I have always enjoyed some of the early Britney Spears hits. Baby One More Time or...oooh.... I love love love Crazy.
I know you all think they are terrible though.
There’s no shame in liking Britney Spears songs. She’s actually not a bad singer, though her range is kind of low and she maybe doesn’t have the purest voice. She made it work for her in her heyday, though.
Max Martin is kind of a genius. Dude has what, like 30 #1 songs or something? He actually uses some rather unusual and sophisticated chord progressions for pop. Especially for his early Britney stuff. Probably because Spears had no pretensions as a songwriter or a desire for a particular sound and was more into the dancing so Martin had freer rein. I think both Baby One More Time and Crazy are both in minor keys, which you might not expect.
There’s certain things he does which are a little formulaic, but 1. It’s pop dance music. You have to keep it simple 2. People often pay him crazy money to write a song just like another one, so he does, 3. You try writing like 500 songs and have them all be different.
Admittedly a lot of his later work tends toward the same old I-V-vi-IV everyone else uses. They’re still catchy, but not as interesting.
But anyway, yeah. Critics jizz all over Robyn but Body Talk is Max Martin, too.
