Year: 2000
Chart Position: #9
Last year's Worst Songs position:#18
Poor Britney. That's really all one can say. In 2000, she was the It girl -- setting fashion trends, dating Justin Timberlake, selling out concerts, publicly admired and desired. Seven short years later, she's radioactive -- her latest debacle, "Gimme More," hit #3 due to morbid curiosity and has since disappeared from radio.
With all that's happened to her, she could have maybe weathered the storm if she had created a musical catalog worth a damn. Alas, Spears only gathered four top ten hits in her brief tenure at the top. "Oops" was her second after her breakout hit "...Baby One More Time" -- it's not surprising that her handlers (in this case, producer/songwriter/bubblegum manufacturer Max Martin) kept her on the "Baby" track by making "Oops" a nearly identical song: the loping bass line, the interval lift in the chorus, the slight growl in her voice, the mock innocence. Her arrested musical development doomed Britney to become nothing more than gossip fodder and eye candy. Here's hoping that Britney's inevitable dark 'personal' record comes on soon -- she could use the musical therapy.
Fun Fact: Max Martin also wrote huge hits for The Backstreet Boys ("I Want it That Way") and, in a break from the teenybopper world, Bon Jovi ("It's My Life.")
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