Unlike most other mortals, sometimes this author lies awake at night searching for philosophical meanings between 90’s bubblegum pop hits. While the rest of the world was trying to guess if Britney Spears’ 1998 classic ‘ Hit Me Baby (One More Time) ‘ is actually about a woman’s fetish for some harmless hitting during… whatever it is she does with her bae, I almost convinced myself it was about a suicidal cockroach.
Turns out, both were wrong guesses.
17 years after the song came out, the book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook, revealed some new info about the hit. Apparently, it’s about a girl who recently split with her boyfriend. And she wants him to ‘call her one more time’.
The track was written by Swedish songwriter Max Martin and Swedish-Moroccan songwriter Rami Yacoub, who worked for Stockholm’s famous Cheiron Studios which churned out a lot of hits in the ’90s.
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. Much better than a song about violent sex, I guess.
You can even see her lips moving to “Call Me!”