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Comment by didymospl | Hacker News Reader

More recent example is Hit me baby, one more time by Britney Spears:

>Turns out, it's not any form of physical abuse or kinky S&M or even a metaphor relating to those -- it's all one big misunderstanding.

>Swedish writers Max Martin and Rami Yacoub believed that "hit" was American slang for "call."

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6753845/...

And the fact that it's another mistake made by Swedish writers shouldn't make you think they are bad at English, but rather make you wonder how many successful writers/producers of pop music come from Sweden.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

> Martin is the songwriter with the third-most number-one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon (26). In addition, he has had the second most Hot 100 number-one singles as a producer (20), behind George Martin, who had achieved 23 by the time of his death.

Podcast where I heard about MM: http://www.switchedonpop.com/24-searching-for-max-martin/. If I remember correctly, they praise his lyrics as having a certain musicality to them, even if they're not always perfect English.

Huh. I always figured it was a blackjack metaphor, about pushing one's luck.

Yeah, that was my impression too. Giving the song more credit than it deserves, but I suppose that's Death of the Author.

Whereas I thought it was like the blackjack metaphor you might use at a bar for “give me another drink”—the singer wants another “hit” of her ex-lover, as if they were a drug, because her loneliness is “killing her” like withdrawal. In fact I thought it was a thinly veiled song about drugs, framed as about love.

I also initially read it as drugs, and "your love is like heroin" in particular, being both self-destructive and highly addictive.

I was wondering why the article didn’t bring up the Britney Spears “hit me baby” thing.

Actually Max Martin is Swedish and he wrote tons and tons of the hits we hear today. Basically this dude and Lucazs Gottwald wrote the majority of ALL the hits from the last 10-20 years, which is why all pop sounds the same lol

I wonder what the actual percentage is. It’s pretty insane that two guys wrote a huge amount of the main pop songs you hear today.

Perhaps from the phrase "hit me up"?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hit%20me%20u...

They were close. "Hit me up" would be close enough to "call me" to work the way the way it was intended, but "hit me" definitely does not.

> make you wonder how many successful writers/producers of pop music come from Sweden.

A metric fuckton: https://tobyskinner.net/2017/06/11/the-great-swedish-pop-mac...

The book "The Song Machine" also talks about it.

Strange omissions in the history in the Toby Skinner article: Dr Alban and Leila K, whose international hits were also masterminded by Denniz PoP. But maybe they are mostly remembered by Swedes.

Never in my life had I heard of, or even imagined, people reading that song as literally, physically hitting. Signed / Swedish dude.

The song jacket just says "...baby one more time" (and that's the song's official name) because of the concern that it would be taken as a song about a guy beating his girlfriend and her asking for more abuse.

Like others here, I took it to mean "I need another hit of your addictive loving".

Neither had I. /English dude.

Very similar example. Literal "hit" makes the song more interesting and mysterious. Is this s&m, abusive codependency... some other strange and curious but of culture?

physical abuse or kinky S&M or even a metaphor relating to those

Did people seriously think that's what the song was about? Their understanding of English is fine, they just underestimated the paranoid creativity of the American cultural reactionary.

I am Swedish and I always thought that that lyric actually didn't make any sense, and that was intentional.

So much many music lyrics is just a sequence of unrelated words strung together in a way that sounds good, and this sounded just like one more case of this.

That said, I never listen to lyrics in music, and at best I know the first line of the chorus even in songs I've listened to many times, so perhaps I'm wrong and there is a deeper meaning to hit songs.

Oh, and with regards to the Ace of Base song mentioned in another thread here, I always interpreted that sentence in the literal sense, that she wanted to become pregnant.

Finally, someone gets it.

Wow, you are overthinking it.

That was one of my first CDs and like most pop songs the lyrics were pretty meaningless and unanalyzed despite everyone being able to sing it.

The extent in which I heard anyone ever actually scrutinize the lyrics (until now) was when my friends and I thought it was hilarious to punch each other during the chorus.

Makes me cringe a bit to see someone try to expand it into some statement about American culture.

I once read an article mentioning it was okaying domestic violence. Seriously.

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