(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Singles: #21: Britney Spears – Toxic (2004)

My high school English teacher always said to never start an essay with a quote, but I’ll break all grounds here. “I need a hit/Baby give me it,” says Britney in “Toxic’s” first verse, and it’s a line that could be taken very straightforwardly. I’m not talking about a shot to the veins or a punch to the gut, but rather, she was at a point in her career where she needed a blockbuster hit single like, as Chris Rock would say, a crack head needs a hit. The untouched Lolita days of “Baby One More Time” and “Sometimes” were long ago, and even the sex kitten character of “Oops I Did It Again” and “I’m A Slave 4 U” were now in the rearview. What Britney had going for her at the time was a continuous media whirlwind tour to the bottom—breaking up with Timberlake, reaching first base with Madonna at the VMAs, marrying the decade’s most honored douche bag in Vegas—that jeopardized any chance of her having a stable music career, especially when the kiss with Madonna was a foreshadow for their duet collaboration, “Me Against The Music”, an average song, but one that did neither artist any favors.

But if Britney had a worthwhile quality, it’s that she’s always been able to pull that rabbit out of the hat when she needed to. During this shitstorm she was in, she came out with “Toxic” out of nowhere, an unforgettable song that was more musically intricate than any of her singles to that point. It’s probably her biggest hit since the dawn of the zeroes, the sole reason that got her back in the discussion of the world’s most significant pop stars. In hindsight, it didn’t exactly direct her career back on track, in fact things would get much worse. But it did bring her some musical relevancy again for at least a couple more years, just enough time for her to cook up another comeback single and do it all over again.

The first time I heard “Toxic”, I didn’t I know I was listening to a Britney song. The hooks in it were unusual—those gliding, shrieking Eastern strings, that playful Spanish-sounding acoustic guitar, that echoing guitar hook that seem like it came out of a Western. It was addictive, it was out of the ordinary, it was beyond belief, and it was assuredly like nothing else I’d heard from Britney before. If “Me And The Music” was unimpressive and definitely forgettable (and it hurts for me to say that because that’s one of The-Dream’s first songwriting endeavor), “Toxic” was the complete opposite. It was the perfect example of what top-of-the-line production can do to an ex-trailer park princess.

Its coolness improves as you listen to it more. After a while, Britney’s vulnerability becomes evident throughout the whole track. On her singles before “Toxic”, it always looks as though it was important to Britney for her to feel completely in command, trying to take charge of the public perception of herself. But here, she just sounded like a teen along for the ride, more than happy to relinquish all decision making to an older partner. It made sense in terms of the subject matter—lyrically, “Toxic” was all about resignation to temptation—but it also made a whole lot of sense in terms of the direction of Britney’s career. For better or worse, she had worked so diligently inventing a persona for herself, and then even harder trying to re-invent that persona, that she seemed to have forgotten who exactly she was supposed to be in the first place. “Toxic” seemed like a song that allowed her to tell the world that she’s not going to attempt to define herself anymore and she’s just going to fly by the seat of her hip-hugging pants.

We soon became aware that when it came to Britney Spears and her extraordinary fall from grace, we had just reached the tip of the iceberg. Her lunacy only increased rapidly: the K-Fed marriage, the TV show, the weight gain and subsequent troubling VMA performance, the surprisingly unflattering upskirt tabloid shots, the divorce, the head-shaving, etc. I once said to my friends back when she was still strikingly hot that the day she grazes the pages of Playboy, it’d be the magazine’s most profitable issue; now I’m not so sure anyone would care. Britney was so crazy that it stopped being funny and became very uncomfortable, so much so that a lot thought that all the media pressure and TMZ hounding was going to somehow directly lead to her demise.

But somehow, a full decade after her breakthrough, Britney Spears is still relevant in today’s world. Which is mainly due to songs like “Toxic”, a hit so big that it reminds people why we should care about any Britney tabloid news that pop out. A couple of years after “Toxic”, there was “Gimme More”. A couple of years after that, there was “Womanizer”. If it keeps leading to comeback songs like these, though, maybe it’s for the best that she fades out of everyone’s consciousness for a little while.