The Meaning Behind Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time" Is Finally Confirmed
Everyone on Earth knows the lyrics to Britney Spears' seminal 1998 smash hit "...Baby One More Time," but 17 years after its release, people are still asking "What do they meeeaann?"
The song's lyrics tell the story of a heartbroken girl hashing through a recent faltered relationship she desperately wants back. Britney sings: "My loneliness is killing me \ I must confess I still believe \ When I'm not with you I lose my mind, give me a sign \ Hit me baby one more time."
The chorus, along with insinuations like "Show me how you want it to be" and "There's nothing that I wouldn't do" have historically led people to the assumption that it's some sort of twisted ode to domestic violence or a euphemism for S&M, although Britney proved later she was open to talking about S&M in a more frank way with "S&M," her 2011 duet with Rihanna.
Personally, my younger self always believed "Hit me baby one more time" was some kind of sexual reference. She was clearly beckoning to that hot basketball dude for a "Hit," right?
Wrong. Pop culture enthusiast and music writer John Seabrook just released a book titled The Song Machine and in it, proves all these theories wrong by providing the truth behind the lyrics. The Huffington Post reports:
The track was written by Swedish songwriter Max Martin and Swedish-Moroccan songwriter Rami Yacoub, who worked for Stockholm's famous Cheiron Studios -- a veritable hit factory -- in the '90s. In Seabrook's telling, Martin and fellow Cheiron songwriter Denniz PoP wanted to work with Spears because she was new, and young, and they could shape her sound the way they'd wanted to do with other singers. So they gave her a song Martin wrote about a girl who just split up with her boyfriend, "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)."
The Swedes, Seabrook writes, thought that "hit" was brand new American teen slang for "call." The singer, then, is pleading for her ex-boyfriend to call her just one more time, because she's lonely. Nothing improper there!
According to HuffPo, Seabrook's book also claims Jive Records dropped "Hit Me" from the song title for the reasons above, in turn making it "…Baby One More Time." He also notes that Martin wrote the song for TLC, who originally rejected it.
In a 2013 interview with MTV, T-Boz confirmed the group also turned down the song because of the "Hit." “I was like, I like the song but do I think it’s a hit? Do I think it’s TLC? I’m not saying ’hit me baby,’" she said. "No disrespect to Britney. It’s good for her. But was I going to say ’hit me baby one more time’? Hell no!”
Her loss!