OK, let’s discuss this calmly: Isn’t Britney Spears’s song “Hit Me Baby One More Time” really about battered women, or am I reading too much into it? It’s been driving me crazy for months, and occasioning much brisk driving-time conversation around these here parts.
From time to time my duties include chauffeuring a number of pre-adolescent and adolescent females around to various places (the mall, roller skating, each other’s houses, etc.), and while we are all in the car, these pre-adolescent (and adolescent) females naturally enough insist on listening to the radio, and just as naturally, the radio insists on playing “Hit Me Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears, over and over and over again. By my own conservative estimate, I have probably heard the song at least 5 times a week, every week since spring of 1999, so I think I can claim to be an expert on how the lyrics go, such as they are. Just to settle it in my own mind, I looked them up on somebody’s website, and yes, that’s what she’s singing all right.
The thing about the song is, it seems abundantly clear to me (a 40-something adult who’s been around the track a few times), it’s about battered women. Now I know, I immediately start sounding like those people who anxiously scan rock lyrics for references to drug use and Satanic sex, but really, that’s not me. I remember my own parents sniffing suspiciously at pop music, so I think I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to rock and pop lyrics.
But really, sit down and listen to this song. Not only the chorus, “hit me baby one more time,” but the whole gist of it. She loves him but she knows something “isn’t right”. She’s very conflicted. The minute he’s gone, she wants him back (battered women will tell you that they can’t imagine living without him), but then she begs, “Give me a sign–hit me baby one more time.” A lot of battered women will tell you, “I said to myself, if he hits me one more time, that’s it, I’m leaving, so it was like a sign when he did hit me, and I left.”
Alternatively, it could be taken to mean, “Promise me you won’t do it any more.”
She sings, “That’s not the way I planned it.” She sings, “My loneliness is killing me.” The main reason that battered women continue to be battered, even though they know he’s no good for them, is that they’re lonely, and afraid to be by themselves, even at such a terrible cost. She sings, “Boy, you got me blinded” and “Don’t you know I still believe.” Battered women persuade themselves that “this time it will be different.”
This would all be just another chirpy pop love song if it weren’t for that line, “Hit me baby one more time.” I would be very interested in knowing whether Ms. Spears herself concocted this thing, or whether there’s an actual 40-something songwriter who’s been around the track a few times somewhere in the wings.
Anyway, one day last summer I ran this theory past the carload of pre-adolescent (and adolescent) females, and was loudly decried for my sordid muckraking mentality, with much exasperated rolling of eyeballs. I asked them what the words “Hit me baby one more time” could possibly refer to, in the context of a love song, and one of the females explained to me, with vast patience, “No, see, it’s like when you’re playing blackjack in a casino, and you say ‘hit me’.” (I’m still trying to figure out how that particular pre-adolescent female knows about playing blackjack in a casino.) But I still don’t see what the phrase has to do with a love song.
So is it some 21st century thing, like the way “phat” suddenly doesn’t mean “fat”? “Land sakes, Pa, these young folks nowadays and their newfangled “music”.”
And if it is about battered wives, as one of the adolescent females quite reasonably wanted to know, “Why would 16-year-old Britney Spears be singing about something like that? Eeww…” (here you must imagine a smilie with a look of disgust on its face)