The most appalling song that appears on Mad Men is over the closing credits of the fifth season episode “Mystery Date.” It is not Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s finest work.
It’s easy to cluck your tongue at 1962. They were so primitive back then! Surely we’re doing better now. Right? Well…
Oh boy, that hook is seriously messed up. It’s on my mind because it’s the first of many number one hits written by Max Martin, who is the subject of a riveting John Seabrook profile in the New Yorker. The article talks about “…Baby, One More Time” in some detail. Seabrook argues that Martin didn’t mean “hit me” to be taken as a literal wish for violence. Martin’s first language is Swedish, not English, and his lyrics are word salads of what he imagines American teenage slang to sound like. Supposedly, he meant “hit me” in the James Brown sense.
I don’t buy it. I know a lot of Swedish people, and they all speak English flawlessly. (One of them explained that you have to if you want to watch movies or TV.) It’s true that James Brown yells “hit me” during his songs quite a bit, without meaning that he wants someone to physically hit him, but it’s worth pointing out that James Brown did perpetrate some domestic violence. And it’s not like “hit” is some obscure vocabulary word. Max Martin knows exactly what it means.
But, okay. Let’s pretend that Martin really didn’t understand at any level how the chorus could come across as endorsing violence against a teenaged girl. That doesn’t excuse all of us English-speaking people who made the song a gigantic hit. Britney’s label found the line sufficiently embarrassing to omit the word “hit” from the title, but they didn’t go so far as to request that the lyric be changed. It’s not like it would have been hard to do. Why not “Kiss me baby one more time”? Or literally any other one-syllable word? An army of executives signed off on the single. So, tacitly, did all of the radio stations, journalists, retailers, advertisers, and, of course, we the listeners.
To compound the creepiness, the music video has Britney dressed in a Catholic school uniform with her hair in pigtails. She was seventeen years old at the time, and in the costume she looks younger than that. America loves implicit sexual violence against teenaged girls.
The sad fact, however, is that in spite of everything, I love the song. Pretty much everybody does, whether or not they’d admit it. We’re right to love it! The lyrics may be offensively dumb, but everything else about the track is flawless: the melody, the chords, the beat, the arrangement, and all the subtle touches in the production. As Seabrook observes, Max Martin songs are more musically sophisticated than is the norm for pop. Martin has a solid grounding in classical harmony, and more importantly, he appreciates and understands groove better than just about any other white producer. “…Baby One More Time” is undeniably funky. The slap bass and wah-wah guitar would fit right into a Quincy Jones song.
The chord progression is simple but effective, and it’s worth taking a dive into music theory to understand it. As background, you need to understand how major and minor keys relate to each other in Western classical harmony. If you play the white keys on the piano from C to C, you get the C major scale. If you play those same keys from A to A, you get the A natural minor scale.If C is the first or last note in the melody, or just the most prominent one, you hear C major. If A is the most prominent note, you hear A minor. Both scales are shown below. The left circle shows the notes as they’re arranged on the piano keyboard, and the right circle shows the notes arranged by fifths.
There’s another, more complicated way to establish that you’re hearing A minor rather than C major: you can add another pitch, G-sharp, the note directly below A. It’s called the leading tone, because it leads your ear upwards to A. When you replace G with G-sharp, you get the A harmonic minor scale. This is not a sound you hear in too many pop songs.
Okay. Bearing all that in mind, let’s take a look at the chords in “…Baby One More Time.” The chorus begins like so:
"My loneliness" - A minor "is killing me" - E7
This is unambiguously the key of A minor. The first chord is A minor, and the first melody note is A. The second chord, E7, includes the G-sharp leading tone. (Britney also sings the leading tone on the first syllable of “killing.”) E7 is called the dominant chord in A minor, because it so strongly establishes the key. But then comes the twist!
"I must confess" - C "I still believe" - D minor "(still believe)" - E7
Instead of landing on A minor like centuries of classical tradition have led us to expect, the song jumps from E7 up to C major. It’s an unexpected ray of harmonic sunshine. The next chord, D minor, acts as a pivot between C and A minor, since it serves the same function of setting up the dominant chords in both keys. The E7 puts us back into A minor territory. The second half of the chorus is the same as the first:
"When I'm not with you" - A minor "I lose my mind" - E7 "Give me a siiiiign" - C "Hit me baby" - D minor "one more time" - E7
Instead of ending on a stable, resolved chord like a normal pop chorus would, it ends on the unstable E7. That lack of resolution gives the song a dangerous harmonic edge to go with the violent lyric. Pretty hip stuff for teen pop.
It’s off the topic, but here’s a fun fact about Britney Spears’ singing. The most distinctive aspect of her style is her extreme vocal fry. It has created a headache for a generation of voice teachers, as young singers strain themselves trying to recreate it. You can strain all you want, but it’s actually not physically possible to growl like Britney does. Martin layered a sampled güiro to every single one of her glottal stops. Once you know it’s there, the güiro leaps right out at you, and you wonder how you could ever have missed it, which is a testament to Martin’s skill as a vocal producer.