**1/2 Britney Spears

BABY ONE MORE TIME

(Jive)

The gold-and-climbing title track (". . . Baby One More Time") kicks off this debut album with a sultry, funky moan of "Oh, baby, baby" that's all-knowing urban R&B. The CD cover, however, reveals not a black babe but -- almost literally -- a white baby. Not only does Spears look somewhere between 13 and 16 (actually she just turned 17), but her cocked-headed pose and teasingly simple clothes are all white suburban innocence, the perfect get-up for a former Disney Channel mouseketeer from Kentwood, Louisiana (population: 1200).

There's no Tanya Tucker jolt in this contradictory combination because Spears is merely a product of some pretty jolting times when the post-adolescent tradition that goes something like Elvis-Beatles-Al Green-Prince has finally been upended by the juvenile counterforce that goes Fabian-Turtles-Bobby Sherman-New Kids. Yet if this album just follows the formula discovered by Hanson (who are ripped shamelessly) and the Backstreet Boys (whose influence she acknowledges in an album-closing commercial), it also tightens that formula considerably. Here even the ballads disclose sly surprises. Sure, they're coated with icky icing, but when she bemoans the loss of her lover by lamenting, "It's been hours/Seems like days," on "E-Mail My Heart," she welcomes the coming Third Millennium with glorious succinctness. And dig the way the baroque back-up chorus echoes an old Elton John song. Start flooding those KISS request lines now.

-- Franklin Soults