Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby, One More Time” Meaning Debunked in 'The Song Machine'

Britney Spears first stormed the pop scene with her debut hit "Baby One More Time." In the 17 years since its release, the lyrics "hit me baby, one more time" still confuses listeners as to what it could possibly mean. Were 90s kids everywhere singing of battery in relationships? A kinky sexual advance? The song's hook has finally been properly debunked in John Seabrook's latest book centered on pop music history, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.

Seabrook explains in the novel that the tracks writers, Sweden's Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, thought that "hit" was an American slang translation for "call," as Billboard notes. So there you have it, Brit really meant, "call me baby, one more time." The pop tune that told a story of young heartbreak was initially going to be named "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)" but the "Circus" singer's label at the time, Jive Records, felt it might wrongly convey a message of abuse, causing them to drop the "hit me" part of the title.

Earlier in the week, fellow 90s pop star Joey Fatone told Huffington Post the story of how boy-band, *NSYNC, got the star in its name with an idea from Israeli Illusionist Uri Geller. "We sat down and I wrote, on a napkin, NSYNC, and I drew a star in the cafe [in London's Covent Garden]." Geller added, "And I told them, if they place that star on their first CD, they're going to shoot up to No. 1."

The "Till the World Ends" singer recently confirmed that her ninth studio album is officially in the works. During her Las Vegas residency, where she endured an outfit malfunction, the 33-year-old mother of two took to Twitter and Instagram to tease the release of "B9" with a picture of herself and collaborators Justin Tranter and Julia Michaels on the couch directly from the studio.

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Britney Spears, Nsync