On "(You Drive Me) Crazy" and "The Stop Remix"

“I’m a singer who dances, definitely” — Britney Spears, MTV Making the Video, 1999

There are two versions of “(You Drive Me) Crazy”: the original album version, a funk-rock confection with exemplary utilisation of a cow bell and a misplaced guitar solo, and the souped-up “Stop Remix”, which is the one that was released as a single and used in the music video (thankfully the cow bell makes a return, albeit in more of a supporting role). I like both, especially the bridge on the album edition, which injects a fluttering softness into the song. But there is an undeniable muscularity to “The Stop Remix” that helped cement it as a mainstay in Britney’s discography.

Max Martin, who co-wrote and co-produced the original alongside fellow Swedes David Kreuger and Per Magnusson, flew out to New York in May 1999 in order to rework the song, with Britney recording new vocals in order to give it, as she said in an episode of MTV’s Making the Video, “more punch”. It worked: the production on the remix wallops you with countless orchestral hits, a dirtier pronounced bassline, heavier beats and concussive cymbals crashes, and a backup choir that rises in the chorus like a tidal wave.

The chameleonic aspects of Britney’s voice is a topic I’ll explore more in later editions of In the Zine. However, “The Stop Remix” is perhaps the first example where she deliberately modulated her vocal in order to better perform the character that Britney Spears was becoming.

While she sounds good on the original, leaning into a cooing sweetness, in her re-recorded vocals for the remix, that texture is pushed aside for something harder and more constructed. Likely informed by the commercial success of “…Baby One More Time”, with its percussive vocals and idiosyncratic pronunciation, Britney masticates the lyrics of the “Stop Remix” until words like “you”, “me”, “only” and “blue” become mushy and pliable. There are additional meowing ad-libs, melisma and purring vocal fry, and a meatier evolution of the so-called “baby voice”.

The stylistic formation of Britney’s voice is difficult to trace. In an oral history of “…Baby One More Time”, The Song Machine author John Seabrook said that much of the voice actually belongs to Max Martin, whose guide vocal on the demo of her debut single Britney supposedly followed exactly. Lynne Spears, Britney’s mother, has suggested that it was record producers who gave her daughter “the breathy, super-produced pop voice”. It’s a theory also supported by The Song Machine, with Seabrook claiming that songwriter Eric Foster White “got [Britney] to sing higher, to bring out the girlish quality”.

All of this, of course, reduces Britney’s own agency in her voice making. But whatever the truth, there is a clear level of adaptability within Britney, not just as a vocalist but also as a commercial property. This was brand making in action.

Such shameless self-commodification – as well as a willingness to seemingly alter her “instrument” for commercial gain – stands at odds with rockist notions of artistic authenticity. In her essay “Women in Popular Music and the Construction of ‘Authenticity’”, Emma Mayhew posits that if authenticity “designates the construction of truth”, in music the authentic artist/performer is someone whose music represents “a ‘truthful’ reflection of the artist’s talents and personal expression”.

However, who gets inhabit the role of “artist”, Mayhew notes, is highly gendered. In rock, as with “art music”, this has principally been the domain of men, who are seen as the composers/authors of their own work, the instrumentalist/producers, and thus highly creative. “In rock,” Mayhew writes, “these roles are more visible and are presented as indicators of authentic music and, ultimately, artistic integrity.”

Pop has historically been seen as artificial and “shallower” than rock, its focus on themes of romance and love associated with women or girls. This feminisation, according to Norma Coates, creates a binary where rock becomes “male”, while pop becomes “female”. “Real men aren't pop,” she writes, “and women, real or otherwise, don't rock.”

This is further problematised by the prominence given to the role of the producer in pop. According to Mayhew, the producer is someone who exerts “power and control over the end musical product, traits traditionally associated with masculinity”. It creates an image – especially in the career of Britney Spears – of the producer as puppet master, diminishing the artistic autonomy of women in pop.

In this setup, Mayhew suggests, the singer, a role often associated with femineity, is “downgraded in terms of artistic creativity”. Nevertheless, it has often been the primary way for women to contribute in creation of popular music. But unlike, say, writing music or playing an instrument, the voice is “inseparable from the body and thus has often been represented as expressing the most essential emotions in musical form”. In other words, the “natural” or “biological” connotations of the voice, tied to the emotional (and therefore feminine), cannot be intellectualised and is thus de-skilled and devalued.

This is something that musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding discussed in the mini-series of their podcast Switched on Pop focused on Britney Spears. In the first episode, which centred on both “…Baby One More Time” and “Oops!… I Did It Again”, they combat the criticisms levied at Britney for her use of vocal fry – mischaracterised as an exclusively female vocal pattern that has been accused of undercutting women’s authority – with Harding describing it as “simultaneously authentic and very performative at the same time”.

“It’s very masterful,” Sloan adds, also highlighting Britney’s percussive pronunciation. “It takes a lot of vocal control to be able to pull this off… It’s pretty remarkable that a 16-year-old stepped into a recording studio in Sweden and just unleashed this sound upon the world.”

It is perhaps disingenuous to suggest that the voice has been entirely stripped of artistic merit. But when we discuss pop singers who do align with rockist concepts of authenticity — Beyoncé, Madonna (hard won), Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson (also hard won), Adele, Taylor Swift — we also consider their work through the prism of authorship or auteurship. “Thus the female singer,” Mayhew writes, “can be seen in a more creative light in terms of where they fit in a history of rock.”

The conundrum of Britney Spears is that she does not (perhaps deliberately) always operate in this sphere. But the tension between her authenticity and performativity, outlined by Harding, is what makes her such a fascinating and disruptive musical figure. As the critic Ann Powers suggests, “Britney Spears embodies a seismic shift in American culture – not toward the cultivated rawness of rock and roll, but away from it, into an era dominated by new technologies that throw into question the very nature of the authentic.”

Powers describes Britney as being “a voice in league with new technologies”, which perhaps is referring to the use of autotune, vocoder and additional studio tricks that have distorted and manipulated her voice throughout her career. However, these new technologies could also mean the sophisticated mechanisms at work within Britney’s own instrument: her use of vocal fry, the baby voice, and her ability to adapt or alter her voice in order to become an easily identifiable product. She was a musician with commercialisation interwoven into her artistic DNA.

This is particularly apparent with “(You Drive Me) Crazy (The Stop Remix)”, which was released as a single partly to help promote the film Drive Me Crazy, starring Sabrina the Teenage Witch star Melissa Joan Hart and Adrian Grenier, both of whom make cameos in the music video. The film, initially titled Next to You, was renamed after the song, and was a critical and commercial flop. Still, it highlighted the marketability of the Britney Spears project, something that soon would involve deals with Pepsi, heaps of merchandise and even her own movie, Crossroads.

Britney’s voice, with all its contradictions, is just another aspect of her musical career as product, one she (or, as Seabrook and her mother suggest, those around her) can modulate in order to achieve the desired commercial and artistic effect. We’ll see this develop as her career continues, especially on her third, fourth and fifth albums, which see her push her voice into breathier, more digital, and often inhuman territory.

Given that it was only her third single, the Britney on the “(You Drive Me) Crazy (The Stop Remix)” was perhaps only just figuring all this out. There is a sense, when taking a macro look at her discography, that the remix, with its call backs to “…Baby One More Time”, beefier production, and re-recorded vocals, was something of a stepping stone to Oops!… I Did It Again.

Nevertheless, both the remix and the original of “(You Drive Me) Crazy)” have held up well, especially compared to some of the other songs from Britney’s debut (see: “Soda Pop”). But while “The Stop Remix” does a better job at distilling that chewy turn-of-the-millennium bubble gum sound, it’s relatively simple compared to what would follow: it was too early for the meta-commentary buried in “Oops!” or “Stronger”, and perhaps lacks the potency of “…Baby One More Time”.

Still, when Britney shouts “sing it!” just before the final chorus, it's hard not to obey.