BRITNEY SPEARS SINGLES POLL

i would also like to put out a request for a decent-quality mp3 of the alan braxe remix of "anticipating" if anyone has such a thing

as for the music here...considering that even many of her own fans struggle to take britney-the-artist (and indeed britney-the-person) 100% seriously (maybe because she's never bothered with any nonsense Artistic Credibility narrative herself à la JT or Xtina), that's a massive amount of quality in there. there are only a handful of singles there i don't fuck with.

"everytime" has long been my default answer to this question but actually looking at them all lined up..."anticipating" (nile rodgers collab y'all) and its irresistible disco strings, "stronger" as the "baby" template turned up to steely-edged 11, the unimpeachable blackout stretch...

obv "lucky" is the most ~poignant~ in retrospect

fuckkkk "do somethin'" goes so hard for a random bonus track

tell you what ISN'T the best britney single though - "toxic"

"Born To Make You Happy" always and 4 ever.

It has to be Gimme More as it starts one of the best albums of all time.

i c what you did with putting the "till the world ends" remix in there lex

putting ke$ha on a song never makes it better

Crazy

tell you what ISN'T the best britney single though - "toxic"

― flamenco drop (lex pretend), Wednesday, April 24, 2013 6:33 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is obv gonna win, & should

"Born To Make You Happy" always and 4 ever.

― Tim F, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:45 AM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pretty much word for word what i was gonna post

everytime

i c what you did with putting the "till the world ends" remix in there lex

― prolego, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:06 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

putting ke$ha on a song never makes it better

― prolego, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:06 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

putting nicki on a song, otoh...

(i assumed the remix was the single version à la "boys"?)

"Gimme More" and "Womanizer" her dumbest first singles imo.

One of these:

I'm a Slave 4 U
Toxic
Till The World Ends
Hit Me Baby
Break The Ice

I've never heard "Born To Make You Happy"! It wasn't a single in the States.

"Lucky"

Slave

anything but "toxic", srsly

thing with "toxic" is, is it good? yes obviously

is it obviously head and shoulders above ALL THOSE OTHER AMAZING SINGLES SHE'S DONE? no, and if you think it is, by implication you're selling all of them way way way too short and maybe you are not a tru britney head

That is... strange logic. Think I'll go "break the ice" but that is one HELL of a résumé

i'd thought about making this poll several times! ty lex. i will have to rescreen a bunch of these, but my gut tells me "lucky"

voted piece of me.

anything but "toxic", srsly

When "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman" wins this, I will blame you.

"overprotected" is a very underrated single

NO ONE ELSE
BUT
MAAAEEEEEEEEHHHHHHH

toxic is the only good britney spears song

predicting only vote for "You Drive Me Crazy." for me it's the vocal.

iatee going straight for Lex's jugular there.

Voted Piece of Me. It's simultaneously defiant and nihilistic. But could have been One More Time, Womanizer, Toxic, Oops, etc. She's made a lot of great singles.

I used to really love Brave New Girl and Breathe On Me - didn't realise they weren't singles. Interesting album, In the Zone.

yeah i don't remember it getting particularly great reviews - "me against the music" was largely seen as a dud (just b/c it was only 7/10 when everyone wanted 10/10), and the campaign only turned around with "toxic", but it's wall-to-wall great imo, with a lot of curveballs that people didn't quite realise were curveballs at the time but some pretty weird in retrospect. britney spears and the ying yang twins? check. an answer to the "what if the daft punk robots had produced the britney robot?" hypothetical in "brave new girl"? check. r kelly writing her a song about flashing the paparazzi? check. almost entirely bangers except for a grandiose ballad about wanking and a lost/broken/tremulous/tiny-sounding, music box-featuring micropowerballad about justin that was given her realest video ever and went to no 1? check. "toxic" is only like the fifth best or most interesting song on that album let alone her discography as a whole!

i recommend the bonus track "the answer" too, al those amazing tactile percussive clicks>>>>

Voted "Overprotected", but I completely forgot about "Sometimes" even being a Britney song. It's light years away from the music I associate with her, more a BSB song than a Britney. Might have voted for that had I remembered.

"till the world ends" remix wasn't the main single version, it was just rushed out at one point to boost the song's chart position for a week a la the rihanna "s&m" remix w/ britney and the katy perry "last friday night" remix w/ missy elliott

i hate to vote for her debut single because there really is lots of great material here but man, that song is just so great. i often forget just how good it is.

my top 10:

1) ...baby one more time
2) born to make you happy
3) till the world ends
4) sometimes
5) i'm a slave 4 u
6) piece of me
7) criminal
8) break the ice
9) stronger
10) (you drive me) crazy

i have to say that i find "toxic" extremely overrated

anyone who votes for anything other than "I'm a Slave 4 U" is an imbecile and should be banned from this thread.

everytime>>>stronger=born to make you happy>lucky>>i'm a slave 4 u

man her first album is kind of amazing huh

anyone who votes for anything other than "I'm a Slave 4 U" is an imbecile and should be banned from this thread.

― sandra dayo connor (The Reverend), W

my boo

Just going by resonance/nostalgia... Baby One More Time.

"i'm a slave 4 u" was always lukewarm

CRAZY #1. THAT BREAKDOWN IT'S ALL "UNH UNH UNH UNH UNH... STOP!!!!" #protodrop

Piece Of Me

i might like "slave" more but "toxic" is so fucking important to my high school self and i'm voting for it to spite lex

my boo

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 24, 2013 6:17 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my mans

"Toxic" is the clear winner for me. Sure, it hasn't aged that well but it's still brilliant. Plus, I always go with what had the most impact on me at the time of its release. "I'm A Slave 4 U" and "Gimme More" would be my second and third choices, not sure in what order.

putting ke$ha on a song never makes it better

― prolego, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:06 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally disagree. Ke$ha was BORN to sing that chorus!

Shocked to realize I like more than half of these - in my mind she'd put out a lot more crap along the way but this is a solid lineup of songs. Some of them I might like more from freshness/distance - "Stronger" is sounding great right now but I'm pretty sure I got sick of it at the time, etc.

"Toxic" blew my mind the first time I heard it, just such a banger and a blast to dance to and just associated with great times. Unfortunately that means it never really left my mp3 collection or whatever, and I've heard it too many times and the things that once sounded really striking about it now sound kind of canned and thin. Maybe that's why the big booming Max Martin tracks are sounding better to my ears than they ever did before, I dunno. Anyway, if you'd asked me this question almost any time in the second half of the 2000s I would have given this to "Toxic" in a heartbeat, but...yeah, I dunno.

Kind of amazing now to realize that the greatest hits album predates "Gimme More," "Womanizer," "Til The World Ends," and "I Wanna Go." Kinda forgot how long that stretch between In The Zone and Blackout seemed at the time - I imagine at some point it seemed like the Britney wave had probably run its course completely and it was time to cash in. I know that most of the people in the room here are serious Britney heads so let me just say that this is totally just outsider perspective, but for me it was really surprising at some point to realize that she was still releasing songs and they were still massive hits even though I sort of had thought she'd become a pop-cultural nobody or punchline at some point mid-decade. I don't clearly have a sense of whether or how much something like "Til The World Ends" was connecting with people who bought the first albums, or if it's an entirely different, teenage and young adult listenership.

Her top tracks on Spotify totally blow my mind. "Baby One More Time" is the only track from the first two albums and it's down at #10! Below "3," "Piece Of Me," and (ugggggggggh) "Circus" which I probably hate most of anything in the whole lineup, not counting the ghastly Bobby Brown cover which is basically a showcase for every limitation of her voice and none of her charm.

Bah. Hrm. "Toxic," "Baby," "Womanizer," or "Gimme More" for me. "Slave" also way up there and I probably enjoy "3" and "Me Against The Music" more than is really justifiable.

kinda surprised by how many of these i love, especially 'anticipating,' which is just so stupidly happy and giddy i can't not smile when i hear it. britney is such a great, weird singer -- she never phrases things the way i expect her to. worst one is 'i love rock n roll.'

oh wait, i forgot "If You Seek Amy," that would DEFINITELY be my pick for worst. Don't think I remember the I Love Rock N Roll cover but it doesn't bode well.

yeah wow, this sucks

I know that most of the people in the room here are serious Britney heads

Naw, I like a few of her songs but I have never ever even slightly given a teensy portion of a fuck about her

oh man I am going to out myself as a nerd here but if you like those icy/blank/fucked-up tracks you will love the original doll-era unreleased stuff. (one of them is a "cry me a river" answer track!)

Crut OTM + the chorus doesn't follow from the verse, lyrically. Clumsiest double entendre ever.

Piece Of Me (Gavin Russom rmx)

"If you seek Amy", um, I doubt it's *really* so, but does the performance sort of suggest that the singer hasn't noticed the double-meaning?

(A bit like the Pizza Restaurant girl in "Porky's" ?)

oh man I am going to out myself as a nerd here but if you like those icy/blank/fucked-up tracks you will love the original doll-era unreleased stuff. (one of them is a "cry me a river" answer track!)

um TELL ME MORE about these things i had not heard of before!

so happy to see people discovering "anticipating" for the first time, it's pure joy

i agree that what annoyed me most about "If You Seek Amy" was the lack of syntactical sense but DJP's sold it to me on this thread

"If you seek Amy", um, I doubt it's *really* so, but does the performance sort of suggest that the singer hasn't noticed the double-meaning?

It's almost literally spelled out at the beginning of the video.

That's the video, I was meaning the song / recording...

i've only heard "mona lisa" from the original doll but it is awesome and basically lucky pt. 2

"now see everyone's watching, as she starts to fall
they want her to break down
there will be a legend of her fall"

britney OTM :(

or: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_qvB75rLT4

if I did a top-ten Britney list "Guilty" would make #5 at least; the whole thing is fucked-up and brutal. "you may sit there, say I'm filthy / but you're the one who made me guilty." supposedly this is a radio edit of a Quentin Harris remix of the original (which hasn't leaked), which suggests there was at least some traction behind it getting a release. probably would be easier to get away with in this share-happy climate than back then.

i had never heard of "the original doll"! i remember that period when fully-formed songs seemed to surface randomly, but looking at fan tracklists there are a bunch of these i've never heard! awesome.

also all of the fan album art i'm seeing is 100000x better and more carefully considered than her real album art, smh

just to show u how much i care :(

before seeing spring breakers i would have selected toxic, but instead i voted for "everytime" which i find addictive now for some reason. kind of want to take back my vote because this is a very trite song musically, whereas the dancier stuff is more musically interesting/distinctive.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

If her first single doesn't win this, then everyone will have been thinking about this too hard.

still going with "lucky" but "born to make you happy" has a certain poignance i've never picked up on before (when i was 10)

how the hell did you even know the song back then, the only people i know who ever heard of it are euros

same as "Anticipating," I suppose.

BUT TELL ME
WHAT HAPPENS
WHEN IT STOPS

how the hell did you even know the song back then, the only people i know who ever heard of it are euros

― bish don't kmt (some dude), Monday, April 29, 2013 8:37 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i had the CD! was it not on the US version? maybe that's why i didn't remember it

no it was on the album and obv it sold boatloads but it was only a single overseas and furriners always seem surprised that most americans don't know it

ah

i wish we had gotten "born to make you happy" instead of "from the bottom of my broken heart". it was the only non-single track i ever played from the album

everytime v. lucky v. overprotected v. gimme more v. slave 4 u probably

but born to make you happy was definitely also a single in canada. and from the bottom of my broken heart.

at the very least the video got plays up here.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

If U Seek Amy 2

respect

u and who else?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUtHjOvPKT0

New song on the Smurfs soundtrack, must repoll.

smurf me baby one more time

lol "piece of me" you dumbasses are still on that

I'm a Smurf 4 You obv

Good top three but Gimme More really should have been higher up.

if u smurf amy

u and who else?

I voted "I'm a Slave 4 U"!

I came really close to voting for it and then asked myself how much of that was just for the fun of the low crazy GIMME MAWRR - which while great, maybe isn't a whole song's worth of great.

Also thought long and hard about voting for "Til The World Ends," which is just a total banger with a great payoff in the bridge...but on the other hand the verses are pretty transparently a lift of Enrique's "Tonight."

In the end, I was the lone vote for "Womanizer." Not sure I can explain why I voted for it, but at the same time I'm amazed nobody else did!

if u smurf amy

― infirm neophytic child (zachlyon), Tuesday, April 30, 2013 9:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i seriously considered "If U Seek Brainy" but the total collapse of the already-creaky entendre was too much to bear

u and who else?

― we're up all night to get relegated (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, April 30, 2013 8:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

me

piece of shit

love the long tail on this poll. sign of a strong career.

Pity Get Naked (I Got A Plan) was never a single.

"Pity get naked" is a good title tho.

brit's people tried so hard to make Radar happen and it didn't even get a single vote here, sigh.

"piece of me" classic for the part at the end where brit & robyn say "piece of me" one right after the other, only robyn says it "mee" and brit says it "mayy."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNbyHQyr-U

lol i remember the 2nd time "radar" was released as a single (or maybe it was just released once, but put on two albums?) and my only thought was "damn i did not even like this song the first time around"

iirc the circus (and single) version was slightly remixed (and botched)? i love the blackout version, it's so manic.

smh @ the winner, love for the long tail, imo the zero-pointers that were really robbed are "boys", "break the ice" and "do somethin'" - all pretty flawless jams

feel like i should've voted for "anticipating" but v gratified to see a strong showing for "everytime"

"piece of me" classic for the part at the end where brit & robyn say "piece of me" one right after the other, only robyn says it "mee" and brit says it "mayy."

haha YES

xp "Anticipating" deserved better, although it regularly receives lots of love around here
ILM Top 100 2000-2004: TRACKS

i would LOVE to read a behind-the-scenes retrospective of blackout à la this one for aaliyah http://youknowigotsoul.com/aaliyah