...Baby One More Time (Britney Spears) ... played on the accordion

Another accordion cover song video this week -- the last from my slushpile, so I'd better come up with something new for next week! These videos have been skewing toward the primordial end of my repertoire, those dozen or so of my earliest regular tunes still sticking in my brain's limited number of "memorized songs" slots like old video game savefiles on some console save cartridge gathering dust in the back of a dresser drawer. This, this was my first bonafide hit. This was the one I could use to slap the faces of people who would see me take the stage and think "oh no, an accordion!" From the moment I picked up the accordion I knew that I wasn't going to play regular accordion tunes or be devoting myself to mastery of the standard repertoire; instead, I would be harnessing the instrument in the service of the very opposite, songs so remote from what people expected to come out of accordions that they wouldn't recognize solid gold pop hits even when they came out and stared them in the face, because squeezebox was so distant from the native context of these tunes. Here I bowed down to the first of my empty signifier masters (some artists have muses, we take what we can get), cognitive dissonance. Yes, it is Britney Spears' turn-of-the-century ubiquitous and unavoidable pop arrangement of Max Martin's failed love anthem "... Baby One More Time". As I arranged this in the cellar of my shared bachelor house circa 2003 (I didn't consciously realize it at the time, but I believe there was an inspirational drunken Russian precedent to which I was exposed in Helsinki circa 1999, likely before I ever realised I would someday pick up an accordion), taking care to only experiment with its potent mixture of the forbidden and the ... equally forbidden, like matter and antimatter, when I was alone in the house, to avoid tipping off my roommates to the fact that I was dabbling in Things Man Was Not Meant To Do. I knew I was tampering with powerful forces, yielding a compelling, dangerous power over audiences. Over the years as Britney's star has dimmed, shaved its head and attacked photographers with an umbrella, the absurd potency of this arrangement has similarly waned, but it will always pack a certain "oh, I wasn't expecting that!" punch. In its time it was positively atomic. I was told "nothing is more punk than going to the punk-rock open mic and playing Britney Spears". Indeed, people would not allow me to play anything else! (I would negotiate -- wouldn't you prefer I play you something /good/? Here, I'll do the Britney Spears if you sit through a Dan Bern song first...) A fragment of a house party performance of this song was secretly recorded and posted to the then-new YouTube (probably the highest degree of virality I will ever experience) and strangers began sporadically stopping me in the street and asking me if I was "the Britney Spears accordion guy". My drive to expand my accordion cover repertoire to the further improbable axes of Radiohead, Pink Floyd and Nine Inch Nails was driven my a need to escape being reduced to The Britney Spears Accordion Guy, because once you've played them the last thing they'll ever expect, now they have a whole other set of expectations... and what's the last thing you can ever play them that will be just as far from the expected as the previous song? Eventually I got known for a crazy mix of songs, so it was safe to revisit the well and (after being disappointed by a crazy run of inferior Britney follow-up singles -- while Max Martin has swung from strength to strength!) come up with a ripping arrangement of Toxic, but I don't think I can do that one justice without a band backing me up. ... a band backing me up: one of my first memories playing accordion on stage was signing up for the In the House spin-off Cover 2 Cover with Daniel Mate's band backing performers singing cover songs... it felt like being strapped to the front of a locomotive, unable to communicate to them to drop out during the bridge. A train wreck, in front of all the Main Street alt bicycle ladies I so desperately wanted to impress. If only there was an easier way! Now I have complete command over the performance, but it has lost its power over them. Just as well, it's about time for me to be retiring for the night. Thanks again for your interest! Hopefully I'll shake the final vestiges of this cough (it only comes out at night, aka "YouTube recording window o'clock", now) in time to serve you up something else wonderful and terrible next week. Cheers & squeeze on!