/

The 15 Best Britney Spears Singles

We’ve compiled a list of pop princess Britney Spears’s 15 best singles.

Britney Spears
Photo: RCA

Britney Spears rode the late-’90s teen-pop wave to superstardom, setting records and defying the odds by making the transition from child celebrity to bona-fide pop star to gay icon—all in the first 10 years of her career. She kicked off her second decade, which came on the heels of a very public personal and professional near-implosion, with a string of smash singles that rivaled her initial run of iconic hits. The singer’s 2013 album, Britney Jean, was met with a lukewarm reception from critics and audiences, but even if her ninth album, Glory, out this Friday, fails to reignite the charts, she’s already cemented her status as America’s premier pop princess. To prove it, we’ve compiled a list of Britney’s 15 best singles.


YouTube video

15. “Pretty Girls”

While one regrets the thought of Britney now being forced into the Madonna role of pop star collaborations, “Pretty Girls” (the first and then abandoned lead single from Glory) is amenably trashy enough to wipe the floor with all the doubts. Against the dubious qualifications offered up by Iggy Azalea, Britney’s trademark overweening Auto-Tune almost sounds like the new purity, and the skulking tempo matches the overall lack of effort from either party. It’s all over before the amount of time it takes to jump to the front of the line, and that’s all it needs to do. Henderson


YouTube video

14. “Stronger”

“My loneliness ain’t killin’ me no more!” Britney belts on 2000’s “Stronger,” referencing a key phrase from her debut single, “…Baby One More Time.” Notable at the time of its release mostly for the CGI-heavy music video in which the singer tussles valiantly with a metal chair, “Stronger” is, in retrospect, a standout among Max Martin’s many teen-pop productions from the era, boasting a melodic, ABBA-esque hook, robust dance beat, and a menacing foghorn that announced a sexier, more sophisticated, and yes, stronger, Britney. Sal Cinquemani

Advertisement


YouTube video

13. “Hold It Against Me”

A good pun is as gratifying as a bad one is worthy of an eye roll. In light of Kesha’s accusations of rape against the track’s co-producer, Dr. Luke, the title of “Hold It Against Me” has the distinction of being both. In my review of 2011’s Femme Fatale, I lamented the single’s “cheesy pickup lines” and “generic Eurotrash beats and dated trance synths.” By the time the album dropped a couple of weeks later, though, the track, in all its cheesy, generic glory, had burrowed its way into my psyche like a brain-eating amoeba and remains lodged there five years later. Cinquemani


YouTube video

12. “Oops!…I Did It Again”

A classic “in case you didn’t know what I’m all about from my debut #1 hit, here, let me just repeat that for you” follow-up single, right down to the ellipses, “Oops!…I Did It Again” won no points for creativity, but at the very least firmly established Britney’s camp credentials. Midway through the impenetrable Max Martin edifice, the singer breaks it down for a fantasy interlude, imagining herself being asked to the prom by the homecoming king bearing Titanic’s Heart of the Ocean. Henderson


YouTube video

11. “Everytime”

Britney isn’t exactly known for her ballads, so it’s worth noting that an EDM remix of “Everytime,” the third single from 2003’s In the Zone, was partly responsible for the song’s ascension toward the top of the airplay charts. The original version, however, is an understated heart-tugger, reportedly a response to ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River”: “I may have made it rain/Please forgive me,” Britney sings, her downcast vocals an equal part of a minimalist arrangement that includes piano, sparsely placed backward loops, and a simple yet evocative music-box melody. Cinquemani

Advertisement


YouTube video

10. “Work Bitch”

The arc of Britney bends toward excess, but it also bends toward achievement. She’s a case study in the insistence of American moxie, and “Work Bitch,” glitteringly blunt and obvious as it is, may as well be her mission statement—a talent show-honed paean to earning your paycheck, delivered via an almost musical assembly line of elements custom-built to push you past the hump in your spin class. “You want a hot body? You want a Bugatti? You want a Maserati? You better work bitch!” Henry Ford couldn’t have put it better. Henderson


YouTube video

9. “Circus”

It’s tempting to interpret the title track from Britney’s sixth album as a response to the intense media circus surrounding her very public child-custody battle and so-called “breakdown.” But lyrically and sonically, the impeccably produced “Circus” is a statement of self-possession, more akin to Janet Jackson’s “Control” than Madonna’s media-excoriating “Human Nature.” When she sings, “All eyes on me/In the center of the ring/Just like a circus,” along to a spare foot-stomping beat and spooky synthesized theremin, she isn’t airing a grievance against the paparazzi, but boasting of her prowess as a performer and global megastar. Cinquemani


YouTube video

8. “Boys” (The Co-Ed Remix)

An ode to a topic of interest to Brit and virtually all of her listeners, “Boys,” in its tight but guarded album incarnation, underwhelms, just as do boys. The Neptunes’s silken remix highlights the heat in her vocal delivery, and lets Britney’s cat out of the bag and into, as per her Vanity 6 quote, “her own little nasty world.” Henderson

Advertisement


YouTube video

7. “…Baby One More Time”

When Britney burst onto the scene with her debut single, “…Baby One More Time,” her adenoidal, childlike vocals suggested an innocence belied by the image of the then-16-year-old on the album’s cover, kneeling in a short denim skirt, her schoolgirl blouse unbuttoned, her head cocked to the side. Prior to 1998, teen pop had been an innocuous, perennial nuisance, but those big, pounding piano chords and processed squawks of “Oh, bay-ba, bay-ba,” followed by the singer’s full-throated delivery of the song’s hook (“My loneliness is killing me!”), signaled the christening of the genre’s very first Lolita. Cinquemani


YouTube video

6. “Piece of Me”

Though she didn’t write it, “Piece of Me” is perhaps Britney’s most personal song, evidenced by the fact that she named her Vegas residency after it. “I’m Mrs. ‘Extra! Extra! This just in!’/I’m Mrs. ‘She’s too big, now she’s too thin’,” she “sings,” her robotic vocals processed to within an inch of her life. In 2008, America’s sweetheart looked uncomfortably close to the edge, and the glitchy dance-pop track, which features Robyn on backup, takes stock of Britney’s life as a public figure under the often-unflattering glare of the spotlight. While my review of Blackout likened Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant’s production to robots fucking, in retrospect a more apt metaphor would be robots on the verge of self-destruction. Cinquemani


YouTube video

5. “Womanizer”

At the time, it was her first #1 hit since “…Baby One More Time,” but now frequently relegated to the asterisk status that factoid embodies, “Womanizer,” a pitch-perfect new wave-paced dance-floor monster, was actually as startlingly unexpected an about-face as “Gimme More” was just a year earlier. Here was a Britney who not only cared what you thought of her, she wanted you to know she cared that you cared, and wouldn’t stop pummeling you with her prolix syncopation (“Boy don’t try to front I-I know just-just what you are-are-are”) until you gave B for Brit an A for effort. Henderson

Advertisement


YouTube video

4. “Till the World Ends”

In writing about the best films of 2014, I noted that Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake “inadvertently explains why so many puffy-chested boys who struggle to accept remaining ‘just friends’ with their closest objects of desire (indeed, denying the psychological damage that doing so will absolutely wreak) cry every time Britney Spears sings about the world ending.” Or it could just be that with its swift start-stop tempo, gilded synthesizer riffs, and absurdly chipper response to impending apocalypse, the song is simply among the most successfully Dionysian dance tracks this side of Prince’s “1999.” Henderson


YouTube video

3. “Gimme More”

Demanding everything, offering next to nothing. Rarely has there been a more perfectly crafted formula for backlash. “Gimme More” is, even still, best remembered as the song where Britney couldn’t give two fucks about what you thought about her VMA performance, and the moment where the world seemed so scarily focused on tearing her to shreds that the creators of South Park took note, sending up her spiraling descent in the episode “Britney’s New Look.” Maybe it’s how she flaunts her addiction to brazen consumerism, or maybe it’s just the Cookie Monster cameo in the chorus, but it’s hard to imagine a bolder move circa 2007. It’s punk, bitch. Henderson


YouTube video

2. “I’m a Slave 4 U”

Though it failed to crack the Top 20 in the U.S., the slinky “I’m a Slave 4 U” found Britney making a move away from teen pop and toward a decidedly more mature, urban-influenced sound. Produced by the Neptunes, who would go on to assist Britney’s then-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, make a similar and arguably more successful transition, the track’s minimalist beat evokes Vanity 6’s 1982 hit “Nasty Girl” while the skittering synths and heaving breathing served as a preview of what would become Britney’s m.o. for the next decade and a half. Child stars have an infamously unlucky time trying to grow up in the public eye, but “I’m a Slave 4 U” helped Brit made the shift rather gracefully—giant yellow python in hand. Cinquemani

Advertisement


YouTube video

1. “Toxic”

In a way, putting “Toxic” at #1 on the list of the best Britney Spears singles is counterproductive, as the song (very successfully) sells a version of Britney that doesn’t really seem to exist anywhere else, and shortchanges her actual strengths. For a pop artist who’s always been at her best when the sweat stains show, or conversely when she can’t be bothered to take the gown in for one last fitting, “Toxic” is a stunningly effortless, metallic hustle, written like a Kidzbop James Bond theme song, produced like a Swedish steel trap, and performed with Adderall clarity. On the other hand, “Toxic” is one of those rare moments in which Britney’s so caught up in the moment that she sounds rather convincing delivering the second-person message. With “Toxic,” Britney proved she could leave behind her simple sing-songy legacy and legitimately vie for the crown instead of settling for the tiara. Henderson

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.