3. …Baby One More Time (1998)
USA BILLBOARD HOT 100: #1
UK SINGLES CHARTS: #1
From the Album: …Baby One More Time
Why its Great: Come on, there is no way that you can have a “best of Britney” list and not include the song that set her on the path to super-stardom. Produced by Swedish pop legend Max Martin (who had/would come up with tracks for the likes of Ace of Base, Backstreet Boys and N’Sync amongst many others), the sound of this would become a little bit ubiquitous as any number of pretenders battled for their slice of the chart action. But as soon as those piano chords hit in this couldn’t be anything else.
It had a bit of luck. Coming as Grunge and similar type of music was losing ground, this song certainly hit the airwaves at just the right time. Convinced he’d written an R’n’B hit, Martin offered it to TLC (“Was I going to say ‘Hit me baby one more time’? Hell no!” were the words of T-Boz a decade later) but when they passed it found it’s natural home (although Simon Cowell did try to snag it for his new boy band Five, even offering Martin a $95,000 car!). Spears herself originally wanted to be a “Sheryl Crow style singer” but after a meeting between the pair the rest is history. It’s no exaggeration to say that the success of this song changed the course of commercial music completely. And it’s still utterly recognisable from the very first second to this very day.
Alternative Album Cut: The Beat Goes On – the fact that British electronic act The All Seeing I, who had already taken their own cover version of this Sonny & Cher to #11 in the UK Charts, produced this album closer already hinted that whilst straight up pop was what Britney was going to give us, there was some hidden away pop weirdness from her and her team waiting to break through.