“Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.”
—Morrow Mayo
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Gossip is as old as civilization, but it’s recorded that the first tabloid journalism was founded by a British reverend in the 1770s, and spread to the States by the 1840s. In the 1960s, the National Enquirer perfected it, becoming a shorthand for the brazen, unhinged headlines that would dominate grocery store checkout lines. People, Us, and Star blazed the trails of a corrosive, magnetic journalism disregarding any semblance of privacy. We see it now in the form of doxxing, from 4chan and lolcow.farms to The Shade Room and constant sports trade rumors, making sure no morsel of uncertainty is parsed. Waiting For Britney Spears languishes in this swamp, commiserating in what was the most harrowing time for celebrities we’ve seen.
You wouldn’t think that someone like Jeff Weiss would be the one to write the ultimate künstlerroman on Britney, yet he’s uniquely positioned to do so. Perhaps the preeminent rap blogger of the 2010s, he is best known for his site Passion of the Weiss, a singular voice of independent hip-hop journalism, in addition to an exhaustive chronology of Drakeo the Ruler and Coachella recollections that sound less like music festivals and more like snapshots of the 7th circle of Hell. It’s in Waiting For Britney Spears that he documents his initiation into the miasma known as celebrity.
Weiss starts the book as an extra in “…Baby One More Time,” sitting in the bleachers. He’s but a captive witness to a phenomenon, of someone who will have America arrested in her brilliance, Southern warts and all. Even a true rap head cannot help but be sucked in by Britney Spears, the progeny of Madonna and Janet Jackson,, aided generously by an instant Max Martin classic. If this happenstance comes off as too far-fetched, I understand, but I spied with my little eye a shaggy brown-haired extra during Britney’s basketball court dance routine, and I’m choosing to believe it’s Jeff Weiss.
This fleeting brush with stardom propels Weiss into answering a Craigslist ad for an entertainment reporter who “regularly goes out to clubs, parties and bars with people from the entertainment industry,” someone Weiss clearly is not. In a clever metatextual play, his exaggerated bona fides mirror the “alleged” conduct that details the next four hundred or so pages. Nova, the magazine he interviews for, is headed by Alice Von Bronx, whose “Hillary Clinton pantsuit” makes me imagine her as the mom from Daria. His first assignment is cataloguing the Teen Choice Awards, especially whatever Britney does. Without guest list, of course.
The next chapter introduces the most principal character besides Britney and Weiss himself; Oliver Bournemouth. A chain-smoking British photographer battle-hardened from the treacherous world of his country’s notoriously brutal tabloids, he shows Weiss the sordid underbelly of LA paparazzi life, flexing an expensive SUV with a rolodex in the thousands, every hideout of the celebs, and those who know how to get in. Weiss capitulates to the glamor. How could a starstruck Angeleno resist?
Quick answer: he doesn’t. The sights of the Playboy Mansion beckon, boistered with Tara Reid and Xzibit, a cornucopia of 2000s glitterati that would dazzle an unassuming, fresh-faced writer. The sightings are numerous: Dita Von Teese, Josh Hartnell, a still alcoholic Colin Farrell. Weiss takes in the proximity as any voyeuristic tabloid reader would, with a lust for salaciousness, always riding for the next scoop. Nova makes it worth his while: appearances at the Teen Choice Awards, the ESPYs, whatever award shows can be mined for content. As Weiss writes, “Secretly, I reveled in the choose-your-own-adventure possibilities of every assignment. I’d begun to subscribe to the classic bad-faith axiom: If I don’t do it, someone worse will.”
Of course, every tabloid journo thought this of themselves. The tragic figure of Britney was ripe to be plucked, and everyone needed their fair share. Some with more scruples than others–but the end result was the same. The cottage industry built around her became big business, and Weiss let himself be swept into the wave. Her fifty-five-hour marriage to Jason Alexander sticks as a perfect example, strung out on alcohol and pills, rebelling against a machine psychologically consuming her: it’s no wonder she did something so irrational it was scarcely believable. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown.
Weiss’ recollections of these events come with typical aplomb, his bombastic style seamlessly building the lurid world he’s found himself in. “If you were sucked in by the dazzling Hollywoodland illusion, you could blame your downfall on the savage exploitation and hollow greed of the locals. But I was supposed to have natural antibodies. The tap water was not supposed to make me sick.” The obvious point of reference is Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese, yet the prose also can smack of classic LA pulp and the fantastic unconscious of the tabloids themselves. It’s vintage LA storytelling, equally Mike Davis and Bret Easton Ellis.
Two events shroud the apotheosis of Waiting For Britney Spears: the marriage of Britney and Kevin Federline and Weiss’s arrest trying to confirm Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s romance (popularly known as Brangelina). In both, we see the ravenous lust for access that typifies this era, with one positioned as a media frenzy that Weiss is only along for the ride in, the other a scandal of his own making, tipping the moral scale from reluctant journo to active participant in the voyeuristic culture he’s embedded himself in. Ironically, this incident only occurs because he’s ostensibly auditioning for People, the “reputable” celebrity magazine. He’s entrapped by a zealous cop for trespassing, exploiting the young reporter’s lack of legal expertise and set him up to take the fall for a scoop the entire tabloid world has breathlessly grasped at.
The rest of the book covers a series of Britney breakdowns. Attacking a paparazzo with an umbrella; Shaving her head to reclaim any semblance of agency; Her “Holy Bimbo Trinity” with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, the trio terrorizing clubs far and wide; The infamous performance of “Gimme More” at the 2007 VMAs, where she had a panic attack backstage before having to perform in front of millions live. And the eventual manic breakdowns that led her into conservatorship, a marionette at the hands of her family, wherein she’s partitioned access to her kids and left as a perpetually drugged-out zombie in the hands of various psychiatric facilities.
Weiss wisely steps back from personal anecdotes by the end, instead letting the harrowing saga speak for itself. Its chronology leads into what Britney was known as in the 2010s, a tabloid punchline in the same way Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston did. The cash cow has run dry, milked and used until a shell of herself. By writing Waiting For Britney Spears, Weiss acknowledges his, and by extension, our, complicity in crafting a profuse need for wanton celebrity breakdowns, the pressure building toward the dam till it bursts open, never to be contained again. It only makes sense that celebs now eschew any sort of risky, career-defining behavior in favor of Instagram palatability and crafting parasocial relationships with their fans. Famously, in Waiting For Godot, Vladimir and Estragon consider suicide, but they do not have a rope by which to hang themselves. In Britney Spears’ case, the rope is imparted onto her by the media.
Despite it all, Waiting For Britney Spears at its heart is a love letter to Britney, both literally and figuratively. At one point,Weiss and Spears briefly interact, him profusely apologizing for the paparazzi and Matt Lauer’s slimy interviewing, and she calls him “so sweet.” When the greatest pop star of the twenty-first century shyly compliments you, how could you not write a whole book in a veiled attempt to profess your undying affection and make her see that you’re the one for her? Jeff Weiss loves Britney Spears, warts and all. We should too.
Eli Schoop
Eli Schoop is a writer from Cleveland who lives in Brooklyn. He can be found at @elischoop on Twitter.