Illustration: Iris Gottlieb.
For many listeners, hearing Britney Spears’s “Toxic” for the first time in 2003 was a moment of epiphany. Spears slides from her chest voice in the verse up to an eloquent falsetto in the pre-chorus, doing both in the chorus. The song’s producers, Bloodshy & Avant, combined a matrix of sounds that should not go together — a 1981 Bollywood love song, electric surf guitar, and funky synthesized bass — into an unforgettable melange. And Cathy Dennis’s lyrics, which spins a universal tale of trying to…
