Teen queen Britney Spears invites
you to hit her with your best shot.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jon Dolan
Aug. 27, 1999 | If the gazillion-selling Backstreet Boys seal themselves and their
fans in a sonic terrarium of soundboy solitude and stark sentimentality, Lolita star
Britney Spears -- who shares the same producer -- allows something else to step
into her world. As the Crystals would say, it feels like a kiss. Her intruder is
self-subjection at best, physical violence at worst, and she implies that she's gotta
have it.
Much of Ms. Teen USA's fame is centered around the line "Hit me baby one more
time." And while the vocal hook might seem like a coded hip-hop sexual entendre,
given the new-conservative culture that produced the Louisiana native, it's hard to
imagine that it means anything except for exactly what it says: "Hit me." In
suburban America, where the song blew up, it's a Stepford-whelp male fantasy
with nasty implications, a teenybopper corollary to Limp Bizkit's "Nookie." Just as
that band's front man, Fred Durst, has drained hip-hop of everything but its viscera
and darkest misogyny, Spears' inventors have turned back the clock to a time
before the post-femme Spice Girls and determined diva Monica raised the bar for
new, aggressive female pop singers.
"(You Drive Me) Crazy" is a brilliant snatch of boilerplate
electro rock, and the post-Beenie Man/Shaggy rasta-twirp
vibrations of "Soda Pop" twirl and flaunt with kicky bliss.
But every song, especially the gloppy ballads ("Born to
Make You Happy"), systematically bulldozes our baby's
agency. Where other contemporary lite pop stars like Natalie
Imbruglia dream of approaching a Dusty Springfield plane
where raw vocal-emotional intensity bullies out everything
but the intensity itself, Spears just wants to remind us that
Tiffany did not vanish in vain. Vocally, her niche makes her the oldest teen in
America -- a 17-year-old bringing kids half her age the gospel that you're never too
young to grow up too fast, basically Mike Eisner's worst nightmare -- but her
fabricators seem to have no need to program in any of the seemingly hard-won
maturity that makes Monica special, let alone a dash of the Spice Girls' pussy
positivity.
So, in the first single she's letting you kick the tar out of her, and on the next one
("Sometimes") you've got her running and hiding in terror. Eventually, it gets to
the point that even the most simple "I miss you/I'll be there/I'll popmail you some
digicam shots of the boob job my mom bought me"-style sentiments become quite
spooky. Spears might sound as if she's trying to sing like a real, live,
all-growed-up dance-pop diva who can get into real live clubs and even buy drinks,
too, but she really just sounds like a Backstreet Girl -- under your thumb.