While TLC interpreted the lyrics as alluding to domestic violence, they actually represented Martin’s attempts at American slang, believing “hit me” could seamlessly replace “call me”. “I was like: ‘I like the song but do I think it’s a hit? Do I think it’s TLC?’ … Was I going to say ‘Hit me baby one more time’? Hell no!” said T-Boz in 2013. Martin, convinced he’d written an R&B song (“Pop music with a flavour – what we call R&B in Sweden, what you guys say is pop,” he said in 1998), sent the song, then called Hit Me Baby (One More Time), to TLC who rejected it. “I remember listening back to after blew up and you can hear me sort of go: ‘Hit me baby one more time’, then I hear myself say, Yeah, it’s pretty good,’” the notoriously interview-shy Martin told Swedish journalist Jan Gradvall in 2016. Having hauled himself out of bed to his nearby dictaphone, he sketched out the song. In a Sliding Doors-esque moment that could have changed the world as we know it, …Baby One More Time very nearly didn’t get written at all, with the song’s melody bubbling up as Martin was drifting off to sleep. It was different and I loved it, I don’t think you can anticipate how a song is going to be received.” “The whole song is about that stress that we all go through as teens,” Spears tells me. Released in the wake of Alanis Morissette’s hugely successful 1995 album Jagged Little Pill and its litany of imitators, it presented a different angle to the prevalent idea of female angst this was gloriously OTT teen girl longing, encapsulated by a lyric – “My loneliness is killing me” – that feels depressingly evergreen. Without it, there would by no Christina Aguilera, no Katy Perry, no Charli XCX Taylor Swift would probably still be singing country songs, and Eminem – who arrived in 1999 – would not have had as much to rail against. In the space of just three minutes and 31 seconds, Spears launched millennial teen pop, fusing family-friendly, girl-next-door fun with good old fashioned controversy, forging a template for those who followed. Along with its equally iconic high school-set music video it re-turfed pop, kickstarting an entire sound (think funk-tinged R&B grooves mixed with Abba melodies), sweeping aside the dregs of grunge (sorry, Bush) and US heartland rock (bye, Hootie & the Blowfish), revitalising pop radio and MTV in the process, before cementing its songwriter and co-producer Max Martin as one of modern music’s most influential exponents. Baby One More Time, which turns 20 this year, announced the arrival of a new superstar: the then 16-year-old ex-Mouseketeer from Kentwood, Louisiana, Britney Jean Spears.
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