“Everyone who heard it thought it was strange.”
We’ve played all the Britney Spears songs, but…Baby One More Time will remain iconic forever. The song became a number 1 hit 25 years ago (yes, we feel old too), despite an error in the lyrics. We’ll tell you more.
Mistake
“Hit me, baby, one more time”: we all sing it along loudly, but what is the meaning behind this iconic phrase? There seems to have been a lot of speculation about this over the years. It literally means “Hit me, baby, again.” Yet this was not entirely what the makers intended.
Britney’s song was written by Sweden’s Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, who also wrote songs for Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and the Backstreet Boys. Writer John Seabrook writes in his book The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory that there was a lot of talk behind the scenes about the lyrics of …Baby One More Time. “Everyone who heard it thought it was some strange reference to domestic violence,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “But it was actually due to Swedes not using English correctly.”
What seems? The writers actually wanted to say hit me up on the phone one more time. “But at that point, Max wasn’t very good at English, so it sounded a little strange,” says Seabrook. Despite many doubts within the team surrounding Britney, the text was no longer adjusted. And so it happened…
Third choice
…Baby One More Time was initially offered by Max Martin and Rami Yacoub to R&B group TLC and Swedish singer Robyn. They refused, so sixteen-year-old Britney, unknown at the time, came into the picture. “…Baby One More Time was her first song, so we didn’t really know what the style should be yet,” says Martin about the moment Britney came to his studio in Stockholm to record the song.
Hungry
“We just kept trying different things. After a while I heard her stomach rumbling in the microphone. We had already been at it for eight hours. I asked her if she was hungry, but she said she was fine,” Martin said. “When we finally took a break, she ate three burgers.”
Source: NU.nl | Image: NL Image
