1999 Britney Spears: ....Baby One More Time

From time to time over the course of this journey I've paused to muse on just what it is that makes a 'good pop song’. I don't have the answer yet I'm afraid, I probably never will, but I have noticed some Aristotelian common currency between those songs that make up my idea of ‘good pop’. Chief among these is the notion that the quality shouldn't be context specific or dependant. By that I mean a ‘good pop song’ shouldn’t have to rely on anything other than its own being to justify and sell itself.

To cast my net wider for an example, a much covered, much interpreted song like Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ thrives on its own inherent quality – there’s not necessarily a ‘definitive’ version of it out there, but that doesn’t negate its definitive existence both in its own right and within the context of ‘Porgy And Bess’. It's a standard that everybody knows. Back in the pop sphere, a song like (for example), ‘Sugar Sugar’ would, I'd submit, remain a good pop song regardless of the act behind it or the era it was released. Being 'performed' by a non-existent cartoon band highlights my point I think - obviously, somebody wrote and recorded ‘Sugar Sugar’, but their identity is not important; the song is such that it would have sold regardless and only an act of wilful sabotage would have prevented it from being anything other than a hit.

At the other end of the scale, a song like (for another example) 'Too Shy' is one I suggest sold purely on the strength of the zeitgeist it rode - the imagery and fashion conscious facade of the band that fronted it, and the cynical way it taps into the white boy, slap funk sound that was all the rage in 1983. Another band could probably have had a hit with it at roughly the same point in time had they conformed to the same rules of presentation as Kajagoogoo, but I don’t believe something so wretched could have got to number one in any other era; without those cultural touchstones, the song disintergrates like a vampire in sunlight.

I can say upfront that I think 'Baby One More Time' is a good pop song. In fact, I think it's a great one. One of the best, and to follow my own thesis, I don't believe it needed Britney Spears to sell it. True, Ms Spears cavorting through the corridors in school uniform like some jailbait Lolita in the video is memorable, but in truth a song this strong does not need to resort to such questionable tactics to sell it. Spears’ later career would come to depend on cleavage and thigh to maintain interest but 'Baby One More Time', like heroin, sells itself and would find its audience sans the promise of teenage sex which, in this case, are as superfluous as writing 'BANG!' on the side of a nuclear warhead and render Spears as much of a cartoon as The Archies were.

Which is all the more power to my thesis - 'Baby One More Time' succeeds in spite of Spears, not because of her. Her too self conscious by half attempts at an Eartha Kitt sex kitten growl are as erotic as granny pants the night before washday. But that's fine - her crude croaks and the song's tinribs production no more derail its trajectory than a butterfly could derail the flight path of a cannonball. And that's because like all good pop, ‘Baby One More Time’ is a master class in audience hooking . The "Oh baby, baby. How was I supposed to know" lights the fuse to kick-start the creeping, two step stealth of "My loneliness is killing me" where an audible shift of gears primes the mechanism to deliver the payload payoff of the “Give me a sign, hit me baby One. More.Time“ chrorus that's as effective and memorable as a nail driven between the eyes. Then job done, it leaves the flywheel spinning to start the process again until, just when you think its been milked dry, a monster key and tempo change on the middle eight (at to 2:05) keeps it fresh 'till the end. What's not to like?