30-Day Song Challenge Day 12 – A Song That You Feel Embarrassed Listening To

Author Ed Miller: “Music is the weirdest human thing. A few dozen songs out of the zillions recorded fire off like a massive dopamine flood every time I hear them.

And then like other people don’t even like those songs.”

A friend and long-time loyal blog follower recently sent me a 30-Day Song Challenge meme in the hope that I couldn’t resist taking the challenge and blogging about it. Here’s Day #12 – A Song That You Feel Embarrassed Listening To: My Girl Britney, (You Drive Me) Crazy.

A friend of mine likes to remind me that I should be embarrassed about my fangirling of My Girl Britney. And at a surface level I get why her and others would want me to feel that way. Which is why I decided to not take this category literally and choose My Girl Britney for it even though I’m not in the least embarrassed.

“I knew there was something wrong when My Dad liked Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake before I did,” My Daughter Diandra said once upon a time. She may have been just as bewildered as to why I’d find her giving me a Britney Spears CD as a Christmas gift one year (technically a CD single of Stronger) so exciting.

All I can say – and there could a lot of blogs on this subject – is that right from the start I have found Britney Jean Spears, born in 1981 in Mississippi and raised in Louisiana, over 100 million records sold worldwide, #1 singles and #1 albums in three different decades (are you kidding me?!) – utterly fascinating and completely captivating as an iconic popstar. And I refuse to feel even the least bit embarrassed about this!

Anyway, the song I’ve chosen is her third single (You Drive Me) Crazy. The song itself is a classic slice of Abba-inspired ear-wormy, anthemic, Swedish bubblegum pop. At the time of its release, Britney’s career was blowing up to the point that it prompted a major change to a teen romcom being made to capitalize on the popularity of Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame[1]. Originally entitled Next to You, the film’s title was changed to Drive Me Crazy to take advantage of Britney’s rising popularity and the song’s music video appearance in an MTV special – I repeat – an MTV special! In an inspired win-win-win promotional campaign, the music video for (Drive Me) Crazy included the movie’s stars and came out first with a bang on MTV. Then the single was released the following month after persistent MTV airplay. And a couple of months later the movie appeared in theaters.

OK, maybe I am a bit embarrassed that I know all of this.

While I haven’t seen the movie – my shame does have some limits – of the YouTube video’s 120 million views, somewhere around 25 million of them are probably mine. 🙂

Maybe I should be embarrassed. But I’m not. 🙂

OK. If I were going to be embarrassed, it would be for Britney over this. This regrettable attempt at Joan Jett’s I Love Rock ‘N Roll is truly horrific.

WAYYYYYYYYY better is her cover of Bobby Brown’s My Prerogative.

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[1]  I always enjoyed watching that show with My Daughter Cassandra although it was a clear second to Saved By the Bell.