“…Baby One More Time” is probably the best debut single of all time. Appearing in September 1998 like an asteroid, it smashed into Earth with such ferocity that it birthed a new era for pop. In the smithereens was Britney Jean Spears, a 17-year-old girl from Kentwood, Louisiana, who over the next quarter of a century would become one of the most influential, complex and iconic figures in modern cultural history.

Like the theme from Jaws, or the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, the opening two-note piano riff of “…Baby” (DUN DUN–DUN) is instantly recognisable. It’s declarative, forcing your head in its direction, just as the bounce of the drums kick in and Britney emerges with those three immortal words: “Oh baby, baby…” There’s a wavy guitar and bass that’s ripe with attitude, while percussive breathing, wet like a panting dog, suggests something adult and slippery underneath. Then Britney begins in earnest:

“Oh baby, baby/How was I supposed to know/That somethin’ wasn’t right here?” she asks, her voice humming with electricity. “Oh baby, baby/I shouldn’t have let you go/And now you’re out of sight, yeah.”

Many have written about “…Baby” since its release nearly 26 years ago. “This is pure, livid, living evil,” suggested the late Neil Kulkarni when reviewing Britney’s debut album, also titled …Baby One More Time, for Melody Maker in 1999, adding: “Burn the witch!! Burn her!!”

A review in Billboard by Larry Flick was kinder. “Spears has a charming Kewpie-doll voice that has a soulful quality that leaves the listener intrigued and wondering where she'll go with time and experience,” he wrote. “In the meantime, she makes the most of this fine tune.”

That fine tune, of course, was written by Max Martin. The origins of “…Baby” are now well documented. We know how the melody came to Martin as he was drifting off to sleep, and how the song was initially rejected by TLC, who thought the lyrics alluded to domestic violence (Martin, being Swedish, believed the phrase “hit me” could replace “call me”), and then by British boyband Five.

“Max at that point in his career thought he was writing a R&B song, whereas in reality he was writing a Swedish pop song,” songwriter, producer and A&R executive Steve Lunt told writer John Seabrook for his book The Song Factory. “It was ABBA with a groove, basically… But that was the genius of Max Martin. Without being fully aware of it, he’d forged a brilliant sound all his own, and within a few weeks every American producer was desperately scrambling to emulate it.”

Following its release, “...Baby” charted at number one in nearly every country it was released. It has since gone on to sell over 10 million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest selling singles of all time. Given this success, the music industry launched an army of teen pop imitators, such as Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson and Willa Ford. And as journalist Michael Cragg noted in his history of “…Baby”, without the song “there would be no Christina Aguilera, no Katy Perry, no Charli xcx; Taylor Swift would probably still be singing country songs, and Eminem – who arrived in 1999 – would not have had as much to rail against”.

While the Spice Girls and their motto of Girl Power had briefly injected rambunctious femininity into the charts, in the late ‘90s pop was predominantly the terrain of boybands. Britney’s predecessors, Janet Jackson and Madonna, had pivoted to more introspective, adult and experimental work, leaving young listeners open to the titillation of pop’s Chippendales, the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC.

Riding with them was the tapering end of post-grunge and the sweaty male-dominated rise of nü-metal. Such machismo smothered the success in the mid-to-late ‘90s of women artists like Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan and Fiona Apple – as well as the eclectic and inclusive celebration of Lilith Fair. While Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill seemed to have captured the raw edges of adolescent girlhood to great success, pop seemed to have soured on the experiences of women.

“...Baby One More Time” brought this rough terrain back to pop. But if Girl Power offered a (post)feminist and utopian vision of womanhood divested from the constraints and violence of the patriarchy, the hunger of “…Baby One More Time” could be seen as a retrograde recentring of male power. There is an unquenchable yearning at its core, delivered in Britney’s gasping and idiosyncratic vocal. “Oh, baby, baby/The reason I breathe is you/Boy, you got me blinded,” she sings on the second verse, the line delivered with such animalistic percussiveness that it suggests a young woman snapping at her cage. This untameable quality extends into a chorus loaded with frightened desperation: “My loneliness is killin’ me.”

What prevents “…Baby” from traditionalism is its narrator: while perhaps uncomfortable, her unbridled angst and longing are authentic. It’s in the fierce ownership of the lyrics, chewed over by Britney then spat out with emotion and a zap of vocal fry. It’s the aural equivalent of a scribbled diary entry, one stained with tears. Girl Power was an ideal; my oversized desire and aching despair, Britney seems to suggest, is the reality.

You can see this play out in the music video. Director Nigel Dick’s original concept – a “really bizarre… animated Power Ranger-y thing” according to Britney – was scrapped, with Britney herself suggesting the high school setting and the Catholic school girl outfits “if you want me to reach my age group”. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have knee-highs and tie the shirts up to give it a little attitude?’ — so it wouldn’t be boring and cheesy,” she told Rolling Stone in 1999. While Britney may not have experienced the agony of teen heartbreak when she recorded “...Baby” aged just 16, the music video represented her world: this is what girlhood, or at least her girlhood, truly looked like.

The bared midriff, pink-scrunchied pig-tails and schoolgirl outfit of the “…Baby One More Time” video may seem quaint now, but was criticised at the time by some for its supposed Lolita-style sexualisation of teenage girls. Still, one of Britney’s greatest strengths has always been her understanding of her image and how it may be perceived (and consumed) by the media. The “...Baby” video provoked because it held a mirror to America’s patriarchal fantasies. As Britney dances down that corridor, there’s something both strangely juvenile and menacingly adult about the fire in her eyes and the way that she moves, as if she’s performing (and becoming) a third, liminal thing: not a girl; not yet a woman.

This resonated with young women, Britney’s target demographic, because it reflected their honest realities: how do you move through life as a teenage girl when you’re considered a child by some and a sexual object by others? But the video also trapped teenage girls, too. The image of a slim, beautiful and sexualised Britney became an ideal by which all others would forever aspire to.

Britney wasn’t immune to this prison. The indelible impression left by the “…Baby One More Time” video, strengthened by heavy rotations on MTV’s Total Request Live, forever cast her as a figure on the cusp of adulthood. She would spend the next few years trying to dismantle that with mixed success, until she was forced into arrested development purgatory by the personal and professional suppression of conservatorship. Even now, with her freedom hard-won and secured, there’s a paternalistic and patronising perception that she needs to be cared for, that she is somehow not fully grown.

It’s hard not to see Britney’s life and career refracted through the lens of “...Baby One More Time”. Listening to it now, I’m still struck by the magnitude of the piano stabs, the precision of its hooks and the muscle behind Britney’s vocal delivery. The song has such seductive and inescapable power that I want to worship it.

But I’m also aware of the baggage attached to such an explosive cultural artefact. “...Baby One More Time” may have helped create Britney Spears, but it confined her, too. It stands totemic over her discography, casting a shadow over everything that followed. Not only that, but it remains the yardstick by which young pop stars are measured: when a 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo released “Drivers License”, its success was immediately compared to that of “...Baby”. The song is eternal, capturing both a moment in time and yet extending far out into the future.

“…Baby One More Time” is not just the best debut single of all time. It’s probably one of the best songs ever made, too.