Switched on Pop - Listening 2 Britney: Toxic

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

In 2003 Britney Spears released “Toxic,” a song that would make converts out of pop skeptics, be named one of the greatest tracks of the 21st century by multiple publications, and become a personal favorite of Switched on Pop. Despite its success, when “Toxic” was released as the second single from Spears’s fourth album, In the Zone, even the song’s writers thought it was too “weird” to become a hit. But thanks to the new iTunes platform, which was just gaining traction in 2013, audiences kept buying the track and helped push it to the top of the charts.  For many listeners, your hosts included, hearing “Toxic” for the first time was a moment of epiphany, an opportunity to rethink one’s views on the expressive power and musical invention of Top 40 pop. And almost twenty years after its release, “Toxic” is still rippling through the culture. It’s been covered as a jazz-noir ballad by Yael Naim, a screamo anthem by A Static Lullaby, and a bluegrass burner by Nickel Creek. In 2022, the song enjoyed yet another revival in the form of DJ duo Altego’s viral TikTok mash-up of the song with Ginuwine’s “Pony.” What makes “Toxic” so enduring? For one, it’s the pull of Spears’ voice, as she moves from her chest voice in the verse to an eloquent falsetto in the pre-chorus, then combines the two techniques in the chorus. It’s the way the song’s producers, Bloodshy and Avant, combine a matrix of sounds that should not go together—a 1981 Bollywood love song, electric surf guitar, and funky synthesized bass—into an unforgettable melange. And it’s the lasting power of Cathy Dennis’s lyrics, which spins a universal tale of trying to resist temptation…and ultimately failing. Songs Discussed Britney Spears - Toxic Lata Mangeshkar and S. P. Balasubrahmanyam - Tere Mere Beech Mein Kylie Minogue - Can’t Get You Out of My Head Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl Yael Naim - Toxic A Static Lullaby - Toxic Nickel Creek - Toxic Mark Ronson - Toxic Altego - Toxic/Pony Mashup Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchedon Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And this is episode three of listening to Brittany where we strip away everything you think you know about Britney Spears and just focus on her music. And I feel like Nate, last time you left me with a cliffhanger,

saying that we were going to be moving to the apex of Britney's music. music. You're producing today's episode. What's happening? We have arrived, Chuck. It's the apex. It's the zenist. It's the apogee. It is the halcyon moment in Britney Spears career, in my humble opinion. I thought you were out of your vocab words. But I'm not the only one. The song we're going to talk about today has been named by some one of the greatest songs of the 21st century. The song has been covered by everyone and their mother. Charlie, the song we're going to talk about today is toxic. My mom is not covered toxic.

I think for many people myself included, hearing toxic for the first time was a moment of epiphany. Oh, yeah. A revelation. I think this is actually the song that converted me to loving top 40 pop music. Really? A conversion. Yeah. like Constantine seeing the cross.

Yeah, Charlie hearing the surf guitar. I guess so. I think I had a similar experience. It was a moment when I had to confront some of the biases I had about pop music. Because even though we've spent two episodes of this series celebrating Britney Spears, like I wasn't necessarily doing that back in middle school. I was being a snob. I was saying, no, no, that's not real music.

You know, jazz is the only true. musical art form is probably the pretentious kind of thing that I was saying. And then Toxic came out and I had to kind of step back and go, oh, wait a minute. Maybe I have to rethink my opinions about Top 40 Pop because this song moves me. So this puts us 2003, her fourth album called In the Zone, it's the follow up to Britney, which had a bunch of that movement into the dance pop orientation we talked about in episode two. Indeed. Toxic is in that world, and yet it's also kind of a thing in and of itself.

It don't really fully understand how this came together because it just doesn't sound like anything else, Brittany or otherwise. It's a very unique song, and that's why I want to spend the entirety of this episode listening to it. Beautiful. And I hope by the end, you'll have a new appreciation for how this 21st century master. masterpiece all fits together and why toxic is peak Brittany. Great. So where we begin? Let's begin with the first thing that we hear in this song.

You have these high whiny strings and a beat mashed together. The strings, I believe, come from a Bollywood sample? Yep, very good. Table that idea. Stick it in your back pocket. I'll enlighten you later as to the origins of this sample. Let's just talk about what the music itself does. here.

Whoa. Whoa. I mean, that could be an introduction to a spy film. It's this call-in-response thing, right? You have this bum-bum-pum-da-da-dum. And then that second phrase is super mysterious. Yeah. From the second you hit play on Toxic, you get these two contrasting ideas.

And that sense of contrast, almost of these two ideas like battling. for supremacy, that's going to continue throughout the course of the song. And it's very fitting because the lyrics of the song are something of a battle themselves, an internal battle between giving in to temptation and staying strong. So let's keep listening, move into the first verse of Toxic, and hear how these contrasting forces continue to play out. Whoa, that bass line. Oh my gosh, I just never have noticed

Not to remove any excellence from the vocal But this could stand alone as an instrumental Because the bass line is a hook all by itself It's funky, it's crunchy It's propulsive It's textured and nuanced But then its counterpart is so weird There's an acoustic guitar strumming chord

It's like, what is that doing on top of this nasty, funky bass line. It doesn't totally make sense to me. But I think that's exactly the point. It's like contrast, contrast, battle. You know, we do hear a lot of acoustic instruments in Brittany. It's one of the strange things that is fairly consistent from the beginning of her career, even in moving into the dance poppy world,

away from that new jack swing kind of thing she was doing with Max Martin and Romney. It's like, there were always underneath little acoustic elements. So maybe this is a through line. Maybe that's Brittany. Let's keep moving forward into the pre-course. The voice for all that she's been criticized for her vocal fry that we talked about in the first episode. Her baby voice. Yeah.

Her baby voice. She clearly has so many different timbers that she can use. I agree. And something I never totally noticed before is the way the production amplifies the kind of haunting falsetto that she's giving us here. Check out these like strange Siegel. echoes that surround her voice at the end of this line. Right. There's a lot of text painting.

At first, we have too high don't come down. She's up in her head voice. It's very breathy and airy. And then when she's getting lost and it's going all around, you have this echo pink pongy back and forth in the stereo image of the song. So now in the verse and the pre-chorus of the song, we've heard kind of two sides of this battle. In the verse, Britney Spears is pretty confident and in control.

in the pre-chorus she's going up into the highest part of her range her head is spinning round and round it sounds like she might be giving in to temptation yeah

and then right before we get to the chorus where hopefully we'll get some kind of resolution here they make us wait when you expect to go to the chorus instead you get this buildup that just kind of freezes time in the world of pop

where every second matters and you never want to lose someone's interests. It's pretty bold to go from kind of esoteric string sound to bass sound into all of a sudden chugging guitar power chords. Like, I don't think I've heard these things in context together ever, and you've completely cut out Britney's voice. You're leaving me hanging. The saying goes, don't bore us, get to the chorus.

And yet at this moment, they keep us waiting even longer than we might expect. Like, they could just add four beats of this buildup, and it would sound perfectly effective. It would sound like this. Instead, there's eight beats of buildup. It's like a lifetime, Charlie. Oh, my gosh. It's so subtle, but I love how the bass slides into the chorus.

And then we arrive at the chorus, and there's really no reconciliation, I'm sorry to say. Brittany sings, I'm addicted to you. Don't you know that you're toxic? But in this way that where she's kind of owning it. in a sense. In the first half of the chorus, she's singing both in her chest voice, but also in her head voice, kind of reconciling between the verse style of singing and the pre-course style of singing. But in the second half of the chorus, the post-chorus, it's all in her chest voice.

Don't you know that you're toxic? I'm addicted to. Like, there's a certainty to it. She's singing it with affirmation. It's embracing the contradiction of wanting something that is toxic. And this is so cool because I feel like that tension is mirrored in the very harmony and melody of this chorus itself. Because the chords follow this very tense chromatic chord progression. They go, but then the melody is kind of bright and hopeful.

So it's an odd mix here. When she sings, you're toxic I'm slipping under. She's repeating this phrase that sort of collides into the melody. It doesn't slide down, but it feels like the harmony and the melody kind of converge at that moment. It's very, it's pretty gnarly. It's a pretty gnarly harmonic moment. Whoa. Hey, remember Nate Sloan from middle school who thought only jazz was what's cool?

He's, he's feeling it. Yeah, no kidding, because he likes those really chunky chords. Yeah, yeah. He just had his bar mitzvah. He is digging on these chromatic toxic hearts. harmonies. And then after the chorus, one of my favorite parts of the song that also gets back to like the central metaphor we've been talking about, this like internal battle, this idea

of spinning round and round. Check out the string sample that started the song. But tell me if you can hear how it's changed at the end of this chorus. Whoa. Is that the sampled but just reversed? Very good Chuck. Johann Sebastian Bach would be very proud of you, right? now because that is a technique that he would call retrograde.

Retrograde, which does not mean it's getting worse. No, it means reverse. It's just a more pretentious way of saying reverse like you did. But it's not only that like the direction of the melody has changed. But if I'm right, it's the same sample. It's just been flipped and it's backwards, right? Here's the way we heard that melody at the beginning of the song. And here's how we hear it at this moment after the chorus.

So it's the exact same notes just being played backwards. It's almost like a mirror or a palindrome, if you will. And whether we're processing it that way or not, it's like, wait, this melody is literally spinning around just like the narrator of the song is being spun around in her head. There's an almost nauseating quality to that melody. Kind of like in the movie Willy Wonka, when they go down the hallway corridor, which keeps getting smaller and longer, there's some way that this compression of time and reversing it makes me feel uneasy.

Okay. Don't totally get that analogy, but I'm going to give it to you, Chuck. And we can even go deeper into that feeling you're talking about, that feeling of maybe being trapped. Is that kind of what you're describing? Yeah, you're like trapped in a hall of mirrors, I guess. Maybe that's the proper metaphor. In order to show you this, I'm going to answer the question that you had at the very beginning.

Like, where did this string sample come from? You thought that it was from a Bollywood film, and you were exactly right. It's from a song in a 1981 film called Tiri-Miri Beach Mean. I don't know exactly what I'm listening for. Exactly. Because this sample is not just drawn directly from this 1981 song. It takes just a tiny sliver of this section of the song, which I'll play one more time. Do do do.

Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Same thing with another section of the song. Listen to this. That gets chopped up to become... Yeah, it's part of like a long tradition of sample chopping where you find some source material, but you really kind of chop it up and collage it into something entirely new.

Like, it's not even quite a recognizable melody from that song. It's a new composition using that sample source. And the result is a sound that's really arresting, and I think really stood out on the pop charts in 2003, right, to hear this like Bollywood string reference, the sound of like 60 or 70 violins playing in unison. It's an amazing sound. But what really blew my mind was not just the musicality of this phrase,

but the surprising parallels between the plot of this 1981 film and the lyrics of Toxic. Really? If we translate the title phrase of this song, Tiri, Miri Beach, Meein. It means between you and me, what kind of strange bond is this? And then later the characters saying, I've lost my sleep and my peace. No matter how hard I try, I can't stop this.

I mean, that could be the lyrics with the pre-chorus. You could superimpose them almost. This film is about a kind of Romeo and Juliet's story, a romance between a Tamil man and a North Indian Hindi woman who can't be. together because their families don't approve. There's something about this sample that doesn't just give it this kind of musical push. Very deep in there is even a surprising lyrical reinforcement. So, like, this was a really well-selected sample, I think, for multiple reasons. Yeah, if you're willing to do the digging that you've done, it pays off.

So when we listen to Toxic Now, all of these aspects, right, the surf guitar in the chorus, the... You haven't even really talked about the surf guitar. What's going on? I don't have anything to say. It's just really good. And it's another one of these contrasts that just add to the tension of the song. There's so many great examples of call and response happening in this song because she has this phrase, then the guitar, then she comes back in. Then the follow-up phrase is the guitar.

There's these two conversations happening. It's like the guitar is the devil on her shoulder, maybe, saying like give in to temptation. Embrace the toxicity. I never expected a Bollywood sample to coincide with this surf guitar thing. But the mysterious quality that we talked about of the, you know, the second part of the phrase, can you play it for me more time? I think I said at the beginning, that could be a spy movie. Well, it's got a kind of James Bond vibe to it, right? Yeah, exactly.

Maybe there's some overlap there. The surf guitar definitely is straight out of the James Bond playbook. We did a whole episode about the entire history of James Bond music. Lots of fun conversation. But like that surf guitar thing with those strings, it's a mashup that shouldn't work. And yet it's perfect. Yeah. But you know, you're not alone in thinking it's surprising this works.

Even the producers and songwriters behind this song didn't expect it to be a hit. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova. And I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you.

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Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens. back to the places from which they came.

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In a 2009 interview with a Norwegian magazine that I put into Google Translate, so, you know, some caution how accurate this is. The producer, Bloodshy, said it was uncertain for a long time if toxic would be included on the album in the zone. Whoa. They thought it was too weird. I assume that's the label or the management or whoever. That it was absolutely not a single release. They made very clear to us, but it got into the album.

And when it was released, people started buying that particular song like crazy. Oh, because this is like the moment when iTunes downloads are starting to take off. And so. Exactly. A unique point in the development of music technology where finally we can see. that actually the people really want to hear this other song, even though it wasn't promoted to be the single. And it's not the only way that this song almost didn't happen.

Kathy Dennis, who wrote the lyrics for the song, said that it was the one that they finished on the very last day and the very last hour of the week-long songwriting session they had. She said, on day seven, which was the day I was flying back to England, I had run out of time, and I knew that it was D-Day, and I had to finish the lyrics. Nothing is better than a deadline at getting something great done. And I want to give some love to Kathy Dennis here

because she is someone who is not a name you necessarily recognize, but she has written some of the biggest pop songs of the 21st century, including toxic, including Kylie Minogue's, can't get you out of my head. Don't play it. It's going to be stuck on my head. I'm not joking. No. And Katie Perry's I Kissed a Girl. What are those songs have in common besides being written by Kathy Dennis, do you think? I generally have no idea.

I'm looking for something, but I have no idea. I might be going out on a limb here, but there's themes of longing, longing for something that is forbidden in all of these songs. Now we should say, I kissed a girl. This was maligned as queer baiting at the time of its release, using the thrill of a same-sex encounter as a way for a straight artist to generate listens. Sure. Since then, Katie Perry talked about the song and said it was based on her lived reality and her

sexuality was never black and white. So regardless of what you think about it, there's something remarkable about the fact that all of these songs are about longing for something that you can't have, whether it's, I kissed a girl, can't get you out of my head or toxic. As much as we like the confidence in Britney Spears' vocal in the post chorus, she's in her chest voice. You were drawn into the song because it exists in this emotional gray area. Yes, well said, and that might be a hallmark of a Kathy Dennis lyric. And one of my favorite parts of the song is also one of the most ambiguous.

It's at the very end, the outro of the song. Britney Spears sings, intoxicate me now. I'm ready now. It's a nice way of sort of flipping the meaning. Toxic is not just unhealthy, but it's also the root to intoxicating. Maybe that ambivalence is part of what makes this song so enduring. Why almost 20 years after its release, it's still such a major part of pop culture. I mean, this song has been covered so many times.

It's been done in a kind of shant-to's jazz version by the same. singer, Yael Naim. That one really embraces the nauseating quality of those chords. It's been done as a screamo anthem by a static lullaby. Nice. That rocks. It has a bluegrass cover by Nickel Creek. Oh, hell yeah.

And it's been Mark Ronsonified. Wait, what? And as we speak, it's a TikTok meme getting mashed up with one of your favorite tracks, Pony by Genuine. And that mashup is by the DJ duo Altago. Man, this is why it's one of my Desert Island songs. And that's why the song isn't going anywhere, Chuck. These ambiguous lyrics, the musical contrast between surf, guitar, and crunchy synthesized bass. Britney Spears eloquent falsetto vocals

and then exploding into her chest voice this Bollywood sample that connects us to a 1981 film all about forbidden longing I mean I know you already loved this song Charlie but I hope now you have a whole new appreciation for why toxic represents Britney Spears' masterpiece Switched on Pop is edited by Jolie Myers engineered by Brann and McFarland

illustrations by Arras Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr. Our executive producers are Nashak Kroa and Hanna Rosen or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere. You get podcasts. And our website, switchedonpop.com. Tell us what you love about toxic.

Tell us your favorite toxic covers on Instagram on Twitter at Switched on Pop. We love hearing from you. We'll be back next week to give you more of listening to Brittany. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge. Okay, I got it.

I got it. Okay, and until then, thanks for listening. It's Charlie, bitch. Euforia of Calvin Klein, the new collection elixir. Three new elixires perfume intense. Solar, Magnetic, ball.

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