Several months back, I listened to Britney Spears'
"Hold It Against Me" for the first time. If you read
my post about sawtooth waves in pop music, you only have to listen to the first eight seconds or so to understand why I was instantly fascinated by it. Britney has a strange amount of longevity on the fickle thrones of music charts and, with this song as my Rosetta Stone, I thought I'd figured out the source of it. But I needed to put some research behind the theory. Based on Billboard chart records, here's a list of Britney's top singles from every album, with links to the songs if you don't already have them memorized. For the sake of space, I wont embed every song I think you should listen to, so just know that every following link in this post is a link to a song.
"Circus" gets honorable mention since it topped almost everything before it,
and the battle between "Hold It Against Me" and "Till The World Ends" is still hot. "3" isn't on Britney's main line of studio albums, but hit #1 on the charts in 2009 so is worth mentioning. Perhaps by looking at this timeline in detail, we can gain some insight on how Britney Spears became such an inexorable part of the pop pantheon.
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Ah, the breakout hits. I grouped these two songs because they're very much the same (even the titles are weirdly similar). They both feature a simple head-bobbing beat, staccato piano for emphasis, and a hint of funk — the exact sound that made the Spice Girls popular in the States immediately prior (admittedly, with the sass toned down a couple notches). The writers/producers for these two Britney tracks were also responsible for early Backstreet Boys and N'Sync hits which sound markedly different. Instead of keeping with their style of songwriting, the dominating pop sound was likely put aside for the sake of mimicking what had recently worked for female pop vocalists of the time.
There's that touch of funk again. The overall style is a little different though. The accented beat (normally represented by a snare drum) now sounds more like a hand clap/rim shot, which are staples of hip-hop and R&B music. Incidentally, this is the point where hip-hop and R&B began to usurp the reign of boy bands. Following suit, the strength of this song is in the rhythm. Britney sings a melody, but one that is not harmonically well-supported with the percussive instruments. In fact, one of the only recurring extended tones in the song is detuned, which makes it actively resist being harmonized with. If you can't figure out which sound I'm talking about, it's the one that happens every few beats and sounds like a cartoon flower wilting — an appropriate symbol for the teenage innocence Britney had totally abandoned by this point in her career.
This video is a monument to Britney's power as an sexual symbol so I can't help but mention the visual sexplosion. And the scenes are so badly hyperbolic they become good again. She freaking dances through a laser grid! How stupidly awesome is that?!...But anyway...
The guitar is an obvious reference to the James Bond soundtrack. There have been Bond films pretty regularly since the 60s, so I doubt there was a strong enough trend to make that more than an arbitrary stylistic choice. But the other sounds have a more interesting origin. They are actually taken directly from a Hindi film called Ek Duuje Ke Liye (don't ask me to pronounce that). More specifically, the song, "Tere Mere Beech Mein." The film and song are from 1981 and probably foreign to Britney fans, both literally and figuratively. The popular trend followed here was not the source of the sounds used, but the fact that they were used at all. This is called "sampling" and is common in electronic music, which (alongside R&B/hip hop) was gaining a substantial footing in popular culture by the time "Toxic" was written. Additionally, the beginning of the song and the point starting at about 2:21 are lo-fi versions of the sound that drop back into a heavy beat after a few measures — a musical technique I hear most commonly in electro-pop, used for a dance-able and energizing emphasis to otherwise repetitive songs.
The hand clap/rim shot return with bass lines that are easy to follow — another tip-of-the-hat to hip-hop. Unlike previous songs, the instruments in these are unabashedly digital. There are also several more post-production edits than we've heard before (digital filters, vocal effects and such). The forte of a song with a hip-hop feel but electronic sound will necessarily be where those styles overlap: the strong beat and rhythm. This super dance-able lovechild of the two hottest trending genres creates what we now think of as the last decade's typical pop song. With Britney Spears at the forefront of their convergence, she became the reigning queen of the dance floor.
"3" is musically simple (even for a pop song) and therefore particularly easy to get stuck in your head. I suspect that's the only reason it climbed the charts like it did because it's also boring, goes nowhere, uses stock synth sounds, and really doesn't say anything significant about Britney's musical progress. "3" deserves a spot on the charts like I deserve a spot on the senate. If nothing else, the simple nature of this outlier makes it good remix fodder.
If you've heard "Hold It Against Me" before, you already know what happens at 2:17. It's a
drop! Like from dubstep, the not-so-underground DJ movement favoring the dirty, filthy sound that's currently trending in pop music as a result. In textbook dubstep style, it drops to a throbbing 66.5 BPM, a cutting saw wave, and a heavy, low-frequency oscillator.
Both of these songs are a (dub)step in the right direction for the current trends. The influence is more subtle in "Till The World Ends," but you can still hear comparable elements. Not surprisingly, "Till The World Ends" was co-written by Ke$ha, perhaps explaining the vocal wailing in the chorus and the excessive use of a saw synth.
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I wasn't so in touch with popular music trends until the last year, so the secret to Britney's longevity eluded me until hearing "Hold It Against Me." Dubstep hadn't been on the mainstream scene very long before that song was made. After looking (and listening) to all this, hopefully you noticed what I noticed. She and her producers are consistently among the first to adopt the trends of whatever musical season they're writing for. Pop music is frequently not about innovating anything, but rather giving as many people as possible the sound they want at any particular time. And it's a gold rush: The first people to the mines are the ones who get rich, leaving only flinders of wealth for the late-comers to glean while everyone searches for another deposit.
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| "Why, yes indeed!" |
When talking about Britney Spears, it's often unclear whether you're talking about the actual person or the pop sensation created by musical minds working silently behind the glamorous curtain. Britney is definitely not the same type of musician as the other contenders for the title "Queen of Pop" (which include Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Lady Gaga) but she's still a juggernaut. Every single one of her albums over the past twelve years has been a chart-topper. And just because her existence is mostly a symbolic one doesn't mean she's undeserving of the crown. Right, Elizabeth?
Madonna is old news (53-year-old news, to be exact), Janet Jackson is inconsistent (is she even on the radio anymore?), and Lady Gaga is only a toddler on the scene (plus her aesthetic parlor tricks are growing stale). These lovely ladies all have their place in the ranks of pop royalty. But with the veritable key to pop music stashed in her back pocket, who truly deserves the throne? It's Britney, bitch.
