When Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” was released in 1998, teens everywhere went crazy — while conservative adults everywhere were absolutely scandalized. It’s not difficult to see why: Spears wore a schoolgirl uniform and danced like the sultry pop queen that she is, urging an unnamed person to, well, hit her one more time.
But what did the lyrics actually mean? Well, it turns out, it wasn’t sexual thing at all — or so they say now. Here’s an excerpt of the explanation from the Huffington Post: > The track was written by Swedish songwriter Max Martin and Swedish-Moroccan songwriter Rami Yacoub, who worked for Stockholm’s famous Cheiron Studios — a veritable hit factory — in the ’90s. In Seabrook’s telling, Martin and fellow Cheiron songwriter Denniz PoP wanted to work with Spears because she was new, and young, and they could shape her sound the way they’d wanted to do with other singers. So they gave her a song Martin wrote about a girl who just split up with her boyfriend, “Hit Me Baby (One More Time).” The Swedes, Seabrook writes, thought that “hit” was brand new American teen slang for “call.” The singer, then, is pleading for her ex-boyfriend to call her just one more time, because she’s lonely. Nothing improper there! There you have it: All the scandal was created by a translation mistake made by Swedes. Who knew? Just for kicks, check out the video below and take a journey down memory lane.