Switched on Pop - Listening 2 Britney: ...Baby One More Time

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

On a crisp Autumn morning in 1998, the world was introduced to the voice of Britney Spears, and pop would never be the same. Britney’s mix of vocal fry, percussive pronunciations, and timbral play on “...Baby One More Time” hadn't been heard before. As successful as they were, these techniques were derided by critics as parts of her manufactured “baby voice." Listening in 2022, we can hear Britney with more clarity: as a radical new artist. "...Baby One More Time" was not Britney's first turn in the spotlight. She had been cast on the Mickey Mouse Club in 1992, when she was 12 years old, executing immaculate vocals and choreography. But the voice on her first single represents a different side of the singer, and a new sound on the pop landscape. With Britney's ferocious vocals at the center, "...Baby" rocketed to number one and broke sales records. On her next release, "Oops!... I Did it Again," Spears upped the ante. Working again with producers Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, "...Oops" borrowed liberally from music across the radio dial, and added a dash of 16th-century harmony into the mix. Between her first two albums, Britney had taken hold of audiences by sheer force of personality and artistry, fought for in every syllable she sang. The stardom that followed was as unprecedented as her sound. But for someone as scrutinized as Britney has been, the artistry behind her celebrity has often been ignored. On the first episode of the four-part series Listening to Britney, we focus on Britney's voice in order to hear a pop icon with fresh ears. Songs Discussed Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time, Oops!... I Did it Again, Stronger, Don't Let Me Be the Last to Know, Email My Heart Backstreet Boys - Larger than Life Jean-Baptiste Lully - Les Folies d'Espagne Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch John Pop. I'm musicologist

Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, do you remember where you were on September 28th, 1998? Not precisely, but definitely at some point that day, I probably would have had two excruciatingly long bus rides to and from middle school. Probably listening to a lot of radio. Well, Charlie, I hope this date is burned in your mind forever more because September 28th, 1999. a Monday was when the world was introduced to the voice of Britney Spears. So I was probably rushing home from the bus to watch Total Request live on MTV. The details may be foggy, but I know one thing, Charlie. Your world, my world, the world of pop music was never the same.

That's undeniable. Britney Spears has been in the news nonstop since that moment in 1998. Her highs and lows have been super. served up on an almost daily basis to an insatiable public. She's been made the symbol of innocence, sexuality, politics, mental health, feminism, confinement, and freedom. She must be Charlie the most overexposed figure in the history of popular culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Except for one aspect of her career. What's that? Her music. Yeah, I mean, for someone who has been dissected ad nauseum, you can be a lot of them. you can find whole podcast, books, magazine articles, television series dedicated to unpacking her private life. Yeah. Which we're not going to do, by the way, on the show. We are the least qualified people.

Truly. But we do love her music. And on this four-part mini-series, we are going to rediscover her catalog by leaving all of our assumptions at the door. Basically, what we're going to be doing is listening to Brittany. I'm so excited to do this because she has some of the best earworms in history. And yet, this is a pretty significant task. So where do we begin? I think we have to start with the voice of Britney Spears.

And the first time we heard that voice was on the song that we've been listening to already, Baby One More Time, Off Spears' debut album of the same name. Yeah, I think that's the right place to start because this is the beginning of her career. She's quite young. She's not getting songwriting or production credits yet, and she's working with the likes of Max Martin and Rami Jacob, who are also working with all of the big boy bands, Backstreet Boys, Insink, et cetera, et cetera.

And I feel like the place where we can really hear her is in her voice because it has a quality like I had never heard before. It is unique. I think you're on to something, Charles. I think that's the first thing you notice about this. This is a different kind of pop voice. And frankly, I think it's a little weird. It's kind of a weird voice.

And I don't mean that in a pejorative way at all. I mean, it's different. It takes you by surprise. Take that little excerpt from the second verse of Baby one more time. Spears brings so much force and dedication to every syllable she sings. The reason. I, yeah. It's like when she steps into the recording booth,

it is a cage match between her and the English language. What are you specifically hearing? In order to answer that, I think we need to strip all of the lush production of this song away for a second and just really home in on the sound of Speer's voice. Boy, you got me blinded. Oh, Basque in the glory, Charles. Whoa. That's so cool because I've heard this hundreds of times,

but I've never recognized the percussiveness and the ferocity and the articulation. And I think that's the first key characteristic of the voice of Britney Spears is the way she articulates and pronounces every word as though it's the last word she may ever utter in her life. I want to hear it again. Can you like zoom in on like almost at the consonant level? Let's go through some of the the pronunciation here. I mean take that that explosive baby baby that begins the second verse. That baby is delivered with enough sonic force to like knock down a wall. Like you said ferocity earlier. I think that's a nice adjective for this vocal delivery.

Kind of knocks you off your feet. The reason I breathe is you. Here's another kind of unique approach to pronunciation. You articulate every syllable, right? So it's not breathe. It's breathe. So she's actually performing breathe th with an extra breath in the. It's making a word that could sound very smooth, right?

Breathe. That has a like this long kind of legation. auto feel to it. But as you said earlier, it takes that smooth word and it makes it a percussive, sharp staccata word. It's no longer breathe. It's... I breathe. I breathe. Even the monosyllabic vowel I

becomes another percussive phoneme in the hands of Britney Spears. It almost takes a vowel and turns it into a consonant. Right. The same thing that happens two words later on the word you. It becomes you. And it's not a breath in the normal way that we think of breathiness. Like, ah. Right. It actually has a rhythmic element to it.

It's percussive. There may be a reference to Michael Jackson here. Sure. It was known for similar utterances. Yeah, it's white. It's stubborn you to be back. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can hear that.

But the way Spears deploys this technique here feels new and different to me, because it's not just the presence of these percussive pronunciations. It's the whole way she's singing every syllable and she's bringing so much vocal fry to every note. Vocal fry. Vocal fry. Literally when we're making the sound, we're letting our epiglottis just be almost as loose as it can be. just a little bit of vibrations are seeping out, and it gives it this rough kind of uneven tone that's very noticeable. We literally hear it in the first moment of that isolated clip.

That oh in the oh baby baby. Right. Let's hear it again and listen for that light growl around the edges of the sound. Yeah, that is the sound. that I associate with Brittany. And I also remember going back to 1998. Take me there. As distinctive as it was, I feel like this is also the vocal quality that was most derided.

This attribute of vocal fry, which rightly or not has often been attributed, particularly to the speech patterns of young women, has been met with a lot of controversy. There have been scientific studies about vocal fry. one of which argued, quote, vocal fry may undermine success of young women in the labor market. Wow. A columnist for The Guardian wrote a whole op-ed with the title, Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice. Maybe that columnist should give up their column.

So when we're listening to this sound, it's not just kind of this benign vocal effect. It has like all this cultural baggage. It's associated with like the decline of strong young women at the turn of the millennium or something. Kind of like the least veiled sexist critique. Which is so wild because on the one hand it's like how challenging is it to pull off this vocal fry that Britney Spears is giving us? I think it's very hard because it requires you to sort of like close up your throat. And the thing that you want to do when you're singing is open your throat and use your insolm. and use your instrument most fully.

And so you're constantly struggling back and forth between opening closed sort of qualities. And it gives off this impression of something feeling simultaneously very authentic and totally performed at the same time. Yeah, I hear that, Charles. It's very masterful. You know, it takes a lot of vocal control to be able to pull this off.

Oh, baby, baby. How was I? supposed to know that something wasn't right here oh baby, baby, I shouldn't have let you go and now you're right of side, yeah. Oh, so every single time she has a vowel sound

like in that and oh, there is a vocal fry that intensifies that percussive quality. So it's working in tandem with that percussive approach to pronunciation. Right, because rather than having these words be legato, that something, it's like, there's like all these little micro moments of cutting off air and adding interest into the word. When Spears sings, it's like every single syllable is a little universe of sound. There is no word in a Britney Spear song that does not get her full attention.

And that kind of rivets you as a listener. You have to pay attention because you can never predict exactly how she's going to sing a word. You know, the other thing that's funny about Spears' use of vocal fry, I feel like it's something she came under a lot of criticism for. And yet when you listen to a lot of like male alt rock vocalists of the 1990s, you know, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, for instance, I think we find a lot of vocal fry in their singing as well. Check out the way Chris Cornell sings the word in on Black Hole Sun.

It's a non-melodic quality. Like it's a moment when you can't discern the pitch. It's just kind of... Yeah, it's a way of coloring a word, a sound. It just gives it more force and presence. But no one was accusing Chris Cornell of being a Vapid Valley girl. Don't think so. So Britney Spears is giving us this voice of percussive pronunciation and masterful vocal fry.

It's pretty remarkable that a 16-year-old... stepped into a recording studio in Sweden and just unleashed the sound upon the world. Like, she wasn't singing like this prior to her first single. If you listen to the Whitney Houston demo that got her this record contract, there's very little trace of this percussive vocal frying singer. Be warned, the audio quality here is pretty rough. Yeah, that's like classic diva. ballad style.

Listening to that demo and then comparing it to the voice that she created for her debut single, I think it points to the third remarkable aspect of Britney Spears' voice. It has this chameleon-like quality. She can change it from that vocal fried percussion to this like full-throated 90s ballad singer. And she can switch in the middle of a song if she wants to. Right. At the end of the chorus, It's the full-bodied voice.

Give me a sign. And then, oh, babe, babe, baby. And then she's back. Yeah. She can turn on a dime. So this is the voice that introduces the world to Britney Spears on her debut single, Baby, one more time. But, Charlie, I feel like after the break, we have to dig into her second album. And its hit single, oops, I did it again, to hear an artist really stepping in to her full vocal power.

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You release an even bigger and better song? And that song is oops, exclamation point, ellipsis. I did it again. What confidence does it take to put out a song that's oops, I did it again? Like, sure, it sounds like it's about a relationship. But let's be honest, this is about oops, I just put out another hit. I think that's why the song, to me, is an even greater accomplishment than baby one more time. because now we have a song whose lyrics and sound kind of match the exquisite control of Britney's voice.

And when we think about the meaning of this song, it's portraying a narrator who is alternately like losing control of their senses, but at the same time is not that innocent. So there's like kind of an in-betweenness here. And I think it's so well suited for that chameleon-like quality of Britney Spears' voice. I'm dreaming your way. Wishing the heroes, they're truly watching the day. It's like in those 10 seconds of music, we get, I don't know,

at least four or five different versions of Britney Spears' voice. The song itself is constantly toying with us. It's going between two poles. It's going from minor to major harmonies. And then right back to minor. Even in the harmonic world of the song, your head is kind of spinning.

You don't know which way is up. Right, right, right. You wrote a whole chapter of our book about this dueling personality, minor, major progression, Brittany thing. Right. And the best part of it is it's a chord progression that goes back to the 15th century. It might be a song about youthfulness, but it's a throwback too to way long ago. Exactly. In terms of Britney Spears' voice, in terms of the lyrics of the song,

in terms of this oscillating chord progression that goes. back 500 years. The song is constantly pivoting between different identities. And that to me is like one of the musical keys that unlocks our obsession with Britney Spears. Well, sure, we're obsessed now, but how was this second album received when it came out? Well, one of the big criticisms of Britney Spears was that she was trying to please everyone. There was a review that ran in the A.V. Club that said, Spears is a true cipher, a dress-up doll programmed to satisfy as many different fans and fantasies as possible. I mean dress-up doll? Like, what a gross description of any artist. This dress-up doll language is pretty gross, but I also disagree with the critic's larger point

that Spears is somehow being inauthentic by trying to make music that is university. That is universally appealing. And for the reviewer, that's a bad thing, right? It speaks to her kind of inauthenticity as a performer, I guess. But I think we could flip that on its head and say this is the strength of Britney Spears. It's her ability to obscure her true identity and instead to perform this kind of prism of identity, constantly keeping you guessing, through her multiple vocal timbers through this oscillating harmonic progression through a sound world in this song that draws from multiple different genres. And it's like a weird hodgepodge of different styles. Yeah, if we dig into oops, I did it again for a second, just take it from the very beginning.

Like, what kind of sounds are we hearing? We start with an orchestral hit. Right. which is really popular in the world of 80s, 90s, hip hop. Our friend of Stel Caswell did the best video ever on the influence of the orchestra hit. It's everywhere. Originally comes from Stravinsky. Please continue. You've then got funk, slap bass. Think of the Seinfeld theme song, perhaps.

And drums that feel like they're nodding, chew. the new Jack Swing movement. Because Oops I did it again also has a lot of those sort of DJ effects as well. There's a bunch of that wika wika happening. Wicca, wika, wika. Under some wa funk guitar as well. It's a weird. A melange, yeah.

Yeah. It could only be created by the mad Swedish scientists at Kairan Studios. Definitely. But what all of this does is disorients you as a listener a little bit, I think, in a way that is really exciting to, listen to. Like, it's not a bug. It's a feature of this music, I think. Yeah, I feel like this is the thing that makes her music in this period distinct. It is all about her vocal quality because, as we established, the producers that she's working with, primarily Max Martin and Ramiyaka behind

these hits, they're using these same sounds in dozens of other songs you're hearing on the radio. Right. Take another hit off the Oops I Did It Again album, Stronger. It uses, a synth sound that I feel like was just left over in the studio from a Backstreet Boys recording session. Here's stronger. And here's the Backstreet Boys larger than life. Yeah, it's got that vocal, formity quality that makes me think of even like Genuines Pony. Right. Which is not in the same genre world, but maybe is like in that this thing that,

the Swedes are compiling all sorts of different pop references. Like maybe that's one of the connections. It's a suite of sounds that would dominate turn of the millennium pop. But it's also worth listening to Stronger for another reason too, which is that we also start to get another theme that will recur in the oeuvre of Britney Spears. We've got some meta-narrative happening here. If oops I did it again is kind of like saying like, oops, I made another hit song. Stronger is literally referencing Baby One More Time in the last line of the chorus.

Right. My loneliness ain't killing me no more is a response to my loneliness is killing me from Baby One More Time. And I feel like it's introducing this theme of empowerment, which will continue to run through her catalog. Right. What's so fascinating about these first two albums that she releases, there's this. mix of like the innocent engenu and the incredibly worldly

knowing, confident singer. They're both in there. Yeah. And so if you want to listen to these two albums and ask the question, who is Britney Spears? I don't think you're going to get an answer. And I think that's exactly the point. Like if you were wanting

those 90s Whitney Houston style ballads that she auditioned with, those are on these records. You can find them. Don't let me be the last to know, for example. Sure. Co-written by Shania Twain. No way.

That's wild. Totally. And let us not forget a song that has not aged very well. Email my heart. Oh, one of my favorites. Right. Like in the great metadata loss of 20505, the forensic media analysts are going to have to go back

and listen to pop of different decades to see which communication technology. is being referenced. Is it voicemail? Is it email? Is it DMs? SMS? If you want references to 1950s do up, you're in luck. You can listen to the classic Lucky.

This is a story about a girl named Lucky. Morning. Another great example of her taking on different personalities. Like, yeah, Lucky's probably her because she got lucky as a star, but it's also, it's a character. Lucky. Right. These albums are like a fun. house mirror. You kind of see what you want to see. We hear Britney Spears establishing this like

prismatic identity and the set of musical themes. And it sounds like she's kind of poised to just hit the ground running, but instead she does something even more surprising. She completely flips the script. Which we'll get to in part two of listening to Britney. Switch on Pop is edited by Jolie Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, Community Management by Abby Barr, our executive producers on Ashok Kerwa and Hanna Rosen, or member of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and a production of Vulture. Also, a special thanks to Ted Hart, Genevieve Kosky, Neil Jenowitz, and Oliver Sava. You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you listen to podcasts and our website,

Switchedonpop.com. Tell us what tracks for Brittany's first two albums we should have talked more about. Are you an email My Heart, Stan, for instance? We want to know we're on Twitter and Instagram. at Switch on Pop, and we love hearing from you. I am nostalgic for the sounds on the first two Britney albums. But on her third album, things take a wild turn, and she creates a new sound that might be the most definitive part of Britney's career.

Check that out next Tuesday, and until then, thanks for Liz.