Britney Spears Baby One More Time Music Video
In 1997, Britney Jean Spears was a loftier schoolhouse freshman agonized to become out of the placidity stretch of Louisiana that bumps up confronting Mississippi. The most notable thing well-nigh her at the time was one off-Broadway credit and her status as a former Mouseketeer. A year later she would become one of the biggest pop stars in the world, cheers to the force of her debut unmarried, "…Babe 1 More Time." Produced by Max Martin — a failed Swedish glam-metallic rocker who was making coffee runs while his mentor, Denniz Popular, was producing "The Sign" and "All That She Wants" for Ace of Base of operations — the song would keep to define early '00s pop music.
Twenty years subsequently its release (on Oct. 23, 1998), we have a deep dive into one of the near groundbreaking hits in history.
Jive Records had just started branching out from its stable of R&B acts (they'd recently signed those Backstreet Boys) when a photo of xv-year-old Britney landed at their office.
Barry Weiss, president of Jive Records: Jeff Fenster^ had come into an A&R meeting and shown us a picture of this actually pretty young woman on a red and white picnic blanket, almost similar a tablecloth from one of those pocket-sized, local Italian restaurants. Information technology was kind of funny. I think she might have had a dog in the picture as well. Nigh like Dorothy from Kansas.
Larry Rudolph, an amusement lawyer and family unit friend of the Spearses, brought her into Jive for an audition.
Barry Weiss: She was wearing a blackness cocktail clothes and high heels. She sang live for u.s.a.: Whitney Houston ballads, Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton. She really was a adept vocalizer. She looked amazing. She was similar, fifteen years old. And nosotros kind of thought, Wow, this is really left of center. There's no female person popular creative person out in that location correct now.
John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Within the Hit Manufacturing plant: Clive Calder, who was the head of Jive, signed her to a conditional contract. This was a very significant moment in popular history: The signing of Britney Spears equally a sort of girl-next-door teenager, rather than as a Whitney Houston-esque diva. 1 of the calculations there was, Clive Calder was notoriously cheap, and Whitney Houston was notoriously expensive. So Britney Spears seemed like she would be cheap too, considering she was but a teenager from Louisiana, and wasn't enervating in whatever way.
Star secured, the Jive squad needed, well, music. They turned to Swedish producer-songwriter Max Martin, of Cheiron Studios, who had worked with Ace of Base and co-produced some songs on the Backstreet Boys' self-titled debut anthology.
Barry Weiss: There weren't many U.S. mainstream popular producers that could do immature artists. The pop at the time was very right downwardly the middle. But we were looking for edgier, younger-sounding records. We had an A&R office at Jive in Hilversum, outside Amsterdam. Martin Dodd was our A&R guy, and the Max Martin and Cheiron connection.
Max Martin*: I was in Florida and Jeff [Fenster] asked me to terminate by the function in New York to meet this girl while I was in America. She was all dressed up. She was 16. She thought I was a 50-twelvemonth-old producer from the old school. I had actually long pilus at the time — I looked similar Ozzy Osbourne. Information technology was pretty obvious that she had something, even though she was very tranquillity and very shy.
Martin went habitation to Sweden and cranked out a vocal. But information technology wasn't Britney's… yet.
Max Martin*: I write on the Dictaphone. I came upward with the melody first. I wrote the chorus; yous just hum information technology in. Cheers to [my co-producer, Rami Yacoub], that song sounds the way it does. He is much more urban and R&B than me. I'm more than of a melody man. And then he's a big reason that the song turned out the way that it did.
NaNa Hedin, backup vocaliser: I remember that I thought the song was for teenagers just the production was filled with a grown-upwardly attitude and with sounds that I really liked. I was so impressed by how a guy like Max and the other writers could write lyrics that got into the hearts and spoke to teenage thinking. Information technology really represented [that] whole generation, not them.
Barry Weiss: Martin Dodd had this demo, which was then called "Striking Me Baby 1 More than Fourth dimension," and he sent it into usa and said, "This is a song Max had written for TLC, but they didn't actually want to cut the record." I think Arista wanted Deborah Cox — she was the heir credible to Whitney, and Clive Davis was actually into her. Only Max was non down with that… When the song came into us, we idea, let's cut this with Britney. Let's send her to Stockholm. The magic that worked with the Backstreet Boys, why wouldn't it piece of work again for Britney Spears?
Jive sent Britney to Sweden to tape her debut anthology.
Britney Spears*: I didn't know what to wait. Information technology was my first time overseas. They had six songs, [and] I had a week.
Max Martin*: She was very well prepared. Since "…Baby One More than Time" was the outset song, we really didn't know where to accept it. We merely kept on recording. We tried a couple of different styles. Later on a while, I could hear her tum growl in the microphone. I asked if she was hungry. We'd been going for eight hours. She said, "No, I'one thousand fine." I said, "Let's accept a break," and she had three burgers.
John Seabrook: In those days, and maybe this is still true, Max fabricated all the demos himself. He would sing the unlike harmony parts himself, too. Max has an amazing vox, and very few people accept ever actually heard that demo. I did hear it, and Max sounds exactly like Britney, including all the little sounds that audio improvised; the mow-woww sounds. So Britney concluded upwards sounding exactly like Max.
Chris Molanphy, chart annotator and pop critic: The reason why it remains one of the nearly iconic songs of the 1990s teen popular boomlet is it's kind of a perfect marriage of song and artist and songwriter. If Max Martin is John Hughes, he found his Molly Ringwald. His muse-vehicle for his particular brand of writing. You can't motion picture information technology being sung past anybody else.
Barry Weiss: I remember when we got information technology back with Britney on information technology, she had that "oh BAY-BAY BAY-BAY," these ad libs. We idea it was actually weird at first. It was strange. It was not the style Max wrote it. But it worked! Nosotros thought information technology could be a actually good opening salvo for her.
NaNa Hedin: The magic is the attitude. Deep underneath the pop audio it has a sexy rock rebel attitude, from a young schoolgirl and her voice.
In that location was but ane trouble: the chorus. Specifically: the "hit me."
John Seabrook: Before the song came out, nobody in America liked the claw, "hit me baby one more time." Everybody thought information technology was some sort of weird allusion to domestic violence or something. But what it really was was the Swedes using English not exactly correctly. What they actually wanted to say was, "hitting me upwardly on the phone one more fourth dimension" or something. But at that point, Max's English wasn't that cracking. So information technology came out sounding a lilliputian flake weird in English language. Just when they tried to get him to alter it, he said, "No, it can't be changed. That'south information technology."
Barry Weiss: I actually changed the lyric. I was concerned about going to U.S. radio with a song called "Hit Me Babe One More Time." I don't know if I'm proud of this or not: I came up with the "…Babe One More Time."
With a lead unmarried locked in, it was time to shoot a video.
Barry Weiss: I went immediately to Nigel Dick, the video director. He had done the Backstreet Boys videos "Backstreet's Back," [and would later exercise] "I Desire it That Way."
Nigel Dick, manager, "…Infant Ane More Fourth dimension" video: Interestingly, a lot of people I worked with at the fourth dimension told me I should walk away from the project. "She's an unknown girl. She's sixteen years old. It's candy-floss popular." I'd washed quite a lot of stuff which was a bit more meaty: Oasis, Guns and Roses, apathetic, apathetic, blah. I just thought the vocal was really, really adept.
Barry Weiss: Nigel came up with an idea, similar, Britney is in outer space. She comes and lands on Mars on a spaceship, then she breaks into this trip the light fantastic toe routine. [Editor'southward annotation: You may recognize this as the video handling for "Oops! …I Did Information technology Once again," which Dick too directed.] I was like, "Wow, this is great!" And Britney looked at this and said, "This is horrible. No fashion am I doing this. This is really cheesy. Let me get on the phone with Nigel Dick."
Nigel Dick: She said, "I want to be in a school with a bunch of cute boys and do some dancing."
Barry Weiss: Her idea was the whole Grease matter, dancing in the hallway. She gave the kernel of the thought to Nigel, and he came upwardly with the rest.
Nigel Dick: Your initial reaction to this is, I'g being told past a xvi-year-old-girl what I should do… [Merely] this girl is xvi and I'thou a grown man; perhaps she has a improve perspective on her audience than I practice. So I swallowed my pride.
John Seabrook: Britney knew ameliorate than the adults what people wanted and I recollect that's also significant, because I retrieve the adults began to realize that they didn't necessarily know what the kids wanted anymore.
Nigel Dick: [Shooting] was very easy. There was no real drama. What I did not know at the time was that, of course, you take this feel with the Mickey Mouse Lodge. As far as I knew, she was simply a schoolgirl from the South. [Just] she was very relaxed in forepart of the camera. She was very, very drilled with her dance routine. I've worked with her four times, and I've however to work with somebody who puts in as much preparation, and was as eager to rehearse, as she was.
Every article of wear in the video was purchased at One thousand-Mart and cost less than $17. An inauspicious kickoff for what would become a famous (or infamous, depending on your signal of view) outfit for the underage performer.
Nigel Dick: I don't have kids, so my understanding of what teenagers wore was limited to driving habitation from the office and seeing kids standing by a bus stop. So I suggested they would be wearing jeans and t-shirts and sneakers and would have backpacks, and Britney said, "Well, shouldn't I be wearing a schoolgirl outfit?" And I was very dubious about this idea. But I was overruled.
Chris Molanphy: I can't prove this, but, the fact that all female teen pop stars for the adjacent roughly three years had to shoot a video with their belly button bared — Britney fabricated that look iconic.
Vanessa Grigoriadis, reporter, "The Tragedy of Britney Spears": She said to Rolling Stone, "All I did was tie up my shirt. I didn't do anything." And this has always been the question with Britney: Does she know what she'south doing? It was very much on the edge of what was adequate then.
Nigel Dick: Certainly, my initial reaction was, "Are you sure we should be going downwardly this route with this young lady?" And the people who were in control, the record label and whatnot, said yes, this is the route we want to have.
Britney Spears**: There are so many other teenagers out in that location that clothes more than provocatively than I do and no 1 says annihilation well-nigh them. How tin can I explicate this? I don't encounter myself — hand on the Bible — I know I'm non ugly, simply I don't see myself as a sex symbol or this goddess-attractive-beautiful person at all. When I'm on stage, that's my fourth dimension to do my thing and go there and be that — and it's fun. It's exhilarating just to exist something that you're not. And people tend to believe it.
Nigel Dick: I was kind of aware that some people might feel that that was exploitative. And as it turned out, I got a huge amount of grief about it once the video came out.
John Ivey, President of CHR Programming for iHeartMedia: I was programming Kiss 108 in Boston, and then Jack Fader [head of record promotions at Jive] brought her into the station. Here she comes in, trivial kid, no makeup. You can tell how immature she is. But very wise, already. They had just gotten the final edit of the video [on] VHS. We went into this office and I'm sitting there watching it with her, and I'g looking at her, and looking at the video, similar, hey, what's going on hither? It showed what was going to happen very chop-chop. When you see it you're like, omigosh, this whole schoolgirl affair, it's a footling sexy. Only and then I'chiliad sitting here and she'due south really niggling, she's got no makeup on, she's merely a little kid.
Vanessa Grigoriadis: When I was reporting this article, a lot of people said Britney wanted to be sexy. And the people who are managing her, all the guys who were so involved in her image, they were trying to make her look less slutty, basically, was the word somebody used to me. And she wanted to push the boundaries. I think that information technology'south impossible to know if information technology's actually true.
Britney Spears**: I gauge it's considering I exercise have a younger audience that, you know, parents worry near the role model thing…. Simply when I was younger, I looked up to people, but I never wanted to be them. I e'er had my own identity. I'm an entertainer when I'm on stage…and they demand to explain that to their kids. That's not my job to exercise that.
"…Babe 1 More Time" was released on October 23, 1998. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 less than a month later and spent 32 weeks on the charts.
Barry Weiss: We had her a on a mall tour, handing out cassette singles, in the summer and the fall. The video came out pretty simultaneous with the song. It was just an absolute explosion… By November it was just a worldwide phenomenon.
John Ivey: We felt like it was a hitting. In that location's sometimes you get records, [and y'all call up], I want to play information technology every bit soon as I tin. I know I wasn't the only person that felt like that. Most of the time, for a record like that, I said, I'll showtime it out at night, come across what the kids think, and encounter what happens before we spread information technology out to the mean solar day. And obviously it became a big monster hitting.
The video came out just as MTV combined two existing programs ("MTV Alive" and "Total Asking") into the new, Carson Daly-hosted, soon-to-be-pop-phenomenon "Total Request Live."
Chris Molanphy: I'yard sure if yous were twoscore and wanted to call TRL, yous could. But no one over xx was calling TRL. So it was this mainline, hooked to your veins, of what teenagers were most obsessed with. And it was either the stuff that made them feel similar a difficult badass or the stuff that fabricated them swoon. And Britney arrived just equally this is offset. The way she was presented every bit this schoolgirl gone bad, it had a combination of Swedish pure pop crossed with a little frisson of border. It could non accept been more perfect for the era of TRL.
John Seabrook: MTV had, up to that bespeak, tried to resist mainstream popular, because they wanted to be perceived every bit absurd… But I call back with Britney, and the video in item, and the fact that TRL had launched at around the same time, it really inverse MTV.
John Ivey: Britney had the second level. People saw this video and thought, what is this girl? Because everybody latched onto this immediately. Information technology wasn't very long subsequently that, she was on Rolling Stone .
Britney Spears Baby One More Time video screen grab Credit: Britney Spears Vevo
"…Baby One More than Time" didn't just launch Britney's career: Information technology kicked off the teen pop blast of the belatedly '90s, clearing the mode for a armada of Britney also-rans and male child bands to boss TRL and the airwaves pretty much until teenagers stopped watching TRL and listening to the radio. It also was the breakout moment for Max Martin, who went on to become one of the most successful, influential popular producers in modernistic history, and all the Swedish producers who followed.
Barry Weiss: What information technology was like was worldwide domination. And the differential with "…Baby I More Fourth dimension" and why it was such a cataclysmic event, information technology was the reemergence of pop music.
John Ivey: It would exist in the summit percentile of singles in the past 25 years. Because it broke her as an artist and what she became. It's like Madonna's "Similar a Virgin," or Prince'south "Let'south Go Crazy." It's the vocal that made her Britney Spears.
John Seabrook: It was instrumental in putting Cheiron and Max and Sweden on the map. Other Swedish songmakers got the thought that they didn't just have to write for Swedes or maybe Brits; they could write for Americans and really tap into that huge market.
Barry Weiss: I mean wait, was she involved with writing those songs? Max Martin is a genius, okay? He's bright. He tailor-made those records for her. But she would never accept had the career without her vision. She has this innate ability to motion the media.
Joe Levy, Rolling Rockeditor: The public perception is that this is all created, that the record company created this — the artist, the music, the image. I have to tell y'all, if the record company could have created more than one Britney Spears, they would have done it, and they tried! And people, Mandy Moore is an actress.
John Ivey: There were a m Britney Spears wannabes.
Joe Levy: Britney Spears is someone who, from the fourth dimension she was a kid, wanted to be a star. The drive, the determination, the ambition — y'all accept to requite this adult female the same sort of respect that Justin Timberlake gets. Otherwise, I'm sorry, but you're engaging in a double standard.
Twenty years later, "…Babe I More Time" sounds as sharp as information technology always did: Sultry, catchy as hell, both totally of its time and like something that could have been released this morning.
John Seabrook: I think the melody is eternal, or at least, transcends its late '90s flow. And I think the words, the offset fourth dimension you hear it, information technology's always going to be something that makes you go, what? Tin I say that? Tin I sing along with that?
Barry Weiss: It sounds equally good now as it did and so. It hasn't weathered or dated.
Chris Molanphy: The way the song is structured, how the chorus goes to this chorus of voices — the song is structured to evangelize maximum pleasance.
John Ivey: There'due south some songs that but have a timeless feel. I imagine if you said, "Sing a Britney Spears song to me," that's the one people would sing the hook to. That'southward what'southward ingrained into your listen as what she is. And the thing is, when you expect at her, she still looks the same. I mean, she's older, but you still encounter the aforementioned kid there… When you look at Brit, y'all still encounter her. You even so encounter the aforementioned girl. And you know, it'southward one of those things, I always take the feeling too that people root for her.
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Source: https://ew.com/music/2018/10/23/baby-one-more-time-britney-spears-oral-history/
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