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Teen queen Britney Spears invites you to hit her with your best shot.
August 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.
salon.com | Aug. 27, 1999
Uh, Miss?
By Alex Pappademas, September 17, 1999

By playing a waitress in a video, Britney Spears tries to connect with a great rock tradition. Check, please.

Waitressing, as Harvey Keitel told remorseless non-tipper Mr. Pink in "Reservoir Dogs," "is the No. 1 occupation for female non-college graduates in this country." That makes it a classic symbol of struggle, of shorts taken and dues paid, of inner strength in a greasy-spoon world. And it crops up even in songs and videos by artists who didn't actually wait tables while waiting to be discovered. By playing a waitress who sheds her apron for a big production number in her "(You Drive Me) Crazy" video, Britney Spears joins a star-studded wait staff in the grand rock 'n' roll canon. Her forebears: new-wavers the Waitresses, Chrissie Hynde, playing the server most likely to hawk in your tuna melt in the Pretenders' "Brass In Pocket" video, "Gina" in Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" (who "works the diner all day"), Courtney "hooker/waitress, model/actress" Love, Tori Amos, contemplating waitricide on "The Waitress," and Donna Summer, whose '70s stage-wear included a rhinestoned waitress's uniform.

Spears' problem, in donning the symbolic apron, is that she's too fresh-minted a star to have "early years" to dramatize -- her first job, after all, was "The New Mickey Mouse Club." Not exactly hard labor. She can't bring to her waitress performance the day-job-punk frustration of Olympia, Wash., riot grrrls Heavens to Betsy's plate-breaking news flash "Waitress Hell," or evoke the poignancy of the waitress "practicing politics" in a room full of cryin' drunks in Billy Joel's "Piano Man." And because the video's about waitress-Britney transforming into sexy-Britney in front of the makeup mirror, there's no celebration of the unrecognized beauty of the ordinary waitress. That tends to happen more often in customer's-perspective songs by men, like Tom Waits' 1974 "The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)," which moons over a waitress with "Maxwell House eyes" and "marmalade thighs," or (more recently) murmuring synth-playa Jimi Tenor on "Love and Work," telling his girl, "I want to be every customer in the diner where you work." (Supertramp, whose "Breakfast in America" album cover depicted the Statue of Liberty as a matronly Edie McClurg type serving a giant glass of O.J., basically invented putting waitresses on a pedestal.)

The best waitress song of all time, however, remains Prince's "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker," from his 1987 funk classic "Sign O' the Times." Parker turns up as "a waitress on the promenade." Prince says, "Let me get a fruit cocktail, I ain't 2 hungry." Parker questions his manliness, and the whole story bounces out the window in a whirl of bubble baths, Joni Mitchell quotes and teasing did-they-or-didn't-they narrative confusion. Next to that sexy lyrical scramble, Spears' over-easy clip looks about as compelling as an "Alice" rerun.