Incredibly, Britney Spears Oops I Did It Again – her second album and the one which cemented her place in the pop firmament as no fleeting shooting star – is 25 years old today. And the internet (in its infinite, all-knowing way) has devised all kinds of multifarious ways to celebrate.
Not least being the contribution from streaming platform Twitch which has commissioned the talents of top Twitch DJs to spin their own 12-hour streaming celebrations of the album with sets comprising Britney’s biggest hits, brand-new remixes, and interactive fan moments via Twitch chat.
Twitch, once purely the home of watching other people play video games, has, after being acquired by Amazon, been increasingly seeking to broaden its remit YouTube-style, applying its unrivalled global livestream network to other content, music included.
And the 25th birthday of Oops – potentially drawing in an audience of millions celebrating arguably Spears’ finest work – has proven the perfect opportunity to take their music invasion mainstream.
Could you do that again?…
The release of Oops (the album) of course, followed Oops (the single) which was released earlier on April 11, 2000. Both Oops would make extensive use of the writing and production talent abundant in the Swedish music scene at the time, most specifically centred around Max Martin and his set up and writers and co-producers out of the nascent Cheiron Studios in Stockholm.
While Britney’s entire career would be built upon her debut single …Baby One More Time (a Martin and Rami Yacoub creation) the Stockholm gang only worked on five tracks of her identically titled debut album’s 11, with Jive roping in the tried and tested closer-to-home talent of Eric Foster White, should the Swedish upstarts fail to deliver.
However, Martin and team’s tracks would provide four of the album’s five singles, with the majority of them bunched at the album’s start meaning that (back in the late stages of vinyl) many fans didn’t get round to ever flipping the disc for side two.
Thus things would be a different story for her second album, with record label Jive and Martin (plus team) working in perfect synergy to produce an entire album for their new star that was pretty much flawless and would both set the pace for their pop production rivals and wipe the floor with them simultaneously.
And its title and lead off single – Oops, I Did It Again – is just proof of that perfection.
By now Martin had acquired the knack of getting inside his star’s heads, learning about their worries and foibles and penning songs for them that, despite having zero input into technically, they would be able to better connect with and thus express more effectively when in the studio or on the stage.
And, once again being the pure work of Martin and songwriter Jacob – just like …Baby One More Time before it – it’s a classic that’s proved to be – globally – just as effective.
The track was a global number one (while only reaching an admittedly impressive number 9 in the US Billboard charts).
Titanic tie-in
And while its video lacks the attention-grabbing and dubious symbolism of Baby One More Time’s adult-in-a-school-uniform, it does feature a brilliant added-later cross reference to what ‘really’ happened to the Heart of the Ocean diamond lost in the red hot movie sensation of the time, Titanic.
Genius.
Twitch’s multi-DJ celebration all kicks off today, Friday, 16 May from 12pm ET through 12am ET (that’s 5pm to 5am UK time)
So far the DJ's confirmed as participating are:
sotchi_riot
PYKA
NyyBeats
NyNy_x
Emelea
Djkharisma
Vlouue
Eliciamartin
“And more!” (We're promised).
Happy Oops day! Click the links at the designated moment to hear those live mixes.
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