Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The Give Me a Sign Edition

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History,

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2018

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From a very young age, Britney Spears seemed destined for stardom. The kid from Louisiana had landed a role on the revived Mickey Mouse Club and styled herself as a belter of power ballads. But to score her first No. 1 hit, Spears would team up with an introverted Swedish songwriter named Max Martin. He was trying to write American R&B and instead, through Britney and her high-school dance formations, created a new template for über–American teen-pop. This month, we go inside the Stockholm music factory—and its decades-long history, from ABBA to Ace of Base—that gave rise to a new generation of millennial pop, from the Backstreet Boys and *N Sync to Robyn and Taylor Swift.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music.
0:11.0	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from
0:17.4	coast to coast.
0:18.8	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's
0:23.0	Why Is This Song Number One series. On today's show, 20 years ago this month, a single from a
0:31.2	former Mousketeer made its debut on Billboard's Hot 100. Within two months, it would reach the top of the chart, and it would kick America's teen pop craze into overdrive. In the two decades, I must confess, I still believe.
0:56.0	I'm not with you.
0:57.0	In the two decades since she donned a schoolgirl uniform and strutted into pop chart history,
1:05.0	Britney Spears has been one of the most debated figures in American culture, held up as the avatar of fast food pop.
1:14.9	But what is undisputed is that Baby One More Time is still a topic of fascination 20 years later.
1:23.1	And with hindsight, Brittany's chart breakthrough at the juncture of 1998 and 99 was both the culmination of decades of prior pop science,
1:38.1	and the pivot point of millennial pop, helping to define what the hits would sound like in a new century.
1:53.2	That's because Baby One More Time was not only a smash for Spears, but also an American chart breakthrough for the man who wrote it,
2:03.3	a Swedish pop craftsman named Max Martin, who would go on to become the defining producer and
2:10.9	songwriter of his generation. He and his Stockholm Song Factory would go on to craft hits that were praised,
2:19.6	and hits that were pillory, and hits that were playlists, and hits that were playlisted by millions.
2:41.0	Both Max and Brittany would go on to collaborate with other artists and other producers and songwriters.
2:52.5	Some hits they issued apart from one another would be more acclaimed.
3:00.9	And as the music business transformed from physical goods to the digital cloud, many of their 21st century hits would ultimately wind up more consumed.
3:22.8	But the first collaboration between Britney Spears and Max Martin holds a singular place in their respective discographies, the moment they defined the zeitgeist, helped along by the launch of a new daily MTV after-school countdown slash pep rally.
3:42.9	Ladies are known, Brittany Spears is here.
3:44.5	It's like hanging out.
	...

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