Jeff Weiss’s Waiting For Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly is a pop-star biography the way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a journalistic account of a trip to an auto race and a district attorneys’ convention—i.e., circumstantially, but also not at all. Before the public meltdown, before the conservatorship, before the relitigation of the 2000s in hand-wringing documentaries about our culturewide complicity in the destruction of Britney and other pop stars’ lives by gossip-rag stringers swarming like piranhas with press cards, and before the social-media dance videos shot from impossible non-Euclidean camera angles like TikToks from the Black Lodge, Britney Spears was a huge star and Britney Spears was hounded, and Weiss (who went on to a distinguished career in the reputable-by-comparison field of music journalism) was one of the hounds.
As a young writer in Los Angeles—then as now, categorically one of the least-remunerative types of young person to be—Weiss blags his way into a reporting job at a celebrity magazine by claiming to have won the H.L. Mencken Award for Excellence in Journalism at a college which does not actually have a J-school. This lie sets the tone for a headlong plunge into the reality-distortion field that swirls around famous people in the naughty Oughts, in which truth is the first casualty of gossip-mag circulation wars, car chases are all in a night's work, and the clubs part their velvet ropes for Verne Troyer (RIP.)
Written in the voice of a James Ellroy tabloid fixer palpitating on pharmaceutical taurine, it’s a compulsively readable account of a you-had-to-be-there era by someone who was actually there—and on every page our own oneshotted, brainrotted epoch slouches toward the VIP section at Hyde to be born.
“People were running red lights at every intersection,” Weiss writes. “Proverbs about virtue and humility felt paleolithic when everyone was trying to get ahead, get paid, and push miracle whips. It was Laguna Beach and The Apprentice and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Home Improvement became Cribs. Shock and awe as a cultural mandate. From every packed club and card, you could hear Usher, Lil Jon and Luda’s ‘Yeah.’ The sky was balling.
"Until you escape it, you rarely understand how much it affects you. I considered myself a cool-headed skeptic, but it’s like living next to a power plant: only a Geiger counter can measure the extent of the radiation. What’s the point of following the rules when the rule book is being shredded in real time? We were entering the famous-for-being-famous era, where the only currency was public recognition. Literary romanticism seemed laughable.”
In this excerpt, Weiss his photographer associate Oliver hop a last-minute flight from L.A. to Vegas to watch Spears & Co. ring in 2004 at the Palms, and our hero cops to just how comfortable he’s become on the other side of a powdery looking-glass: “Secretly,” he writes, “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.”
Click here to read an exclusive excerpt from Jeff Weiss’ Waiting For Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly, in stores June 10th.
