Britney Spears - Toxic

A song I can sing my teeth into

My first adult tooth extraction occurred the summer of 2007. It was my bottom right quadrant molar which had been screaming at me non-stop, especially if I tried to eat anything cold or hot or at a consistency other than mushy. My dentist, after attempting a root canal, agreed the tooth needed to come out.

I decided to have the procedure done at a dental surgery center in downtown Oakland that I’d never heard of before and which only had a 3 star rating on Yelp. It was much cheaper (like 500 dollars cheaper) than the more reputable Berkeley Oral Surgery Center which had 5 glowing yellow stars. But, I figured, pulling out a tooth is pulling out a tooth, right? It’s not brain surgery. (Though it is dangerously close to the brain.) And as long as the pain in my mouth faded before the pain from the diminishing balance in my bank account, then it’s all good, right?

I was the only one in the waiting room when I arrived at 9am. That didn’t seem like a good sign. Maybe it was too early for most dental patients. Maybe they had a few cancellations. Maybe the office enforced a strict one-client-at-a time policy. None of these rationales eased my concern.

A fish tank sat on a wobbly stand between two pairs of folding chairs. The whole place screamed makeshift. Like it had been used for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting just hours before. Like it was a front for a money laundering scheme. The fish tanked burbled and belched loudly like a car with a broken muffler. The water was cloudy and it was difficult to see how many fish were in there.

A smiley woman at the front desk handed me a stack of forms to fill out and sign, which I did quickly and without looking very closely. I didn’t sleep well last night or the night before or the night before that. I would have signed anything at that point.

Before completing the paperwork, a pleasantly warm (but not as smiley as the front desk person) dental assistant in fish-patterned scrubs appeared and called my name. She led me down a dimly lit hallway lined with unlabeled cardboard boxes and into a large, hexagon-shaped room with a reclining dental chair in the center surrounded by trays of familiar looking dental instruments, monitors, and a lamp on a reticulating arm. The room seemed about three times as big as necessary and there was a closed door beside a bank of darkened windows across from the chair. I imagined more complicated forms of surgery taking place in here, a team of unseen watchers hidden in a room behind the windows.

Photo by Ozkan Guner on Unsplash

The assistant reached to grab the clipboard and paperwork I was holding.

“I haven’t finished it all yet,” I said, clutching it to my chest.

“Oh, that’s alright,” she said, then snatched the pages from my hands. “I’m sure it’s good enough.”

Just then, the door beside the darkened windows opened and a tall man dressed in navy blue scrubs and a white lab coat entered the room. He looked to be no older than 35 and could have been mistaken for a model. He had no facial hair, his cheekbones were high and taut and his chin was dimpled and square. He had an androgynous, multi-cultural quality, like he could be from one of a hundred different countries, or all of them.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Chadwick,” he said and shook my hand. He smiled and his perfectly aligned, naturally sparkling white teeth immediately put me at ease.

He explained each step of the procedure, how with the anesthetic and nitrous oxide, I should feel no pain, just a bit of pressure.

“The sound of the drill is the most unpleasant part,” he added. “So you can wear these noise-cancelling headphones and choose from a variety of music channels to hopefully drown out the racket.”

Just then, his assistant placed a set of over-the-ear headphones on me and handed me a remote that controlled the music selection.

“I’m just going to numb the area first, which will take a few minutes to take effect. It’ll give you enough time to pick your soundtrack.”

After the novocaine injection, the doctor began to leave, then stopped and turned to face me. “Would you like me to start the nitrous now, or right before we start?”

“Now please,” I answered, a little too enthusiastically.

Most of the music choices —jazz, classical, soul/R&B— seemed far too quiet and downtempo to drown out the inevitable cacophony of drill, suction and diseased molar-cracking that I expected to occur. The heavy metal channel was mostly awful NüMetal bands like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. I’d rather have my tooth yanked with no pain meds than have to listen to those bands. (Click the links at your own risk.)

The only option that seemed lively enough to distract me from the future sounds of torture, and pleasant enough to maintain my usual cheery mood was the Britney Spears channel.

Britney as a Mouskateer in 1993

I’ve never felt strongly pro or con about Britney Spears. She always seemed to me to be Madonna-lite by way of Mickey Mouse Club. Which is kinda what she was, for a while. There were several songs in her oeuvre (I think she would appreciate that term) that I liked a fair bit. "Oops I Did it Again" and "Hit Me Baby One More Time," are truly excellent, catchy pop songs.

If the great Richard Thompson believed “Oops…” deserved inclusion on his 1000 Years of Popular Music album and tour, then it must be a song for the ages.

It wasn’t until Britney’s 2003 hit "Toxic" from her fourth album In The Zone that I became a true fan. “Toxic,” is a sonic masterpiece. Far be it for me to question Sir Richard Thompson, but I think the Oops was in not choosing “Toxic” for his tour.

“Toxic” was written and produced by hit makers Bloodshy and Avant, and wasn’t even supposed to be recorded by Ms. Spears. It was initially offered to Australian pop-dance star Kylie Minogue, but she turned it down. So B&A (I can see why they don’t like that acronym) brought the song to Britney.

Sure, Britney didn’t write the song and had nothing to do with the timeless, throwback 1950s spy-movie production. But the fact of the matter is that she owns it. I’m convinced that without Britney’s sexy, growly, girl-now-a-woman vocal delivery, the song wouldn’t work nearly as perfectly as it does.

In terms of the earwormishness of “Toxic,” it all starts at the beginning. The first 6 seconds of horn and string samples with some sort of clearly looped drum machine beat beneath. No vocals. This musical theme repeats about a hundred times in the 3 and a half minute song, and repeats again, 1000 more times in my head. Thankfully that loop would eventually morph into the beginning of the chorus, where Britney sings:

With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride
You're toxic, I'm slipping under

The rest of the chorus is more amorphous. Sometimes it joins in, more often it doesn’t. That’s how earworms can be sometimes. They might come in the form of a 6 second musical loop, a couple of vocal lines, or the entire first verse plus chorus.

This particular earworm is less invasive than most others, and that could be for a couple of reasons. One, I was already 36 when it came out, well past the stickiness of my musical formative years. A song from the 70s and 80s will always crush anything from the 21st century (for me). I could walk into CVS and a muzak version of Chicago’s “You’re The Inspiration” can be playing in the background and suddenly, Britney is nowhere to be found.

---

Britney Spears music was literally drilled into me that day in the “dental surgery center.” It wasn’t only “Toxic,” I’d heard in the headphones but a well-chosen selection of hits from her first four albums. I was high on nitrous, so I can’t name all the songs, but I distinctly recall hearing “Toxic” at least three times, and I remember opening my eyes and seeing the “doctor” hovering over me, his face a twist of sweaty exertion, his biceps bulging through his scrubs. And then one last enamel blasting crunch and my molar was gone.

As I left the surgery center two long hours after I arrived, I stumbled woozily to my car, my mouth packed with gauze and my face looking like I’d lost a fight. As the nitrous haze began to clear, I found myself humming a little garbled tune, “I'm addicted to you, but I know that you're toxic." Was I singing it to my worst addiction, sugar, the likely culprit for the tooth death? Or was it a way of saying goodbye and thank you to my molar, who provided me with more than 40 years of chomping, chewing and conviviality?

Perhaps when the time comes (hopefully years from now) that I need to have another tooth extracted from my face, I'll be proactive and load my phone with an hour-long Britney mix, just in case I’m not offered any headphones and a music selection. Or maybe I'll just play "Toxic" on repeat.