The following excerpt is from the first chapter of Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade. The book comes out on June 17, published by Ballantine Books, part of Penguin Random House.
The dawn of the twenty-first century was characterized, primarily, by something that did not happen. I have some fuzzy recollections of Y2K, the panic at the end of the 1990s that ensued after a handful of computer scientists raised concerns that the new year would bring mass system failure and worldwide chaos since computer code, which categorized what year it was by the last two digits of the annum, would be unable to tell the difference between 1900 and 2000. As I write this, I have an espionage instrument of the Chinese military in my pocket that I use to watch cat videos and Jeff Bezos controls my supply of toilet paper, so all the fuss seems kind of quaint, but I am told it was a Whole Big Deal. In 1999, Time magazine ran an issue with the words “The End of the World!?!” on its cover. But then, Y2K arrived with little incident. The lights stayed on. Trains ran on time. Society remained intact. Which … obviously. The changing of a clock does not define a new era. Only Britney Spears can do that.
On September 29, 1998, Jive Records released Britney Spears’s single “... Baby One More Time” to contemporary hits radio stations across the United States. Though the calendar wouldn’t flip centuries for another fifteen months, the moment those glottal oh baby, babys hit the airwaves was the moment that the aughts began in pop culture and in music. But “... Baby One More Time” and the birth of Britney as the defining pop star of the 2000s was more than just a kickoff event. Before the aughts could become a period in which pop stardom changed, they had to become an especially fertile one for pop music in the first place, and it was Britney Spears who made sure they did. By creating an indelible pop classic, clearing Max Martin’s path to become the defining producer of the decade, and by using provocation to reach older and broader audiences than the teen pop of the late 1990s, Spears paved the way for pop music to flourish in the early 2000s.
Let’s set the stage a bit. The day before “... Baby One More Time” debuted, Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” was the number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100 and had been for a month. Filling out most of the lower rungs of the chart was a mix of radio-friendly country (Shania Twain, LeAnn Rimes, Faith Hill), hip-hop and R&B (Usher, Brandy, Puff Daddy), and a smattering of Third Eye Blind–variant rock bands. Radio had been in a bit of a bind. Grunge had dominated the mid-nineties, and while Radiohead, Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Pearl Jam were the biggest bands in the world to the MTV audience, their themes of alienation and dejection weren’t great mainstream radio fodder. Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide in 1994 had been a turning point for artists, too—the genre lost its chief spokesperson, and the disaffection of its other leading men became harder to venerate when it had such fatal consequences. Grunge morphed either into nu metal, which made even less sense on Top 40, which on a national level was becoming increasingly homogenized thanks to conglomerate station ownership, or softer alt-rock, which was more palatable but less interesting. Few DJs felt like they were on the cutting edge spinning Sugar Ray during drive time, and audiences were dwindling.
In 1996 alone, New York contemporary hits station Z100 lost a third of its audience. The station fell into eighteenth place, in large part by leaning heavily into a waning alt-rock scene. A shake-up followed, and several new executives, including a young programmer named Sharon Dastur, were brought in to right the ship. On her first day, Dastur walked into the station and was surprised to find Alice in Chains playing on the morning show and Soundgarden signed up for another guest slot. “I’m like, ‘What is this? This is not Top 40,’” Dastur told me.
There’s an idea in radio about how the types of sounds that are popular in music ebb and flow, particularly as it pertains to Top 40. It comes from a man named Guy Zapoleon, a fifty-year veteran of the radio industry and longtime Top 40 program director who now consults for stations. In 1992, Zapoleon published an argument that, since 1956, the modern era of popular recorded music could be explained as a cycle with three stages repeating itself roughly every ten years. Zapoleon argued that the cycle begins with a “pure pop” stage, where there’s a supply of good pop music with mass appeal, as well as rock, hip-hop, and R&B that bleeds into pop. The pure pop stage is the best stage for a Top 40 radio programmer. The second stage that follows is what Zapoleon calls “the extremes,” in which music moves toward its edges, usually alternative rock and hip-hop, looking for freshness and innovation that younger listeners enjoy but loses something in mass appeal. For a radio programmer, the challenge of “the extremes” is that a good amount of the most relevant music doesn’t quite fit on Top 40 radio. This leads to the third stage, “the doldrums,” where pop is dull and overwrought, cut off from the edgier happenings in rock, R&B, and hip-hop, and flounders until there’s something, or someone, fresh in pure pop to bring the cycle back around. And in the late nineties, pop radio was deep in the doldrums.
But cycles being cycles, a new one was around the bend. Zapoleon considers its starting point to be 1997 with the arrival of the teen pop wave and, specifically, the arrival of the Spice Girls in North America. The girl group had been initially shortchanged as a euro phenomenon that would never work in the United States, historically snobbier when it comes to bubblegum pop than European countries, but this proved incorrect quickly. Sporty, Ginger, Posh, Baby, and Scary had “Wannabe” at number one on the Hot 100 for four straight weeks in January 1997 and their debut album Spice sold at least twenty-three million copies.
It’s hard to overstate the degree of international megastardom the Girls achieved, seemingly, overnight. The same year Spice hit America, the Girls visited South Africa for a charity concert and met Nelson Mandela, who called them his “heroines” and told reporters that meeting them was one of the greatest moments of his life. In an attempt at some good PR in the wake of the death of Princess Diana, then–Prince Charles attended the concert and brought along a young Prince Harry, who was nursing a bit of a crush on Geri Halliwell, a.k.a. Ginger. It’s a sadness to me that Peter Morgan’s Netflix series The Crown never did anything with this material; reportedly, one Spice Girl grabbed Charles’s butt during their meet and greet, and I can only imagine how Dominic West would have played that moment. Ultimately, Charles’s attempt to seem like less of a fuddy-duddy backfired when the British press determined that Diana never would have made Harry wear a suit to a Spice Girls show, but the young prince did get to meet his fellow Ginger. Halliwell also had a notable moment in her closing remarks at the concert: “I think there’s a classic speech that Nelson Mandela did, I can’t remember exactly, but he mentioned, never suppress yourself, never make yourself feel small for others’ insecurities,” she said. “And that’s what girl power is all about.” Hear, hear, Geri—no notes.
In the United States, the fact that audiences embraced Spice did seem to indicate that they were ready for a new pop movement. Two years earlier, in 1995, the producer Clive Calder and infamous boy band manager Lou Pearlman had tried to debut the Backstreet Boys with “We’ve Got It Goin’ On.” But while the song was a hit in Europe, it got no traction for the group on US airwaves. In June 1997 they tried again, releasing “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)” as a single. This time, with more and more of the children of baby boomers coming of age every day, we were ready. By August, the song was at number two on the Hot 100. Suddenly, the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Hanson all became household names in America, and their mix of new jack swing rhythms and orchestral hits with croon-worthy pop melodies was all over the radio and MTV. Teen pop was a sensation, and because it capitalized on the last days of the pre-Napster era when CDs were flying off shelves, it was also staggeringly lucrative. Backstreet nearly matched Spice’s sales numbers with twenty-five million copies sold, and every kid knew which Spice Girl or Backstreet Boy they identified with, crushed on, or both. But as long as its audience was concentrated within one generation’s youth, it was destined to crest.
That crest was approaching quickly as Y2K neared. “Quit Playing Games” is still Backstreet’s highest-charting song. The Spice Girls released only three studio albums. Neither they, Backstreet, or *NSYNC would be together five years after Spice took over the world. Charges of juvenilia are often unfairly levied against pop acts, but it’s fair to say the aesthetics of nineties teen pop were probably just a little too youthful for true lasting power. The fact that nineties teen pop was centered around boy bands and girl groups as opposed to solo acts, too, made individual members more anonymous—there were plenty of people who knew Backstreet, but didn’t really know Howie or Brian. For pop to get the kind of traction in the new millennium that was impossible to dismiss as a teen fad, something or someone was going to have to synthesize that bright pop sound with a persona that was more interesting to older audiences. Someone a little less … innocent.
Of Pop Stars and Princesses
I’m pretty sure by this point, given her multi-decade career, the slew of documentaries recently devoted to reexamining her backstory, and her bestselling 2023 memoir The Woman in Me, you know who Britney Spears is and her whole deal, but some quick review just in case. There is a well-established and sometimes horrifyingly detailed record of Spears’s early life in media accounts and that slew of documentaries, little of which Spears herself seems to appreciate, so I will keep this brief: Spears was born in 1981 in McComb, Mississippi, to mother Lynne and father Jamie Spears, who soon moved the family to Kentwood. Jamie was a construction worker whose struggles with alcohol destabilized the family, while Lynne ran a daycare center and was shuttling Britney to and from dance lessons and recitals by the time her daughter was four years old. Britney sought out structure and control in performance, from singing to dancing to gymnastics. Her primary passion was performing onstage, though, and she spent much of ages eight to fifteen trying to make it as a child star. One of her earliest jobs was as an understudy to Laura Bell Bundy in an off-Broadway musical called Ruthless!, which is about—I’m so serious—an ambitious child actor named Tina who murders her third-grade classmate so she can have the lead in the school play. In act II, Tina shoots her own mother, declares there’s no money in theater, and moves to Hollywood to try to book a TV series. Before any of this happens, Tina delivers the best line of the show, telling her mother, “I’ve had a normal childhood. It’s time to move on,” which is some pretty wild foreshadowing if you ask me. Anyway, Britney never actually stayed with the gig long enough to see Ruthless! open. Spears wound up competing on the junior version of the TV singing competition Star Search, but after losing in the finals, she and Lynne decided to leave New York and go home, and Britney was replaced as Bell Bundy’s understudy by another wannabe child actor by the name of Natalie Portman.
Eventually, Spears landed a role on Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club, alongside cast members including Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, and Christina Aguilera—no one has been on a hotter streak than the Mouse Club casting department in the mid-nineties. Spears spent two years as a Mouseketeer until the show was canceled in 1996. After that, Britney went back to Louisiana and enrolled in junior high but kept looking for ways to open doors as a performer. Her family knew an entertainment lawyer named Larry Rudolph whose clients included the Backstreet Boys, Toni Braxton, and Lou Pearlman, the former manager of both Backstreet and *NSYNC who is infamous specifically for perpetrating the longest-running Ponzi scheme in United States history, and generally for being a blimp magnate from Orlando, Florida. (Pearlman, who also embezzled money from the bands he managed and trapped members in predatory contracts, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison in 2008.) Anyway, Rudolph agreed to meet with Britney, and after sensing that she had something, signed her and agreed to help her get a record deal, at which point it was time for Britney and those now guiding her hopeful career to decide what kind of songs she wanted to sing. That meant Sweden was the way to go. In particular, one Swede: Max Martin. Max Martin, born Karl Martin Sandberg, was a Stockholm- based producer with long shaggy hair who’d been tutored under another Stockholm-based producer with long shaggy hair named Denniz Pop.
By 1998, Martin was the go-to producer for teen pop. Alongside Denniz, he’d churned out hits for the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Robyn, which had established Cheiron’s signature sound. Fundamentally, that sound was a combination of ABBA-esque euro pop chords, big eighties rock choruses, and grooves at least vaguely reminiscent of the new jack swing movement in American R&B put through a European filter. The special sauce was Martin’s supernatural gift for melody and zealous allegiance to a principle he calls “melodic math.”
The idea behind the melodic math principle is that every part of a song should be in service of the melody, which is the first thing he writes. The lyrics, and the vocal delivery of those lyrics, for example, exist to support those melodies, with most syllables neatly assigned to one particular note in a melody. If you want to hear melodic math in action, one good song to turn on is Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” Queue it up and listen to how neatly the syllables are tied to notes in the melody: each word of the line you make me and each syllable of the words “teenage dream” emphasizes a single note in the melody of the chorus. The words exist in order to get the sounds to sink in, part of why Martin’s songs are often such earworms. And Martin is dogmatic about his own rules. Let’s say a lyric is poetic but doesn’t naturally end at the end of a melodic phrase. With Martin, it’s the lyric that has to change to fit, not the melody, even if the poeticism is diminished by changing the words or the scan. Which is how you get I never wanna hear you say I want it that way.
It makes no sense, given that the boys are asking the song’s object to explain their own thoughts to them, but also to never speak, but also to tell them why over and over again. Things get even more jumbled when one factors in the verses, where Nick Carter has already told the object of the song to believe him when he says that he wants it that way, whatever way that is and whomever is supposed to be, or supposed to not be, requesting that things be as such. Men would rather never want to hear you say you want it that way than go to therapy, etc. etc.
The A&R team at Jive Records actually tried to intervene and change the lyrics to the song before it was released in 1999 as the lead single for the Backstreet Boys’ third studio album, the thirteen-times platinum-certified Millennium. They wanted to get rid of all the “tell me whys” with lines like “no goodbyes” and “no more lies.” They were logically a lot more sound than the original, but also somehow much worse. Maybe there’s a weightlessness to a message you can’t quite comprehend that makes the song the confection it is—the “that’s that me espresso” school of hitmaking, if you will. Maybe the word “I” takes too much emphasis in the second-to-last line relative to the second syllable of “wanna” and it makes the melodic math feel unsolved. In any case, the boys stuck with Martin’s version, and it worked out pretty well.
Melodic math aside, another reason Martin’s songs contain lyrics that sound a bit off is that he’s a Swede writing in a second language. Going all the way back to ABBA, one factor in the international success of Swedish pop musicians has been the fact that Sweden imports a lot of English-speaking movies, books, television, and other media and entertainment products—studies have found that even a third of TV commercials aired in Sweden contain English—but it’s understandable that idioms and certain phrases were bound to get lost in translation. “I grew up on Elton John and the Beatles and I had no idea what they were saying, it was just gibberish,” Martin told The Telegraph in 2019. “If we come to a place in a writing session where one word might be better sense [sic] but the other option sounds cool, I will always pick the one that sounds appealing to me.” When it comes to the least comprehensible Cheiron lyrics to make it to air, “I Want It That Way” doesn’t even crack my personal top five:
5. Sadness is beautiful / Loneliness is tragical—Backstreet Boys, “Shape of My Heart.” Of course they stuck AJ with “tragical.” Martin produced this song with Rami Yacoub, a Cheironite who was his right hand man during the Britney and Backstreet years and who went on to produce many of One Direction’s greatest hits. (Rami crushed the beats on Backstreet’s Black & Blue album, especially “The Call.”) “Shape of My Heart” is, for my money, the best Backstreet song even though it takes a very non-Cheiron-like forty full seconds to get going. There is no juicier melody in the catalog, “I Want It That Way” included, and I swear this is true. Still … tragical.
4. Tell me, I’m not in the blue—Britney Spears, “(You Drive Me) Crazy.” Best guess, the Cheiron boys mixed up “out of the blue” and “in the dark” to get this one. Idioms were not their strong suit. The electric guitar shredding at the end of the original version of the song? Very much their strong suit.
3. All that she wants / is another baby—Ace of Base, “All That She Wants.” The earliest and one of the best Cheironisms—I suppose we should cut them some slack here given that no one involved in making the song was a native English speaker. (Jonas, Linn, and Jenny Berggren and Ulf Ekberg, the bandmembers, were all native Swedes, which is how they knew of Denniz Pop so early on.) Credit their global sensibilities for knowing that the reggae-lite baseline of “All That She Wants” would click in a New York club setting, or that the chorus’s melody, set over chords, would be fun to sing while speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway. Those sensibilities did not extend, however, to understanding that the lyrics sound like they refer to a woman who desperately wants a child, not a boyfriend.
2. I only wanna die alive / Never by the hands of a broken heart—Ariana Grande featuring Zedd, “Break Free.” First of all, some of you may at this point be going, he wrote that song too?! Yes, and he’s not slowing down. If this list was intended to show the breadth of Martin’s discography, I’d have included I can’t feel my face when I’m with you / but I love it, from the Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face,” but I am told that if you do a lot of cocaine that actually scans. Anyway, in 2014, while recording the song for Grande’s album My Everything, Martin had to convince her to sing the lyrics as they were despite her reluctance toward the idea of dying alive and making the incorrect assertion that hearts have hands. “I fought him on it the whole time,” Grande said. “‘I am not going to sing a grammatically incorrect lyric, help me God!’ Max was like, ‘It’s funny—just do it!’ I know it’s funny and silly but grammatically incorrect things make me cringe sometimes.” Martin and his melodic math won out, though, which perhaps had something to do with the fact that he had seventeen number-one hits to his name by that point. The line stayed.
Which brings us to number one, and back to … Hit me baby one more time. Martin did not write “... Baby One More Time” with Spears in mind. He felt it was a song for a group and had initially offered it to the Backstreet Boys and TLC, both of which passed on it because of the lyrics. “I was like, I like the song but do I think it’s a hit? Do I think it’s TLC? I’m not saying ‘hit me baby,’” Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins later told MTV’s Cory Midgarden, recalling the decision not to record the song. The heart of the issue was a misunderstanding of slang. The phrase Martin and his Scandi cohorts were searching for was “hit me up.” They believed that “hit me baby” conveyed a request to call someone back (sort of like when my mom asks if I’m going to “hook up” with one of my friends later). To T-Boz, it sounded strange at best and like an allusion to domestic violence at worst. She got the song immediately.
Instead of being a turnoff, its taboo quality appealed to her taste for spectacle—the dash of discomfort was what made the song memorable. She heard it not just as flirty, but a little desperate, which played into the ambiguousness of “hit me.” (As means of papering over the issue, the label changed the title of the song, which Martin had been calling “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” to “... Baby One More Time,” but even there, the ellipses read like a wink.) The night before Spears recorded the vocals for “... Baby,” she stayed up all night to make her voice sound extra raspy; later that year she told Rolling Stone that she spent those long waking hours listening to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” over and over again, thinking about channeling Marc Almond’s pleading yelp into her vocal. “What a sexy song,” she said. Though it was her girlish upper register that got Jive to sign her, it’s Spears’s low voice that puts “... Baby One More Time” in its alluring purr. “I wanted my voice to just be able to groove with the track. So the night before, I stayed up really, really late, so when I went into the studio, I wasn’t rested. When I sang it, I was just laid back and mellow—it sounds cool, though. You know how it sounds really low in the lower register—it sounds really sexy.” The results would define the first era of pop music in the 2000s, send every major label searching for more new pop talent and provide Martin with his first number-one hit. “Baby” performed well in the first month after its release.
Spears went around the country, performing the song in shopping malls to increasingly large crowds looking up from their Panda Express or taking a break from browsing at Claire’s. On November 21, “... Baby One More Time” made the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time, slotting in healthily at number seventeen. Five days after that was when the dam broke. The song’s music video premiered on MTV.
The “... Baby One More Time” music video was where Spears, sixteen at the time, fully articulated the combination of girlish pep and adult provocation that separated her from her teen pop predecessors and made her the cultural obsession of the early aughts. In the video, Spears, playing a bored girl at school, waits for the bell to ring at the end of class, then struts through the hallways as the leader of a dance parade. Her shirt is knotted above her belly button and her hair is in braids fixed with puffy pink bows; the aesthetic signals of youthfulness and sex appeal are decidedly mixed. Notably, this approach was Spears’s idea. Nigel Dick, who directed the “... Baby” video, originally conceived it as a cartoon superhero story with a Power Rangers aesthetic. That video would have been much more in line with standard kid fare, and less provocative, but Spears nixed it immediately. She wasn’t interested in Power Rangers. She wanted to channel what was cool to her as a sixteen-year-old girl, which is to say that she wanted to be at school with friends, thinking about boys, with miniskirts and dancing. She said as much on set. Spears would later tell People that she was responsible for the bare midriffs, too. “The outfits looked kind of dorky, so I was like, ‘Let’s tie up our shirts and be cute,’” she said. To her, it was perfectly age appropriate. Every girl in the United States was wearing Soffe shorts with the waistband rolled over to show more skin; why couldn’t she tie up her shirt over a sports bra, showing nothing more than she would have in a dance class after school? Some of the producers were skeptical about the coquettish look and thought she should cover up, but Britney got her way. Dick gave his okay, and the video was shot in three days at Venice High School, also the shooting location for the high school scenes in Grease.
The video took off. Its release came just two months after the first episode of Total Request Live aired on MTV, in an era in which a great music video could sell a song, a look, or a whole career. Off that success, every part of Spears’s rollout campaign went into overdrive. Baby One More Time the album was released on January 12, 1999, and on February 9, “... Baby One More Time” the song hit number one for the first time. By March, Britney had the number-one song in more than twenty countries. That’s a massive moment for any artist, but it was unprecedented for a woman making her debut—Spears was the first new female artist in history to have a song atop the Billboard 100 and an album atop the Billboard 200 at the same time. By the end of that year, she was the bestselling artist of 1999, with the biggest song and album in the world.
The schoolgirl look was a stroke of brilliant iconography. It was an instant Halloween costume, and it effectively became Spears’s avatar in popular culture. But it also made Spears into a teenage sex symbol. And coming at a time when culture was loudly working through seemingly endless hang-ups around sex and women’s bodies, her self-presentation was taken as an invitation to filter all those hang-ups through her. In April 1999, she was on the cover of Rolling Stone, lying on her back on a bed in pink satin underwear, holding a corded phone in one hand and clutching the purple Teletubby Tinky Winky in the other. That choice was an intentional one by the photographer David LaChapelle. At the time, Tinky Winky was embroiled in his own early-aughts morality play: the televangelist Jerry Falwell had attacked the character in a sermon for being “a gay role model.” (What he meant by that is that Tinky Winky carries a purse.) LaChapelle was pushing the buttons of a reactionary strain in culture that was present around the turn of the century, and wound up as the backdrop to Spears’ rise. The headline on the cover story read: “Britney Spears, Teen Queen. Inside the Heart and Mind (and Bedroom) of Britney,” set in blockish letters against the pink satin of Spears’s sheets. (Other headlines from the cover included “Bill Maher: What He Won’t Say on TV” and “Norm Macdonald: Ready or Not For Prime Time?”) Shockingly, it was the bedroom part that got all the attention—the first line of the article includes a reference to Spears’s “honeyed thigh.” I’m going to choose not to expose you to the several books’ worth of examples of barf-worthy coverage of a teenaged Spears, from leering interviewers to gratuitously bitchy early-internet bloggers to condescending music industry veterans to fucking Jay Leno, but, as you can imagine, that reference was not an outlier.
But as LaChapelle seemed to get, to older audiences, Spears’s combination of innocence and provocation was what made her a sensation and set her apart from her teen pop predecessors. It wasn’t just that Spears wore revealing clothes, or alluded to sex, it was the fact that she used the imagery of girlhood to do so that was fuel for a growing number of culture war debates. By the time she released her second major hit, “Oops! … I Did It Again,” in 2001, the tagline of that song—I’m not that innocent—served to define Spears’s persona.
Nearly every tentpole figure of the aughts in and around pop music owes something to Britney, from working with Max Martin to create a hit, to learning to walk the line of provocateur/innocent. She is the figurehead of one of the more impressive freshman classes of pop stars in music history and her success paved the way for the dance-pop of Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, JoJo, Stacy Orrico, and other artists who would thrive at the start of the decade. Spears defined a new era of pop stardom and she inspired both copycats and, eventually, changes in the genre that came in response to her. It’s fitting, really. She has always known how to get a reaction.
Excerpted from the book Hit Girls by Nora Princiotti. Copyright © 2025 by Nora Princiotti. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
