We have given you quality. We have given you taste. Now we give you this.
There's this thing that happens with contemporary depictions of times past, whether they be a period TV show or a retrospective '90s list, where the era is soundtracked with whatever period hits are currently considered tasteful, rather than the huge contemporaneous hits that are not. The same thing happens when it's just music. The same way "Y2K fashion" is often used to refer to the gaudy, blingy fashions that came after Y2K, rather than the holographic blue-and-silver styles of the era, when musicians say that they're "Y2K-inspired," what they mean isn't the actual sound of 2000, but a small sliver of specifically pop music from a few years later, maaaaybe 2001.1 That sliver of music generally did not sound like what the huge pop stars of the time were releasing, or at least not what we remember them for today.2 What 2001 sounded like was a lot like Willa Ford. best known for her single "I Wanna Be Bad," her positioning as the less wholesome foil to early Britney Spears3, or her dating Nick Carter and subsequent vilification by Backstreet Boys stans on Yahoo!4.
"Santa Baby," which bears no relation to the Eartha Kitt-popularized song, was released at the end of that year. Marquee TRL video aside5, it did not become a Christmas classic. The whole thing sounds suspiciously similar to her one hit, which means that, transitively, it sounds like Britney Spears: the spoken-word asides, the panting. Unlike Britney, though -- and, again, like a lot of radio pop at the time6 -- this doesn't sound like the work of Max Martin or any Cheiron Studios affiliate, but attempted crossover R&B. It's all there: the She'kspere-ish production, the melisma ad-libs, the particular rapid-fire delivery on the prechorus, that one percussion record-scratch that was in everything. Much of what the song does hadn't aged well then, let alone now: gratuitous and questionable French; brand name-dropping in an extremely mid-2000s way; enough self-aware, tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless shameless Christmas materialism that, had it become a bigger hit, would have spawned endless hand-wringing thinkpieces. (They would probably have missed the humor.)
And yet, despite all this, I have indeed listened to Willa Ford's "Santa Baby" at least once every December for the past several years. I like that we have this kind of time capsule of an era's sound. I can't be alone in my lingering fondness for this particular sound, considering how many artists have garnered critical acclaim for reviving it. And there is a spectrum of quality. No, really! On a purely musical level, "Santa Baby" is an obviously better song than, say, Ali Lohan's "Christmas Groove," despite both tracks dipping into the same sound.
Also, this guy went ham on drums to it.
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The nadir of this might be the Anne-Marie single "2002," which namedrops several songs that are not from 2002.
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The Beyoncé single from I Am... Sasha Fierce to be canonized was "Single Ladies," not "Sweet Dreams," despite the latter sounding more like 2008. Everyone remembers "Crazy in Love," not "Naughty Girl." We do not celebrate Lady Gaga for "Christmas Tree."
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see also: the title of follow-up single "Sexysexobsessive"
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or, apparently, for having been married to famed Dallas Stars hockey legend Mike Modano
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plus the camera effects from Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn"
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think the first P!nk album