WRITTEN BY: Owen Merskey
She’s Britney, bitch. Miss American Dream may have turned out to be anything but an American dream as a result of despicable parents, paparazzi, and plain ol’ misogyny among other things. Britney Spears, in a state of relative peace compared to the tormented saga she has been subjected to since the very start of her career, could retire from music forever and be completely justified in doing so. Regardless of her future, one thing is for certain: the legacy she left on pop music is undeniable. Furthermore, one may even argue that analyzing her discography reflects not just on her career regardless of who was writing her songs, but on pop culture as we know it today. Society might just not decode itself without her. That’s why we’re taking it upon ourselves to rank her 10 finest singles. This time, the ranking is in order.
10. Do Somethin’ (from Greatest Hits: My Prerogative, 2004):
As far as Spears’ singles go, “Do Somethin’” is a lark. Released off her first greatest hits compilation, it wasn’t even intended to be a single until Spears forced her record label into making a music video so she could display the choreography she’d created for the track. It’s that tossed-off quality, though, that benefits “Do Somethin’” in hindsight. Much of Britney Spears’ material, even by the ridiculously manufactured standards of pop artists, often comes with extreme levels of intent and meticulousness. Here, having her flip between speak-rapping and belting is a thrill, especially as the song saddles itself between the dance-pop she’d become remembered for and the rock she’d always yearned to do. It’s a weird mix that slightly predates the indie sleaze movement, but Britney, always the eager performer, sells the song so convincingly that the mélange only increases its firepower.
9. Break The Ice (from Blackout, 2007):
She’s best described as a singles artist, but boy does Blackout buck that trend. It’s an excellent record that predicts the maximalist, thrashing EDM that would go on to set the charts ablaze at the height of the economic recession. We’re going to cover that album more in-depth as the list goes on, but “Break The Ice” is one of its many great singles. Produced by Timbaland’s protege Danja, the song is underpinned by a brooding and cavernous five-note descending synth riff that lends the electroclash come-on some extra menace to Britney’s already louche presence. She pants, moans, and coos all over the track, but even that comes secondary to the wildly catchy melody that insists on worming its way into your brain and never coming back out. Icebreaker indeed.
8. Lucky (from Oops!...I Did It Again, 2001):
From the start, though, Britney’s always been catchy. Her earliest productions with Max Martin recalled the close-knit vocal harmonizing and taffy-sweet earworms of ABBA, and like many of her earliest singles, they push around the format in new ways. “Lucky” actually recalls the doo-wop and brill building days of 1960s girl groups, and it’s with that added template of colour she concocts a stunningly prophetic account of a Hollywood starlet saddled with the unbearable trauma of being unimaginably famous. Though time has certainly been kind to its narrative, there’s more than just the lyrics that stand out here. A sudden minor-key harmonic flip in the song’s second chorus, right at the song’s halfway point successfully musically conveys the loneliness this lovely Hollywood girl might be feeling. It’s a sudden burst of melancholy that aptly reflects those tears that come at night, and the track returns to it for its grand finale. It’s one of the greatest and most underrated musical tricks Max Martin ever pulled off, and it might be what gives the narrative the emotional heft it truly needs.
7. Gimme More (from Blackout, 2007):
We’re back to Blackout with one of her many legendary lead singles. But its distinction lies in its reception, and just how many critics misunderstood “Gimme More” as an almost deconstructionist work of pop art. To put things into simpler terms, “Gimme More” is to modern-day pop music what Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is to modern-day cinema. Here, Spears taunts the tabloids over their yearning for her attention and her antics, only for that ominous, disturbed chorus to swoop in, with the help of producer Danja, and shatter any notion of the public getting anywhere near her. Those warping, gurgled sounds of “more”, set against a backdrop that recalls somewhere between Miss Kittin and the best of Depeche Mode, turn into a deconstruction of the female voice, so often the object of fetishization and the core of pop as we know it. In that deconstruction, she manages to take her voice back. It’s thrilling, really, and is what primarily lands the song this high on the list, though the entire package is great.
6. Toxic (from In The Zone, 2004)
“Toxic” was the first song that truly made Britney be taken seriously by the critics. Reassessing pop music was not novel by this point, but “Toxic” was insistent on credibility from the jump: written by the same team that brought us “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”, a string sample from an 80s Bollywood flick, surf guitar scattered all over. The song oozes cool, even when handling the most toxic of subjects: dangerous relationships. But once again, it’s Ms. Spears that snaps all of the track’s disparate elements into focus. Her breathy delivery is the perfect counterpart to the frivolous clip this song speeds at, sensual and dexterous enough to demand the listener’s attention but light enough to keep all of the song’s more intriguing facets in the periphery.
5. Oops!...I Did It Again (from Oops!...I Did It Again, 2001):
So how do you follow up one of the biggest songs of all time? You kinda can’t. Well…maybe, you can. Britney, Max, and the folks at Cheiron Studios needed to cook up a lead single for her second that continued the promise of her all-time great début…and “Oops!” is its logical conclusion. Staying true to the tried and true template of power chords, hammer-heavy beats, and gooey pop melodrama, their second lead single is a sequel to their first…and it knows it. “Oops!” in many ways operates as a meta-text, its slyly knowing and observant younger sister who uses the original’s tricks to innovate in new ways. Britney plays with her image effortlessly in the song as the no-longer-innocent girl next door freed from the shackles of teenage heartbreak, able to effortlessly thread in Titanic of all things in a way that still suits the song and further intertwines herself into pop culture at large. Often, sequels are less immediately compelling than what came before them, but that shouldn’t mean they can’t be any less smart.
4. Till the World Ends (from Femme Fatale, 2011)
By and large, we believe that Britney Spears’ discography reached its zenith sometime in the mid-2000s. After the beginning of her conservatorship, she may have mounted a commercial comeback of sorts, but the singles never slammed like the best of her earliest material. Yet there’s an exception to every rule, and “Till the World Ends” claws itself into the very best of Britney’s material by virtue of sheer catchiness. With a co-writing credit from Kesha, “Till the World Ends” is the song that truly pulled Britney back into competition with the rest of the maximalist EDM which she helped proliferate. The key? By embracing it as a pure club track; not a pop song. There’s something special about a song that only reveals its chorus ⅔ of the way through, and can successfully implement a millennial whoop as a proper drop. Even the brief foray into dubstep here is exciting. As of today, it’s her last great moment.
3. Everytime (from In The Zone, 2004)
“Everytime” might theoretically operate as her response to ex-sweetheart Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River”, the sort of pop culture meta-text that demands attention and context and whatnot. But really, “Everytime” works for how distinctive it is, especially by the standards of it being a ballad. So many pop ballads aim for bombast and melodrama, and by turning inwards, “Everytime” somehow manages to evoke considerably more society than so much pop dreck, even today. Britney sounds like she’s about to trip over her own words throughout its runtime, transforming the song from apology into complete existential rumination. It’s perfectly theatrical, perfectly human, and one of the all-time great musical portraits of yearning and loneliness. Don’t take it from us, take it from Harmony Korine.
2. …Baby One More Time (from …Baby One More Time, 1999):
That three-note opening riff seemed to herald an entirely new future, or so it seems. 1999 was the year in which “...Baby One More Time”, her unforgettable début single, reached number one in most charts around the world; it was the same year in which the music industry made the most profit on record – roughly $71 per person was spent on music and its associated equipment in the United States alone. The song remains quite possibly the finest refinement of Max Martin’s sound: earthshaking and percussive chords, gang-vocal harmonies, straight-up melodies, and satisfying climaxes in the final third that always seem to herald a shift in each song’s narrative. It helped that Britney’s throaty drawl felt like yet another sound unheard in pop music.
Yet the most compelling aspect of this classic is how much it harkens back to the greatest of pop songs. “...Baby One More Time”’s narrative is so primal, so melodramatic it becomes downright religious and so unrelentingly romantic that it cannot help but recall an endless canon of classics. More specifically, it’s right in line with the evergreen, obsessive narratives of 60s girl group songs; “Be My Baby”, “You Keep Me Hanging On”, and so forth. These narratives of helpless obsession have kept the music machine afloat for decades. We must confess: of all those classics, this might even be better than its ancestors. A pinnacle of the form.
1. Piece of Me (from Blackout, 2007):
What do you do when your life spirals out of control and everyone’s there to watch? You fuckin’ party. On paper, that seems to be the thesis statement of Blackout, but maybe there’s more to this idea of partying and debauchery than meets the eye. The album was incipient in anticipating how feminine libertinism would be reclaimed as a statement of autonomy, especially amidst the incoming economic recession. If we were going to lose our jobs and our sanity, we might as well party. And for all the heaving and hawing over Britney losing her well-being, she was still determined to prove herself in control. Better yet, she’d prove it to the people who ruined her.
Enter “Piece of Me”, one of the finest and sharpest musical middle fingers ever made. A chorus comprised of tabloid quotes, her effortless stream-of-consciousness evocation of how the paparazzi and quote-unquote mass culture perceives her, all set against percussion that rattles like chains and electronics that crackle like a five-alarm blaze. Whereas “Gimme More” preferred to be more abstract in its indictment of the media and its role in destroying her life, “Piece of Me” sees Britney face them head-on, delivering a blow like an iron fist in a velvet glove. It may not have been the first time an artist so directly confronted their public narrative in song, but it’s hard to imagine any star from Charli XCX to Lana Del Rey to Drake have the guts to do so themselves without this classic. All these years later, “Piece of Me” hasn’t lost any of its guile. It might actually be more empowering than ever.