right? It's hilarious. Absurd song titles. Sub, sub, sub, weird al-ass song.

title. High concept self-parity. Starting in 2019, actually, when baby one more time hit its 20th anniversary, there was a modest run of think pieces specifically about email my heart. The ridiculousness, but also allegedly the prescience. The argument being that this song both horribly dates the record and is also, tragically, the most forward-thinking moment on it. Coming on the line is not the way a single actual person has ever described the act of checking email, even in 1999, but nonetheless, there's something to this. Rolling Stone, in fact, in 2020, ran an essay with the headline, Did Email My Heart predict the future? The future defined here is the age of screen-mediated romance and social distancing, etc. Okay, sure. Yes. Maybe. See, is the implication there that she sent the same email a hundred times?

Let's go to the source, shall we? Slate in 2019 had actually interviewed the guy who wrote Email My Heart, a guy named Eric Foster White, whom Slate hails as the architect of Britney Spears's weirdest song. And Eric, who'd also worked with the Backstreet Boys at Whitney Houston, he wrote Whitney's My Name Is Not Susan. Eric is not especially proud of Email My Heart. This slate deal is a Q&A, conducted over email, of course, and Eric favors terse self-deprecating one-line answers. Q, if you could change anything about email my heart, what would it be? A, not write it. Q, did you ever hear it performed live or encounter it on the radio?

A, thankfully, no. Q, do you still earn any royalties from the song? A, the gift that keeps on giving. Fair enough. Eric would want me to mention, as indeed he mentions in this interview, that he wrote other songs on the baby One More Time record as well. He wrote the power ballad from the bottom of my broken heart, which is better. It's not great, but it's better. Eric's into apps now, notably.

But see, I personally would like to answer the question, if you could change anything about email my heart, what would it be? And so here, now, I am going to change the chorus. I am going to rewrite the lyrics to the chorus. My contention is that the problem, the ultimate failure of email my heart is that it's not absurd enough. It does not lean in. It does not commit to the absurdity of its title or its premise. If you're going to write a song about email, let's write a fucking song about email. regrettably,

regrettably for everyone, my only real option here is to sing for you, my new, superior, revised chorus to email my heart, starting now. This idea occurred to me

in the 15 seconds before I fell asleep last night, and I'm just going to assume it's still a great idea. Thank you in advance for agreeing with me. Email my heart.

Email my heart and please don't mark. Mark my love is spam. Twelve exclamation points will prove that I still care. I know you care. Email me back. It's Brittany at hotmail.com. I hope this finds you well.

Let us never speak of this again. Let us never speak of many things we spoke of here today ever again. But let us never speak of this again the most. Hey, everyone, a quick note about this conversation. Originally, we started out talking about the prescience of the Leave Brittany Alone video and meme, which was brought to us by a woman named Kara Cunningham. But unbeknownst to us, we used an old name for Kara. This was an honest mistake.

Neither of us had any idea that she goes by Kara now. But it's a mistake nonetheless, and it's on me. And I apologize for it. So we went back and snipped out just that little bit of the conversation here. I just wanted to make that clear. Thanks for listening. And again, my apologies. Our guest today is Doreen St. Felix.

She's a staff writer and the television critic for the New Yorker. We're thrilled to have you. Doreen, thanks so much for being here. Rob, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to chat with you today. Excellent. Excellent. Do the last three to five years of the Britney Spears experience, like the free Britney era, I guess, when most people learned about the conservatorship and I've been rooting for her to get out of it.

Does that change the way you hear Baby one more time or any of her early music now? Or can you still enjoy this song as just an exquisite pop song with no baggage attached to it? I remember being a teenage girl and thinking that the treatment that she was receiving, the treatment that like Lindsay Moham was receiving, wasn't. funny. I didn't necessarily have the language to explain why. But something about it felt off because there was a primal connection. I think I felt towards their displays, right? You know, I shaved my head when I was younger. I really understood. I really understood it. So I think that baby one more time, when it first came out, I was too young to glean any meaning from it. But once Brittany, you know, around the time that every time music video came out,

I had already in my mind been looking back on that debut album, and in particular that single. And the way that I look at it now is almost, it's the, we're meant to think that it has sort of ominous meaning. And obviously there was a whole machine. was built around this teenage girl. Right. The age of 16.

We can talk about who actually wrote the song, the notion of authorship. But I try not to, I try to leave that song alone because it almost feels like too weighted. Right. Because the thing about Brittany, and I think that the failure of some of these documentary projects is that they only ever put her in this dichotomy of having had no control or having had all the control. Right. And therefore losing control because of that.

Right. And it seems a lot more complicated that it is true that some of the like a spree of that song are decisions that were made by 17 year old Britney. Yeah. 17 year old girls are freaks, like complete. They have an awareness of their sexuality. They have an awareness of wanting to break out of norms. So I don't want to. I don't want to like overdetermine or underdetermine.

I know what you mean. You know? Right. Yeah, I was thinking about this song Lucky from her second record. Like she's so lucky. She's a star, but she cries, cries, cries, cries in her lonely heart. And like I hear that now and I can't help but hear it as like a cry for help. But I feel like I'm doing that song a disservice by like projecting, as you say,

like this sort of almost victim narrative onto her, you know? Yeah, there are these figures in every generation. and I always think of Pauline Kale's essay about Marilyn Monroe. I think Pauline Kale was reviewing Norman Mailer. He did a bit like, Marilyn Monroe is serious now because I've decided to stow this critical. That's a Norman Mailer move right there. Yes, light on her. And I think Brittany is in that similar space where I think Brittany was always aware

having been a child star that there was an element of her, art that was about persona, that was about character. And I think Lucky is kind of, it's meta, it's doubly meta because it's her doing the like Marilyn Monroe movie star kind of ventriloquely, but it's also extremely enticing and alluring to apply a kind of like, I don't know, retrospective view onto what that song is saying, but at the same time it is true that Brittany was completely miserable when that song came out as were so many of her compatriots. So it's kind of, I think, I like to look back at the early albums as being a mystery of voice,

where it's kind of impossible to exactly pinpoint when Britney is speaking, when Britney isn't speaking, when the situation is speaking. And that's what makes pop music like so alluring. That's what pop-timism tried to correct for. Yeah. You said that when you first heard baby one more time, like you couldn't really, you were too young to glean any meaning from it. Like, how did it strike you?

Did you just like this song as just a song on the radio? So I used to listen to Z100 with my older sister all the time. I'm from Brooklyn, New York. And one of my cousins took me to whatever, you know, music store was extant at that time. And now has been, you know, extinct for 12 years. They're all gone. Tower maybe. Yeah.

Yeah, probably Tower. Yeah. And that was the first, I think I was probably like seven. And that was the first album I ever bought. Are you serious? The British, wow, all right. Baby one more time. And Baby One More Time was an interactive CD.

So I remember putting it in our compact computer that we had in the basement. Oh, wow. And we got to watch the making of the music video. And I think that was very, made a huge impression on me in that this, mystical spectacle was immediately demystified. Like I got to see you're practicing, you know. All the effort behind it, right? All the effort. All the effort. And I also, I actually personally grew up going to Catholic school. And so I think I had a sense for the darkness. Yeah. I know what you mean. Yeah. Beneath that kind of, that kind of display. So I don't even

remember the question that you asked me. I'm just like giving you all of my deep dark childhood memories. No, this is, this is that we love this. Absolutely. We're 1990. 1999 you got Brittany, but also Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez, the second, Justinie's Child's record, like Britney, Beyonce is looming, right? The Backstreet Boys and Incink, were, were you into all of that? And did Brittany sort of stand apart from all of that pop right there in 1999? Absolutely. I think I always sensed that Brittany was just the best at that teeny bopper thing of that cohort. Right.

I in my mind really saw Destiny Sheld as an R&B group, although that's obviously, but, you know, some people would say the R&B like slash pop pop star is a distinction that we should make. But Brittany, to me, she wasn't a love object, which made her different from the boy bands. Right. And I'm kind of interested to see how a man my age might remember how Brittany was presented at that time. Or someone who was, like, attracted to women at that time. Because I didn't feel the notion of her being like a threat that, you know, conservatives and also liberals were like hugely. Again, someone like Brittany, they saw her as kind of like a, you know,

illiterate sex bot that was going to like make all of these 10 year old girls rabidly sexual. And that's not at all what I think girls are attracted to with figures like her throughout each generation. It's that you understand that the spectacle has to be done in order for these like maybe like deeper coded meetings to come across. So yeah, I just thought that Brittany, there was something about her that felt like separate from her cohort. She had that Madonna effect. I just remember thinking, oh, like this is someone who is going to define my childhood and my adolescence, even when I was kind of like too young to understand what that kind of impression. So you knew that immediately.

You could tell. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. For me, I think I was 21 when that first record came out. And like, going back to like 1999 discourse on Brittany now is very unpleasant for me. I think about Rolling Stone, right? The Rolling Stone cover with the Telitubby, right? Like, speaking either as a young person then or as a culture writer now, like, do you think the conversation around young Britney Spears was markedly different or groatier or worse than any of that other, any of the other singers?

in that cohort? Well, it's an interesting question because that discourse happens really quickly because the albums are also coming out like in quick succession. And I think there was, oops I did it again. It's not her independence record. No. But there was a shift in messaging, right? Yeah.

There were like a few like nascent, you know, like the like burbling. I'm almost like breaking out on my like pop. shell kind of messaging that you'll see in a lot of these pop stars second albums. And then there's like a huge resistance to people realizing that Britney is a sentient being. And even more I feel, yeah, like after the VMAs, for example, a huge backlash against her not just being the sexual play thing, but like owning her sexuality. That performance is very different from what we see when we watch a music video like Baby one more time.

And I think something that I think is fascinating is like thinking about that Rolling Stone cover, David Lachapel shot that cover. He did. And he's kind of like the quiet figure who gave us a lot of the iconography of that era. Absolutely. And in interviews, he said that Bernie was uncomfortable, that he was uncomfortable with her discomfort, but it was just kind of like it had to happen. And what's fascinating is that.

But then Dave LaShapelle stays a collaborator throughout her entire career. Right, right. And I almost get the sense, obviously there were operators. There are like evil people that we could probably point to. But there was this kind of just ambience. When we look back at cultural errors, it's easy to assign blame and to say like this person should have done this. There's a way in which everyone kind of like goes with this flow. Right.

And the flow was the things that we sat about Brittany. or Lindsay or even someone like Paris Hilton in our like Twitter heavy everybody's a critic error are like unimaginable but they were like not only par for the course but they were also how these people became very famous

right in 2018 you wrote a piece for the New Yorker about Britney Spears in fashion like the fashion world's failure to embrace her or maybe her disinterest in embracing it and a couple lines in your piece jumped out at me and the first one was as a girl I found

Spears' gift for projecting the agitated intelligence of fed up girls almost frighteningly appealing. Like, has she always sounded like agitated and fed up to you? I think we can even just go to the material of her voice. You know, there's obviously a big divide amongst music critics as to whether or not Bernice Richard is even a good singer. There are some people who wouldn't even call her a singer, right? And there are others who recognize that she had that really rich, earthy Alta voice when she was a kid on that Disney talent show. What was that called?

Mickey Mouse Club. Mickey Mouse Club. Mouscateers. Yeah. I'm using this term very lightly, so don't get mad at me, listeners. But there's an element of code switching that I think is very identifiable. And now we have words that are more in the discourse we could talk about. like vocal fry, we can talk about all the ways that women communicate in order to both

placate, uh, you know, sexist society, but also are just our norms or our culture. And I think that I, I just like really held onto her flagrant and the word that I use in that piece is frightening, just like girlishness. And at the same time that I knew that there was something wrong with that, I also found that to be quite powerful, that she hadn't domesticated that thing that we're supposed to do when we're 15 years old. We're 15 years old and you realize that you sound done because you talk a certain way.

But that she had, if anything, like kind of elevated that language to a zone where it felt untouchable and like no one else could do it. Right. Another line from that piece that struck me is that the male writers of her song forced her to sing in an unnaturally high register, but when she cursed the paparazzi that stalked her, her drawl was low. Do you think in terms of even her physical voice that her pop star voice was totally different than her actual human voice? So it's a complicated question. And I think I wrote that piece in 2018, and I think during that time, there was a people were feeling very ardent about. what men were making women do.

And I think that my critical voice is a bit softer now, and I don't know that I would use that word force, but it is true that Britney started singing in a higher register, and that that caused some damage to her vocal chords. But at the same time, that voice is

it's incredible. It's genius. The like sexy baby voice. It's often been made fun of, but at the same time, the whole, I would say like the entire class of pop stars that we would consider Gen C, they're not famous for being belters. They're famous for having voices that are unique. Right. You know, even someone like Thubb who we might want to call a vocalist. I'm really going out, Ellen here. Please, please do. Sexy baby voice. He's got a sexy baby voice. Absolutely. But Thaibb has a voice that's not, we're not drawn to it because of how beautiful it sounds vocally.

We're drawn to it because of how like audit is. And I think that there's like an eccentricity to the Brittany vocalist of, you know, the early 2000s that is maybe like understudied. Right. Because it's an affectation and the thing that we've learned about Brittany, I think especially through her social media is that she's very aware. of presentation and spectacle and affectation. And it's a way of, I think that's where her true artistry lies. For people who think that, you know, pop stars are only legitimate if they write their music, if they're like a Gaga, it's not true.

But Gaga looks toward a Britney because of her ability to create artistry outside of the obvious, you know, I wrote this song, I'm a producer, that sort of thing. That word force jumped out at me too, because you know, you think a pop star's early years, a female pop star in general, like we're taught to think that like they have no control. You think about Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, of course, like Kelly Clarkson, like part of the arc is that you have no control, but then at some point the pop star gets control and they get to do what she really wanted to do in the first place. Do you see young pop stars almost as prisoners in that way? again I think that dichotomy is proving to have not always held true I watched I mean this documentary is specious for a lot of reasons that Janet Jackson doc that was on lifetime but I thought it was interesting to see Janet push back against that narrative that had been right it's a really like sexy narrative to cook up you know this idea that this like young woman with all of the talent in the world has been spengalied into this creation,

and then she decides to break out against it. It's like it's the Pygmalion narrative. Right. And when you actually do the reporting, you do the work, it's so much more complicated because there are instances where these women are acting like as the true authors of their careers. There are always going to be concessions and compromises that have to be made. And then there are instances of like pure, I would say, abuse.

I think in the music industry, we should really be using that term. And another thing that that question makes me think of is how many young male pop stars were put under that same kind of like refining machine, but that narrative isn't as readily applied to their careers. No. You know, someone like Justin Timberland, you know? I think you can make that argument. Harry Styles.

Yes. Justin Bieber, Usher before him, and then Usher then kind of Spangling. Right, right. I sure got to do it to somebody else. Right. And so there is something about the pop star.

I don't know how old we want this. How old is the pop star? It's maybe like 60, 70 years old, where there is the body, the person that we kind of like ascribe to being the phenomenon, but there's always going to be like, of people behind it. So I think that that narrative, it's useful.

I think it's like if I was talking to a 15-year-old girl, I'd be like, yeah, that's what happened to Britney. Because you want them to have a sense of empowerment. But it's just so clear whenever I kind of catch wind of Britney's responses to a lot of these documentaries, she's always so upset. She is. She cried for two days or something after the Hulu one. Right, right.

Yes. the one, and that's one done, that's one by the time. So that's the one that we can say is like, the one that's most journalistically sound, but the thing is that business, it's very hard to get to the like the nuts and bolts of the facts. And it's really, it's really like fun and easy to have these cultural discourse conversations like we're having right now. Right, right. But I think the truth of the story is always, it's always a lot nodderier. It's wild that even Janet Jackson's is more complicated because she called it. album control and started it by saying, now I'm in control. But even then, it's not quite that simple.

She encouraged it in a way, but she knew at the same time that it really was, it wasn't that simple. Exactly. Exactly. I was really struck when Brittany came out after that Hulu documentary, which is entirely on her side, which is entirely in support of her and just very explicitly says, like she was treated awfully, like world historically awfully by the media, by the paparazzi. Is there any way really for, you know, the media to acknowledge how much they hurt someone without like hurting her further? No. I think the media has completely misunderstood their role in all this.

The media is not, it's not church. There's nothing that can be done about Britney's past. Right. And I think that the victimhood narrative, which really sort of coalesced during the Me Too era, it's funny if you go back and read these articles, they all have the similar, the way the woman, you know, who's coming out telling her truth, the way the portrait is is very similar. In some ways, the story can sound fake because the way it's reported follows such a really reliable rhythm. There's a format, right? Yes, there's a format. And the whole thing is that experiencing abuse, whether it be sexual or otherwise as a woman, there is no format. And that's why it's impossible to really talk about it. And I think what Brittany is conveying rightly is that you can't just do this really easy comment, apologize, say what was wrong and now what was right. And that victimhood should be thought of as, you know, an identity. that's based on agency.

And I think the problem with that documentary in particular is that it did not see her as an agent at all. Yeah. And she's, Britney Spears is a weirdo. If you go on her Instagram, you can see that the way that she doesn't see the world as other people do. Right. How could she? Yeah. She, exactly, because the world, her world is not other people's.

Yeah. So, yeah, I think that this rushed to sort of save these women. is not only a bad way of thinking of what criticism or art that's a documentary or fictionalization should do, but I think it also kind of paradoxically makes the real, like, subject of these pieces is the media. It's not, it's ever the person. It's all got the flash of, like, you know, the really sexist article that came out or Perez Hilton's blog. And the media is obsessed with the media. You wouldn't think that I work in media hearing the talk. But, yeah, there is something, I think there will be like a meta moment five or ten years from now where there will be a huge backlash to the documentaries and the television shows that have come out in this post Me Too air.

I'm doing very hard air quotes right now about how indulgent they are. We're going to have to apologize for all the apology documentaries. Exactly. Because you wrote about Pam and Tommy, about the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape, the Hulu thing. And you mentioned, you know, Marsha Clark, Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Babe. Britney Spears is sort of the final boss of these TV shows that are designed just to apologize to a famous person. But that impulse just never does the famous person any good in the present. Pamela Lee wants nothing to do.

Pamela Anderson wants nothing to do with that show. You know, and Brittany, you know, the New York Times. broke for many people, the conservatorship. The New York Times has done incredible work in bringing all this to light. But even that Hulu thing was about as well done that first Britney Spears documentary was as well done as you can do something like that. But still, that impulse to apologize, as you say, just fundamentally doesn't do the subject of the apology any good, the receiver of the apology. Exactly. And I think it also doesn't, it's not good for the record. It's important to know why culture was the way it was in the late 90s in the early 2000s.

And by putting that veneer of like restitution over it, you end up not like, I can't imagine being like 18 years old in watching that documentary. It doesn't give you any sense of why people thought it was okay. You know? More air quotes. Yes. Right. It was okay.

Right. It was okay. And at the same time, the thing about pop stars is, that the mainstream thinks that they own them, but they're really like the dreams and fantasies of like the queer weirdos who are their real stand-on, you know? The mainstream takes way too much credit for female pop stars. And I can guarantee that if we were to look,

if that was a protagonist, you know, the community of like young girls, young gay boys, of queer people who were thinking about, who Brittany was in the late 90s and 2000s, we get a really different story. Yeah. Right. It just seemed that people came late to the idea of how important she was as a dancer,

right? Is it overstating it to say that she's one of the most influential dancers of the past few decades? Not at all. I think it's really Michael and Janet and then Brittany. Wow. I think you're right. That's wild to say out loud, but I think you're absolutely right. I can't think, geez.

Yeah, like, who was the 90s? Who was the 90s person? I was thinking of this Zadie Smith essay that she did comparing the dance styles of Prince and Michael Jackson. And she sums up the difference as Michael Jackson, you remember every move. Remember the choreography? And Prince, you can't recall or summon in your mind any move, but you just can summon a feeling, how that made you feel. You remember how it felt, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And there's power to both. And Britney's in the first camp in that we all remember the dance that, you know, she didn't, I did it again video and whatever. But those dances do summon a feeling. And I think that Brittany is a performer more than anything, which I think was a thesis of that article I wrote about fashion. And her body, as much as it's been policed and speculated on in the media for, her has been her instrument. Yeah. Just as a last

question, because it was your first album, does baby one more time as a full record hold up for you now? You know, I feel like even for super pop-minded critics, they're not necessarily raving about this album now as like a full album, but do you go back to it ever beyond the singles?

It's funny. There was this, I remember during the first year of the pandemic, Like, someone tweeted about how, you know, some of NERD's, like, best production had actually been given to Brittany. I saw that. Yeah, it made me go back and listen to, obviously, pre-NERD, Brittany. And the music is not as good, but I think that maybe one more time. I mean, it's an unfair comparison. No offense to Max Martin.

But I think that maybe one more time. is a lot like weirder than I remember it being. Right. Soda Pop is a really weird kind of like

ska experiment on that album. There's a weird stuff on that record. Email my heart, of course. Everybody's doing emails now. Have you guys seen

that Britney meme? But then also there are some songs where she's singing in her natural register. And soda pop, she does. She's actually

singing much lower on that. album than you remember okay yeah because i've spent a lot of time with it i'm trying to think of like lower like physically lower jumped out of me email my heart is lower than i remembered it being it was lower than i expected it to be also is a joan is a joan cover on that album i think so i don't uh i don't think so but i don't have it right in front of me yeah but it does sort of stand apart I think for a lot of critics, like her good stuff, other than maybe one more time, the song, like, starts with toxic, right? Like, as I remember it, like indie rock critics, like that's toxic is when they really got on board with her.

Like, that's, we were sort of late, but we at least started there. But I think I'm sort of curious the reappraisal of the first two records before that. Yeah, I mean, you know, on a music level, given that we have the rest of her herb. hard to say. Right. It's easy to want to be like, yeah, the music, and the music was better than we thought it was. But what it was, though, was really, it just told such a compelling story. Those albums to me are like, bend it like Becca.

It's like the perfect teen movie. And that magic is really difficult to reach. And I think it can only be done in this, like, extremely small window of time in an artist's life. when they are not a girl, not yet a woman, perhaps. Perhaps. Doreen, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you for having me.

I had a great time. Thank you very much to our guest this week, Doreen St. Felix. Thank you to our producers, Justin Sales, and the God Kerm. And thank you, of course, for listening. And now, without any further ado, here's Britney Spears with Baby One More more time. We'll see you next week.