"...Baby One More Time" Ranks 28 in Pitchfork's Best Songs of the '90s

[filmandstage13]

I know we'd all probably rank it higher, but for those who have been following Britney since the late '90s, it's refreshing to see the recent critical re-evaluation of her work!  She's finally starting to get her due as an artist, and from notoriously snobbish critics like Pitchfork Magazine (though I do love Pitchfork).  Also notable about the list: the Top 5 is all women!  Lots to celebrate here! 

The 250 Best Songs of the 1990s | Pitchfork

PITCHFORK.COM

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The tracks that defined the ’90s, including Björk, Biggie, Mariah, Bikini Kill, Aaliyah, 2Pac, and many, many more.

The excerpt about Baby One More Time: 

28. Britney Spears: “...Baby One More Time” (1998)

Britney Spears is so thoroughly woven into our cultural fabric—her rise, fall, revival, restriction, and liberation—that you forget she once needed to introduce herself. Her origin story is the stuff of legend: A driven Louisiana teenager met an enigmatic Swede who had written hits for the Backstreet Boys and Robyn. She flew to Stockholm and purposefully stayed up too late the night before recording her vocals, making her voice, as she once put it, “rusty.” Then Spears and Max Martin entered the studio and reshaped the next quarter-century of pop music, like a dam redirecting a river’s flow.

“...Baby One More Time” is the dam, a structure crackling with energy. Like so many great pop songs, it taunts the listener by conflating the romantic and the religious: confession, belief, begging for a sign. The spiritual desperation, alongside Martin’s precise melodic techniques, is what makes a high school crush feel like life or death. Would-be stars and ambitious producers have been chasing that transgressive thrill for decades, but it’s tough to top the original sin. –Jamieson Cox