Pop music surrounds us, but how often do we really listen to what we’re hearing? Switched on Pop is the podcast that pulls back the curtain on pop music. Each episode, join musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding as they reveal the secret formulas that make pop songs so infectious. By figuring out how pop hits work their magic, you’ll fall in love with songs you didn’t even know you liked.
In 2003 Britney Spears released Toxic, a song that would make converts out of pop skeptics, be named one of the greatest tracks of the 21st century by multiple publications, and become a personal favorite of Switched On Pop.
Despite its success, when Toxic was released as the second single from Spears’s fourth album, In The Zone, even the song’s writers thought it was too “weird” to become a hit. But thanks to the new iTunes platform, which was just gaining traction in 2013, audiences kept buying the track and helped push it to the top of the charts.
For many listeners, your hosts included, hearing Toxic for the first time was a moment of epiphany, an opportunity to rethink one’s views on the expressive power and musical invention of Top 40 pop. And almost twenty years after its release, Toxic is still rippling through the culture. It’s been covered as a jazz-noir ballad by Yael Naim, a screamo anthem by A Static Lullaby, and a bluegrass burner by Nickel Creek.
In 2022, the song enjoyed yet another revival in the form of DJ duo Altego’s viral TikTok mash-up of the song with Ginuwine’s Pony.
What makes Toxic so enduring? For one, it’s the pull of Spears’ voice, as she moves from her chest voice in the verse to an eloquent falsetto in the pre-chorus, then combines the two techniques in the chorus. It’s the way the song’s producers, Bloodshy and Avant, combine a matrix of sounds that should not go together - a 1981 Bollywood love song, electric surf guitar, and funky synthesized bass—into an unforgettable melange. And it’s the lasting power of Cathy Dennis’s lyrics, which spins a universal tale of trying to resist temptation…and ultimately failing.
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