On “Soda Pop”
“My favourite kind of Pepsi? Pepsi’s Pepsi…’ — Britney Spears, CNN, 2003
There were a number of curious artistic decisions made in the construction of Britney Spears’s debut album (Britney sort of covering the All Seeing I’s own cover of Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On”, for example) but “Soda Pop” has to be the strangest song on the entire project.
Co-written by Eric Foster White and Mikey Bassie, who also provides additional vocals, “Soda Pop” is a reggae-flavoured pop song that, within the first few seconds, sees Bassie compare Britney (or the song itself — it’s not exactly clear) to “the great poets Homer, Agamemnon, or even Zeus”. Was Zeus a poet? No. Does it matter? Not in the world of “Soda Pop”. The song’s nonsensical lyrics — it’s either about enjoying some fizzy pop at a party or a really bad euphemism for ejaculation — of course made it perfect for the inclusion on the soundtrack for the first Pokémon movie, coincidentally titled Pokémon: The First Movie (the song doesn’t feature in the film itself, however).
Look, this song is bad. There is no two ways around it. What it does have in its favour is the personality that Britney spreads across the whole thing. The vocal performance harkens back to that grainy, VHS footage circulating online from the various showcases that Britney did early in her career: there is a deep throatiness to her voice that suggest a singer with significant power, something that erodes with each subsequent album, only to return with surprising gusto on Glory.
Some have speculated that this is Britney “real” voice. But watching those early videos of her belting on Star Search, dancing on the Mickey Mouse Club, or singing in a conference room at some record label, I can’t shake the feeling that even here she’s adopted a character that she’s performing. It’s like watching a child roleplaying as an adult: the voice, while undeniably strong, still feels like an affectation in some way.
As I’ve said before, we’ll be diving further into Britney’s ability to be an actor in her own voice in a later edition of In the Zine. However, given how diabolical “Soda Pop” is, it feels like a rather torturous endeavour to try and dedicate a whole newsletter to it. Especially when there’s another song about soda in Britney Spears’s discography that’s far superior: “Joy of Pepsi”.
There is no reason why a song Britney recorded for a commercial should go so hard. And yet “Joy of Pepsi” is one of her punchiest outings. The track – is it a track, or is this a simply a supersized jingle? – was written by Alfred Hochstrasser and Mary Wood, who had written a version of the song with Clifford Lane a year prior.
As Hochstrasser recalled on his Soundcloud page: “Once I heard that Britney Spears will be the lead singer, I got super excited and we finished the demo quickly in my recording room at Crushing Music. I recorded a demo guide track with singer Melissa Lefton to send to Max Martin, who recorded Britney's vocals and helped polish my original demo track.”
Indeed, Max’s fingerprints are all over this song: the funky bass, the orchestral hits, the ‘00s DJ effects… it’s all there. It’s as if “…Baby One More Time”, “Oops… I Did It Again”, “Stronger” and “Overprotected” were all pinned up as references, and instead of picking one the creative team just combined them all together and shook them up so they exploded like a can of soda.
The commercial itself premiered during the 2001 Academy Awards (fitting, as this commercial is award-worthy), and sees Britney in her prime. The dance routine, choreographed by Wade Robson, is precision sharp, Britney hitting each move with a ferocity that few performers before or since have ever managed to match.
The advertising deal that Britney signed with Pepsi was reportedly one of the “biggest ever” signed by the soda company and worth at least $50 million. It not only included a number of commercials, of which “Joy of Pepsi” was the first, but also saw Pepsi sponsor Britney’s Dream Within a Dream tour, which she described as her favourite tour in her autobiography The Woman in Me.
Three other solo Pepsi commercials would follow: the “Now & Then” commercial, which saw Britney playing different characters from throughout the decades, the “Right Now (Taste The Victory” advert, which was part of Pepsi’s World Cup campaign, and the Pepsi Twist spot, which was tied to Austin Powers. None of these have the punch of “Joy of Pepsi”, though.
Of course, the Pepsi commercial that most people associate with Britney is the gladiators one, which also features Beyoncé, Pink and Enrique Iglesias. In the US, this epic three-minute advert never actually aired on television — Pepsi allegedly pulled it from the Super Bowl because they thought it wouldn’t “work for the American audience”, as director Tarsem Singh recalled the brand saying in an oral history of the commercial.
The advert was shot in a colosseum in Rome not far from the real Colosseum, with filming taking place in one day. Speaking about the process on the red carpet of the ad’s premiere in London (yes, really), Britney called it awesome. “It made me feel empowered and I got to work with these two fantastic gladiator women,” she said.
In 2001, when Britney initially signed her deal with Pepsi, she was the biggest pop star in the world. By then she already had a line of dolls (I have one in my living room), had released two books, signed deals with the likes of Polaroid and Skechers, and would release her first video game, Britney’s Dance Beat, in 2002. Essentially, within a few short years, she had become a vehicle for more than music: she was a merchandising machine.
That intense commercialisation feels at odds with the seeming innocence of a song like “Soda Pop”, which even in 1999 was never going to be a smash. It is, instead, textbook filler, a song that is silly, frothy and ultimately forgettable. If taken in isolation, without the explosion of “…Baby One More Time”, there’s no way that Britney Spears could have gone on to be the sort of pop star that even signs a deal with Pepsi.
Thankfully, there was “…Baby One More Time”, and that in turn paved the way for “Joy of Pepsi” (although the latter is, of course, not a match on the former). And as Britney herself once said: “I really do like Pepsi.”