Born to make you indifferent (Baby One More Time - Britney Spears)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Baby One More Time - Britney Spears
Date:	05/11/09 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The excellent title track; one or two other solid songs

Disadvantages: The lacklustre second half; has dated badly in places

I like to think I have a reasonably eclectic taste in music, but it has to be said that the output of Britney Spears does not generally form part of my listening habits. However, it's always good to get out of your comfort zone occasionally, and ...Baby One More Time (those much-overlooked dots are in fact part of the album's title) turns out to be a slightly more interesting record than I had originally thought, although admittedly that isn't saying a great deal. It's far from being a masterpiece, it has a number of glaring faults, and in quite a few places it has dated horribly, but it would be wrong to dismiss it as entirely worthless.

This was Britney's first album (somehow "Spears" just doesn't seem to fit her), released in early 1999, at which point she had barely turned 17. A few months earlier, she had rocketed to worldwide superstardom on the back of the title song, and what seemed even then to be a slightly dodgy video featuring the singer and a few friends cavorting around an ersatz classroom in somewhat revealing school uniforms. Those with long memories will recall that at this time, strange as it seems from the viewpoint of a decade later, Britney was being promoted as an innocent, virginal teenager - the white background of the album cover is surely no coincidence - something which sat uncomfortably with the clear sexual innuendo of the video.

That title track is certainly the best song on the album, and indeed is the one Britney song that may well stand the test of time to become something approaching a classic. Most people can recognise it at once from the piano intro, and the driving beat and relentless feistiness manage to overcome Britney's less than brilliant singing, a problem which is evident throughout the record. However, there are other songs that are worth a listen as well: Born To Make You Happy starts rather dully, but explodes into life with a tremendously catchy chorus. I Will Be There also seems to have that indefinable ability to hook the listener in - it's not exactly an original song, but it does its job well, and I was a little surprised to see that it was never released as a single.

The real problem with this album, though, is that there's an awful lot of dross to set alongside the few golden nuggets. Soda Pop, for example, is a truly horrible attempt at reggae, and just doesn't work with a singer as obviously young and inexperienced as Britney. As for the lyrics, well... "Open a soda pop, bop she-bop she-bop" rather says it all. At least that song is in the early part of the album, though, where there are several much better tunes around it to leaven the pain. After I Will Be There (which is track seven) things become much more consistent, but unfortunately that means consistently bad. It would be nice to be able to leave it at that, but on we must go...

I Will Still Love You, for example, is a confused mess of a duet between Britney and Don Phillip. To be scrupulously fair, Deep In My Heart, which follows, is not actively horrible, but it is the very epitome of forgettable late-nineties teen pop; I could feel the words slipping from my mind even as I heard them. It's only a brief respite, however: Thinkin' About You has the sort of effects that bring to mind a middle-school music student who has just discovered synthesisers, while E-Mail My Heart, quite apart from its terrifyingly awful title, sounds like the end credits to a third-string TV movie about "forbidden love" featuring some obnoxiously sugar-sweet teenager for whom a hard life means only that Daddy won't buy her a BMW until she's 18.

And as if that weren't bad enough, we then have to put up with Britney's version of the classic Sonny and Cher number The Beat Goes On, together with distracting "scratchy vinyl" effect. Unfortunately the laconic, jazzy beat of the original is entirely missing here, being replaced by an insistently pounding and resolutely un-swung electronic rhythm. Britney's "kiss" near the end is particularly off-putting. This is the final song on the standard edition of the CD; various later versions add the odd extra track or remixes of ...Baby One More Time (the song which is in least need of any change!), but if you're listening to the album in order you're likely to have given up by this point in any case.

I'd like to say that my assumptions had been challenged and my prejudices shattered by ...Baby One More Time, but as it would be a complete and utter lie I shall not do so. This album contains one truly excellent pop song (the title track), a couple more which are good, fun listening - but too many which seem little more than fillers, and which in some cases are simply too bound up with their era to persist in the memory even were they more accomplished songs in their own right. It might be worth buying downloads of a few of the tracks, but given that this album offers no particularly coherent theme to tie the songs together there seems little point in shelling out for the whole CD.

Track listing (standard album):

1. ...Baby One More Time
2. You Drive Me Crazy
3. Sometimes
4. Soda Pop
5. Born To Make You Happy
6. From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart
7. I Will Be There
8. I Will Still Love You
9. Deep In My Heart
10. Thinkin' About You
11. E-Mail My Heart
12. The Beat Goes On

As of the time of writing, the CD was available from Amazon for £6.48, with individual tracks as MP3s being sold for 69-79p each. The songs are also available for free streaming via Spotify and last.fm.

Summary: Two more times might be overdoing things