I don’t know why it is that I love bad knockoffs of cheap pop, but I do. That’s why, when I heard a folksy rendition of Oops! I Did It Again playing between segments on some NPR program a while ago, I had to go looking for it.

As it turns out, it was Richard Thompson, whose strange sense of humor apparently pops up in his music regularly. You can find his version indexed in Last.fm, but you can’t play it there, and despite the suggestion here, it’s not available as an MP3 download from his site. To hear it, you’ll have to stream it from NPR, or go buying.

Extra: I heard the Richard Thompson cover back in May, but I only remembered it now because KCRWmusic named Toxic, as covered by The Chapin Sisters, their Top Tune recently. Can’t get enough Britney Spears covers? Check out episode 175 of Coverville.

Extra extra: I can’t decide if the best header image for this story would be Britney in wax at Madame Tussaud’s, pretending to do hard math, or just some fan with a Brit photo on his refrigerator in Michigan. Good stuff all.

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Memepool.com points out that the folks at Supermasterpiece are claiming priority over Britney Spears’ Oops ! I Did It Again. Their story is:

“Oops ! I Did It Again” was recorded in April, 1932 in a Chicago studio, most likely Nearlie’s or West and Fourth. Cut for the Decca label by Louis Armstrong and elemends of Zilner Randolph’s touring group, “Oops!” failed to make the chart impact of “All of Me,” another side recorded in the same session, and soon fell out of print.

The song remained all-but-forgotten until sixty years later when a young Britney Spears sent her interpretation of the Armstrong tune all the way to the top of the charts.

Whether you believe Supermasterpiece’s history or not, they’ve got an MP3 available. And, because I love bad knockoffs of bad pop, I like it.

My wife, on the other hand, is haunted by choruses of bad songs and has difficulty getting them out of her head. It doesn’t help that I watch, and when it appears she might have shaken it off, I whisper in her ear:

Oops!…I did it again?I played with your heart, got lost in the game?Oh baby, baby?Oops!…You think I’m in love?That I’m sent from above?I’m not that innocent

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