The opening shot of Spears’ lips reflected how iconic a figure she’d already become.
I said, ‘This bit about the Titanic, what am I going to do with that? How does that fit in?’ And she goes, ‘Oh, you’ll think of something!’ So, you just go, ‘I’ll write something, and we’ll see if they like it.’ And as I recall, I don’t think there were any revisions on my treatment.” And then suddenly the brakes squeal, and you do an about-turn and you go back to 19-whenever it was when the Titanic sank. “You’re going, ‘What the fuck?’ I’m on Mars, which obviously means somewhere in the middle of the 21st century. So now you have to just try and make this idea work.”ĭick found the song’s infamous Titanic interlude baffling. You know, everything is now going to be red. Which for me, makes life a lot easier… Having Britney say, ‘I want to be on Mars’ immediately narrows it. “And she says,’ Well, I want to do this video. The sci-fi concept for the “Oops!” video came straight from Spears herself. The director shared the story of his time with Spears on the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. Whether the fickle world of the Top Ten will let it happen again remains to be seen, but in the absence of anything else (hello, Christina Aguilera) Britney‘s going to walk it.Nigel Dick had already directed videos for Guns N’ Roses, Oasis, and many others by the time he met Britney Spears in 1998, but even the “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine” clips couldn’t come close to matching the culture-shaking impact of “…Baby One More Time.”ĭick went on to helm the videos for “(You Drive Me) Crazy” and “Sometimes,” and when it came time for the all-important first single from Spears’ second album, Oops!… I Did It Again, she and her team turned to him again. Sorry, but she’s done it again – the difficult second album proved to be a piece of piss. “If there’s nothing missing in my life/Then why do these tears come at night?” sounds pretty fucking heavy when you’ve just been dumped and Britney‘s Mickey Mouse Club-trained falsetto is reaching its peak. A heart-rending tale of life at the top of the teen pop tree, transformed into an anthem for dramatic, moody 12-year-old girls everywhere by Max Martin‘s scary talent for teenybop lyrics. It’s Britney‘s ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’. The ultimate mallrat, bittersweet teenage symphony. So, the long-awaited – and ill-advised – cover of the Stones‘ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ is a letdown, but soon-to-be-single ‘Lucky’ is perhaps Britney‘s finest moment. The 21st-century R&B of Timbaland is bastardised, beaten and strangled to within an inch of its life with ‘Don’t Go Knockin’ On My Door’ while the Mutt Lange-penned ‘Don’t Let Me Be The Last To Know’ takes the riff from Iggy/ Bowie‘s ‘China Girl’ and puts it over schmaltzy cocktail-hour bass and love film strings. There’s the deranged helium synth pop of ‘Stronger’ with the huge ABBA chord change in the chorus that sounds scarier and more robotic than the Backstreet Boys. You get your fix in a second of the song opening – the taut ’80s Michael Jackson riffs, the squeals, the killer chorus, the uplifting middle bit, it’s all in there. Essentially a harder, carbon copy of ‘Baby One More Time’, it’s easily as good as her breakthrough single. In its own sick way, Britney is drug music.Ĭase in point is album opener and comeback single ‘Oops! I Did It Again’. An all-encompassing, horrendously realised high – once it’s inside you, there’s little you can do to stop it, you must give in. Like it or not, the songs penned for Britney by Swedish producer Max Martin, the man behind the even more successful Backstreet Boys, get into your brain like ketamine. To realise the evil genius behind this pop phenomenon is frightening.Īgainst cynical opinion, the reason why Britney Spears has sold 28 million albums across the globe is because she’s modern-day pop perfection realised in a, nearly, human form. You have to have first digested each piece of razor-sharp choreography, each flick of the lashes, each pop-genius hook and chord change. To fully appreciate a Britney Spears song, you’ve got to have seen the video about 15 times.
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