WAITING FOR BRITNEY SPEARS

A gimlet-eyed excavation of Britney Spears’ ascent to pop stardom and the insatiable celebrity machine that consumed her.

In this fizzy romp through Spears’ meteoric rise and painfully public downfall, music writer and cultural critic Weiss unveils the toxic celebrity ecosystem that both created and consumed pop’s most compelling millennial icon. Through a narrative style reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Gonzo” journalism, Weiss launches his story at the production of Spears’ career-defining “…Baby One More Time” video, in which he served as an extra. “Every celebrity crush became irrelevant,” Weiss writes. “Britney was the opposite of everything I’d known. A sequined mirage and airbrushed myth. It felt like I’d just watched a comet be born.” When Weiss lands a job at a Los Angeles–based celebrity tabloid in the early 2000s, he spends years tracking Spears’ every move and spiraling breakdown, not just capturing the nation’s (and his own) obsession with Spears but crafting an incisive portrait of the music industry’s seedy underworld. Through his colorful lens as a reporter, we experience trendy clubs, wild parties, and frantic car chases through L.A. The tabloids themselves emerge as characters in this unfolding drama of American celebrity worship and exploitation. As Weiss observes of the “ravenous desire for celebrity gossip”: “If the tabloids were once on the fringes of pop culture, they’re now international big business. The lines between news, sports, and entertainment have been erased.” While often mesmerizing and brutally honest in its depiction of fame’s dark side, Spears’ crash-and-burn story, stretched across 400 pages, occasionally feels excessive and repetitive. Yet Weiss proves himself a formidable talent with a keen eye for capturing the pulse of the moment, a writer whose future work will be well worth anticipating.

A bold, inventive foray into the dark netherworld of pop star fame.