first round

(1) britney spears, “toxic”
POISONED
(16) Matt + Kim, It's a Fact (Printed Stained)
222-45
and will play on in the next round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/2/24.

It’s Britney, Bitch: Listening to “Toxic” at the End of the World by kendra decolo 

We hear it for the first time in the back of taxis, filter-less cigarettes cutting sparks outside cracked windows. We hear it on the dance floor, air thick with muscles dripped in seance and sweat. We hear it in the laundromat, galactic swish-swish, hear it sipping absinth with someone’s glorious head murmuring between our legs, the smell of spunk and tenderness. We hear it until our veins flush with a thousand tiny sequins and it never once gets old.
If you’re like me, you came to Britney Spears late, understanding her genius only after “Toxic,” the second single off of In the Zone, was released, becoming a massive hit, and in some ways a cross-cultural phenomenon, possessing a soundscape that could have been produced by Beck. Maybe you, too, spent the late 90s feeling resentful of girl pop and boy band culture taking over MTV, eclipsing your beloved plaid-shirted men screaming into the abyss; on the cusp of losing your virginity to a metal drummer and spending most of your time writing poems in a crack den made from the bones of a burnt down mansion, Ani DiFranco’s Dilate concussing through the walls.
But Britney came, fluid and evanescent, delivering us from the murky cum-stained couch of adolescence into the gel-glittered cracks of a true Y2K sexual awakening. She did it without battle cry or sad girl hymn, no empowerment messaging, not even the so-called bottom bitch variety, and so it was easy for us—me—to dismiss the era of girl pop as commercial and exploitative, hiding in my JNCOs, smoking parliaments, because I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
In the Zone, Britney Spears’ fourth album came out three years after the “poor-selling” Britney; the ideal setup for a metamorphosis. In 2004—that gem-drizzled midsection of the naughty noughties—yacht hip hop and proto-indie sleaze ruled the clubs in platinum fizz and filth; those of us who had resisted poptimism either resigned ourselves to it or gleefully gave into its pleasures. We had Napster and Limewire now. No more Tower Records walk of shame. Avril Lavigne could snuggle incognito next to the White Stripes and Aesop Rock. 
In Fall of 2003 I lived in Seville, becoming a pro at dissociating in nightclubs, a stranger often wiping vomit and blood from my face, fucked up because I was in love with a man who couldn’t love me back, who would detail his other conquests and ask for advice. Despite the constant heartache, the most sacred place was the passenger’s seat of his car. Driving through the cathedral and fountain-lined streets, our soundtrack was whatever bootleg he had in his deck: “Cameltoe” by Fannypack [1] or Ann Lee’s “No No No”—the club B-sides. Back home friends in New York were blasting “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” and “Through the Wire.” Dave Chappelle was becoming immortalized as Rick James. But here I was blissfully unaware of the American pop machine, catching only what survived the airwaves and landed in his car.
When “Toxic” first played on his hard-earned, portable car stereo that November, I had nothing to compare it to, but instantly ingested the moment like broken glass in my blood. It was iconic: joyful, low and high-stakes, and different from anything else on the radio. There’s 1980s Bollywood in the samples [2] and James Bond in the DNA; melodic leaps and the breezy-synth textures of Britney Spears’ voice colliding into counterpoint registers, simulating drags of hyperbaric oxygen. The smash-up of jump-cut orchestral strings and surf rock guitar made us feel dangerous and sexy, urgent and silly. We heard it for the first time on the way to a club, but most likely pulled into an abandoned lot, not to fuck around but to turn up the stereo, jump out of the car and dance, smashing our Cruzcampos on the ground like derelict confetti.
“Toxic” wasn’t supposed to be a hit. Cathy Dennis who co-wrote the song said in an interview, “I didn’t even like it! It was just weird. I mean, I wanted it to be weird, but afterwards, I couldn’t stop criticizing it… it’s such a quirky song, I just don’t know how I got away with it!” [3] Britney’s label, Jive Records, wanted the second single to be something more club-friendly, like the almost unlistenable “(I Got That) Boom Boom” But Britney knew exactly what the single should be, and as always, she was right.
My favorite Britney Spears moments are when she embraces her weird, which is to say, the pleasure of being herself. I don’t mean shaving her head or any of the other private moments of despair captured by pariahs for our entertainment. I mean Britney Spears annunciating “Babay Babay” in a way that reinvented the word. Britney Spears in her turquoise flight attendant uniform hunching her shoulders like an alien predator about to attack. And more recently, her Instagram dances, including the ones with knives, which she describes as coming home to her body, a healing.
The most uninteresting songs on In the Zone echo the worst of its era—scuzzy electronica, strategic collaborations, arrangements meant to accompany gin-infused oblivion, passing out or tag-teaming the bartender with your best friend in the bathroom. But the best songs on the album are a revelation, the ones where Pop Princess Britney is full-throated and in control. The songs where she goes for the punk rock gesture, like on “Everything” which sounds like Kate Bush and Mariah Carey’s love child or “Brave New Girl,” how the chord changes and chorus give both Sheryl Crow and Dirty Vegas. You can hear Britney’s willingness to take risks and shed the calculations. To let herself get weird.
Britney’s quirks and self-exposure seemed to only be mainstream-palatable when orchestrated by someone else; ie David LaChappelle and the Teletubby photoshoot; which places us as having power over her—to gatekeep her weirdness. The concept for the “Toxic” video, which is now considered to be one of the most iconic and influential of that era, was largely Britney Spears’ vision. So it isn’t surprising to recall how it was removed from regular viewing hours by MTV and relegated to late-night, (because… Justin Timberlake botched a half-time show and couldn’t take credit for his own lukewarm stunt)... [4] Similarly the “Critical Reception” section of In the Zone’s Wikipedia page reads like an Incel message board. From Rolling Stone: “In the Zone offers strip-club, 1-900 sex, accommodating and hollow. Beyond the glittering beats, Spears sounds about as intimate as a blowup doll."  Jesus. Let that one sink in. Then there was All Music: “…while Aguilera comes across like a natural-born skank, Britney is the girl next door cutting loose at college, drinking and smoking and dancing and sexing just a little too recklessly, since this is the first time she can indulge herself." And possibly the most egregious from Slant: "For a girl who's always seemed too sexed-up for her age, In the Zone finds Britney finally filling her britches, so-to-speak. Her little girl coquettishness actually works now—maybe because, at 21, she's finally a woman."
Somehow after 40 years of being a woman on this earth, this language used to describe Spears since she was 16 years old—no, 10 years old (see the Star Search footage), violent as the paparazzi who violated her most vulnerable moments, still upsets me. I’m not shocked by the focus on her body or sexuality, but I am floored by the lack of care and respect—the pompous and smug need to cut her down, to prove dominance, to own her. When I hear these men talk about her body, I hear the Tennessee state senator right after the school shooting in my city, who said of the survivors’ and grieving mothers: “all the attractive moms in Nashville came out to protest guns.” [5]
But I don’t want to talk about the sad parts, or claim that suffering is what makes the music joyful. I don’t want to think about Sinead O’Connor ridiculed with her shaved head and torn picture of the Pope, or Dolly Parton reduced to a punchline, or the million indignities any woman must face as she marches on her hero’s journey, (the one that Joseph Campbell said doesn’t exist for the female protagonist, because they are already the object). The deadbeat. The Paparazzi. The children taken away. The monstrous Trump-like father towering over her body hissing, “I’m Britney Spears now.”
We can’t listen to Britney Spears without thinking of the injustice she endured or the scabrous oppressors of her life. Fuck them all. And yet, when I listen to “Toxic,”—the fuzzed out low-end throbbing before the liftoff, the Charlotte Gainsbourg-like vocals plunging into ruin like a gilded smirk—I feel her power, the propulsion of a woman riding the wave of her own ascent. The song is brilliant because of the counterpoint and production, but also because she is herself—without the storylines, without having to earn the public’s respect or love. Bare-assed. Glistening in our face with a thousand diamonds.
When we listened to the song in his car, we didn’t acknowledge that Britney was narrating our relationship, that when she sings, “With a taste of a poison paradise I'm addicted to you/ Don't you know that you're toxic?” she was talking about the way I would stare at my lifeless cell phone, sobbing so loudly that my host brother once came in and lectured me: “Don’t ever weep for a man, Kendrita,” or the day we returned from our first trip together, leaving smears of my menstrual blood behind on his family beach house wall, I passed by a bar that evening and saw him, already drinking with another woman. Cathy Dennis said, “I think pop and darkness can sit comfortably / uncomfortably together. It is the friction between the two that is fulfilling.” [6] The weight of my growing grief was made light in the lyrics, transformed into a jewel crusted costume that I could wear and disappear into.
The pleasure of listening to “Toxic” is the subliminal feeling that Britney is doing what she loves, what she feels like she was put on this earth to do, that it isn’t a choice but the ecstatic wisdom of her body propelling her forward. During the ghoulish 2003 interview with Diane Sawyer, Britney responded to the condescending and craven questions, such as “Do you like your voice?” with her blunt and generous truth: “I think my voice is okay. I like the feeling I get when I sing.”  In her memoir she writes, “What I love is sweat on the floor during rehearsals or just playing ball and making a shot. I like the work…”
I love “Toxic” the way I love Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”, or watching Courtney Love eviscerate an enemy—Sally Rooney’s “casual intellectual hooliganism” [7]—the fuck-around-find-out joy and feminine swagger of reading a room and knowing exactly how to play it. Watching a woman stripped of everything she loves and publicly shamed is nothing new. But watching her rise from the ashes and get the last word against mediocrity—that is medicine.
At the end of my time in Seville, he drove me to the airport and we wept in each other’s arms, the car pulled to the side of an unlit road. When Whitney Houston’s voice eased into the brutal tenderness of “I Will Always Love You” on the car radio we broke into laughter because it was so intensely perfect that the absurdity gave us delight. The gift of what I thought had been a heavy and devastating love suddenly became clear.
“Toxic” gave me the gift of pleasure and embodiment: rooted in the home of my body and floating beyond it, like Britney with maraschino-red hair on the back of a motorcycle, like Courtney Love crowd-surfing into oblivion, like a chorus of middle-aged women and Gen Z-ers singing along, “Intoxicate me now” in a suburban Trader Joes at noon, the ghosts of our past and future selves tingling and untouchable. When I hear it, I am 20 again, sticking my hand out the window, groping the humid and perfect Seville air. But I am also 40, heavy and light with all of my heartaches, playing this song for my eight year-old, as if to show her a version of myself she will luckily never meet but who will be there guiding her when she crosses that threshold into womanhood; who will be there to mother us both with her wisdom in a way that I never was, in a way Britney never was. The 20 year-old in me is singing at the top of her lungs and learning to leave it all on the floor, but to keep something for herself.
Britney says in her memoir of life before conservatorship: “Even the hard days were my hard days.” “Toxic” gave me a soundtrack to fuck and feel my way back into life—the grief was all mine and so were the unexpected joys.

Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She co-wrote a chapbook with Ellen Bass, Graffitied Heart: Poems in Conversation & A Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2024), and Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), a collaborative chapbook written with Tyler Mills. She has performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues including the Newport Folk Festival. She enjoys knitting while listening to metal and once gave Woody Harrelson a high five at the airport.

Free French Fries and Booty-Shaking: kim z dale on “It’s a Fact (Printed Stained)” by Matt & Kim

I first saw Matt & Kim live in a former billboard factory on the far north side of Chicago. The building’s exposed brick, high ceilings, and rustic wooden beams reminded me of the sort of industrial loft I wanted to live in when I was in my twenties, but the raw historic coolness of the architecture was diminished somewhat by its repurposing as an upscale event space catering to camera-friendly weddings and–at least on that night–a free concert sponsored by Heineken.
The Cold War Kids were the headliners and the main draw for me and my husband. The concert was free. The only price of admission was time. We arrived extra early to ensure we’d be close enough to the front of the line to get in. Once admitted, we stood around waiting for the show to start.
Internet relics from that night assure me the event included “unique on-site experiences” in addition to the bands, but the only on-site experience I recall prior to the music was watching other people drink free beer, an amenity wasted on me because I was pregnant.
If standing around—first in a line on a sidewalk then in a crowded and noisy converted warehouse—sipping water while everyone around you is getting drunk on free beer does not sound like a good time, you are correct. I was rather miserable until I started to see people walk past me with French fries. It turned out that in addition to the free beer there were also FREE FRENCH FRIES. I have a weakness for French fries even without the excuse of growing a human inside of me, so following that revelation I hastened to acquire some fries of my own.
I was still in line waiting for my FREE FRENCH FRIES when an exuberant, electronic sound erupted behind me. Matt & Kim opened their set with a blasting instrumental introduction before lashing into “It’s a Fact (Printed Stained),” a frenetic, pop-punk, pogo-palooza, party anthem with a booty-shakable beat and a chaotic koan of a chorus:

Yes! Yes!
No no no!
Yes! Yes!
No no no!
Yes! Yes!
No no no!

After the blaring start of the Matt & Kim set, the vibe of the room flipped from corporate mixer to full on party. I only hesitated slightly before abandoning the French fry line to join in. I watched and danced and laughed through every song, but the one that stuck with me most was the first one I heard.
In a review of Matt & Kim’s 2006 debut album, Pitchfork called “It’s a Fact (Printed Stained)” a “two-minute powder keg.” This song isn’t some slickly engineered megahit. It’s messy and joyful (much like life). The song is pure fun.
“Fun” is a word that appears repeatedly in reviews of Matt & Kim’s music, shows, and videos. Other recurring themes include:

Explosive,
Energetic,
Exuberant,
Infectious,
Goofy, and
Sheer joy. 

Matt & Kim have been called the “smiling-est band in the world” and “one of the happiest bands making music today.”  When asked in an interview what the band is about, Matt replied, “We’re about having a booty-shaking dance party.”
The term “booty-shaking” comes up a lot in reference to Matt & Kim as well, specifically in reference to Kim whose antics include rampant crowd-surfing and stool-top booty-shaking during their shows. Kim’s pre-show warm-ups involve slipping off to some backstage room where she can be alone to dance. (“Dancing hard like she’s in the club” according to Matt.)  Kim says that the lower she can drop her ass during her pre-show dancing, the better the show will be. I can only assume her booty dropped extremely low before the Matt & Kim shows I’ve seen.
I saw Matt & Kim live for the second time at Lollapalooza. A hot, dusty, youth-packed mega-festival belies my usual introverted, bookworm tendencies. When the Matt & Kim set started, I was lurking near the sound booth, away from the crowd, as is my norm at such events. My husband, a Lolla-veteran, encouraged me to move in closer.
“You love this band,” he needled. And I do, so I squeezed toward the stage, acutely aware that the rest of the crowd seemed at least ten (probably closer to twenty) years younger than me. But in that moment, my age didn’t matter. I bounced in sync with the sweaty throng, fully testing the limits of my middle-aged, postpartum bladder as I blissfully belted out every word:

Yes! Yes!
No no no!
Yes! Yes!
No no no!
Yes! Yes!
No no no!

Matt & Kim are known for their wild—often viral—music videos. They created increasingly absurd family photos in the video for “Let’s Go.” They performed synchronized in-bed choreography for “It’s Alright.” They stripped naked in Times Square for “Lessons Learned.”
Unfortunately, there is no official video for “It’s a Fact (Printed Stained).” The first thing you find when you search for one is a Pitchfork.tv segment of Matt & Kim playing the song in their rehearsal space, but even cramped into a little room (or perhaps because they are cramped into a little room) the energy and chemistry surges between them.
Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino barely knew how to play their instruments when they started their namesake band. They met in art school, where Matt was studying filmmaking and Kim was studying illustration. They weren’t musicians, but they knew they enjoyed working together. They figured it would be easier to learn to play music than to learn how to work with other people. Now, Matt & Kim have been playing music together for twenty years.
In 2023 Matt & Kim announced their new band, PG14. The project is another band made up of the two of them but with a new sound they’ve described as “synth-garage-punk-pop.” Also in 2023, Matt & Kim’s eponymous first album reappeared on streaming platforms after being largely unavailable for many years, which means I have the ability to listen to “It’s a Fact (Printed Stained)” whenever I want, which is often.
When I listen to this song I can’t sit still. My feet start tapping, then my shoulders start bouncing. My head starts twisting back and forth, and yes, my booty starts shaking. Even now, as a 50-year-old mother-of-two, this song makes me want to shake my booty (albeit, preferably, in the privacy of my own home). It just feels good.
Give it a try. Listen to the song and let yourself go. Maybe even sing along:

Yes! Yes!
No no no!
Yes! Yes!
No no no!
Yes! Yes!
No no no!

In a 2022 interview, Matt said, “When we were coming up, there was just no expectation to be successful. The point was to play music.” I can’t argue that “It’s A Fact (Printed Stained)” by Matt & Kim is the most popular dance song of the early 2000s, but it’s the only one I know that’s powerful enough to inspire a pregnant woman to turn her back on FREE FRENCH FRIES. That must count for something. It’s a fact.

Photo is of the author, pregnant and embracing a giant Hello Kitty sculpture.

Kim Z. Dale is writer, dabbler, and daydreamer in Chicago, Ill.