Spears released her debut single, "...Baby One More Time", in October 1998 which peaked at number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1999 and topped the chart for two weeks.It opened at number-one in the UK Singles Chart selling over 460,000 copies, a record for a female act at the time, and became the top-selling single of 1999 and the 25th most successful song of all time in British chart history with over 1.45 million units sold. Gillian G. Gaar, author of She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll (2002), documented that "eyebrows were raised over the schoolgirl-in-heat persona Spears projected in her music video for ...Baby One More Time, along with an increasingly revealing series of stage outfits". Spears's debut album ...Baby One More Time peaked at number one on the Billboard 200 in January 1999.Rolling Stone magazine, in a review of the album, wrote: "While several Cherion-crafted kiddie-funk jams serve up beefy hooks, shameless schlock slowies, like E-Mail My Heart,are pure spam". NME commented "Spears's debut album and its title-track are the kind of soullessness that saturates Stateside charts and consists of nothing but over-chewed bubblegum beats and saccharine sensibilities".In contrast, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic wrote: "Like many teen pop albums, ...Baby One More Time has its share of well-crafted filler, but the singles, combined with Britney's burgeoning charisma, make this a pretty great piece of fluff". ...Baby One More Time was later certified fourteen times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, denoting fourteen million units shipped within the United States.Spears posed for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in April 1999, shot by photographer David LaChapelle.Geoff Boucher of The Los Angeles Times reported, "there was no mistaking the titillation factor in the recent Spears cover story and accompanying photos in the April 15 issue of Rolling Stone, which sent eyebrows arching throughout the music industry, where several executives half-jokingly called it "child pornography".
