Blast from the Past: Britney Spears' ...Baby One More Time

Before she was an internationally renowned basket case. Before all the baby drama. Before all the ill advised relationships and crazy managers, and drug scares, and court cases. Before all this there was an innocent 18-year old pop singer that burst into the musical world by wearing a Catholic school uniform and singing over some seriously catchy beats. Back in January of 1999 when ...Baby One More Time was released few people knew who Britney Spears was, but by the end of that year she was an international superstar, selling records hand over fist, and tantalizing men that shouldn't have been looking everywhere.

Me, I had just turned 18 myself that November so she was right in my age range, but even still I felt a little guilty and a little dirty watching the video for "Baby One More Time". The song was freakin' catchy as hell, I'm sure more then a few of you are singing it in your heads as you read this, but the video is what launched her into stardom. She was beautiful of course, but she was also a bit risque with the whole uniform and shirt tied above her belly. She danced and was flexible and caught every drooling boys eye every time the video came on on MTV. Girls too flocked to her but for completely different reasons. I think they aspired to be her or something. But me I was hooked by the look.

I won't lie, the strength of that video took me to some strange depths. I bought the album unabashedly at Virgin Megastore and listened to it a little bit to regularly. I can still sing-a-long with most of this album and listening to it right now I'm thrust back to my freshman year of college and watching the video a little too often for any sane college aged person. But I was infatuated with this girl. Her voice wasn't particularly special, we knew someone else wrote all her songs, yet somehow she hypnotized us with a short skirt and a Creole drawl. It was a love affair that would never happen, but that didn't stop me from wishing it would.

I have a couple of Britney albums in my collection, no I'm not proud of this, but you have to admit she did have some catchy as hell singles. They roped you in and if you got in on that first wave you were probably hooked for quite a while. Now a lot of us pity her and what her life has become, we gawk at every magazine cover she graces, and talk about her life as if she were someone we actually knew, but when ...Baby One More Time was fresh and new we were just getting to know her and we wanted to know everything there was about her.
Britney Spears - "...Baby One More Time"
Britney Spears - "(You Drive Me) Crazy"
Britney Spears - "Sometimes"
Britney Spears - "From the Bottom of My Broken Heart"
(Editor's Note: I promised you guys a series of "Guilty Pleasures" this year as part of my on going series of Blasts from the Past and these are going to be some truly guilty pleasures of mine. I'm digging deep into the recesses of my closet for this and I hope none of you guys will lose respect for me. And if you start to question it, just take a look at your own record collection and dig out that Milli Vanilla record or N*Sync that you got hiding in there.)