Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of pop?
That’s the question of the week. After welcoming Jeff Weiss back to London for a live show about his tremendous novel-slash-memoir, Waiting For Britney Spears, we got to thinking about our own pop album percies. 2007’s Blackout is certainly up there – ‘a lost weekend of one-more-gram indulgence’ that ‘embodied the hedonistic sleaze of the late Bush years,’ as Jeff sums it up in the book.
Waiting For Britney… is a celebrity biography like no other – a gonzo account of Jeff’s time as a rookie in the world of Hollywood gossip rags, back when celebrities still had mystique and Brit still had a full head of hair. There is scandal and there are laughs, but never at the expense of its stricken central character. The words ‘leave Britney alone!’ never sounded more reasonable.
At the end of June, Jeff blessed us with his presence at Young Space in East London, where we talked to him about paparazzi, poptimism, fedoras, K-Fed, and the chaotic energy of LA in the early 2000s, the era that feminism forgot. Plus, a working theory: why Britney, Kanye and Trump are the quintessential 21st century Americans. (As ever, you’ll find a lightly edited transcript in this newsletter if you scroll down a bit.)
Then at the end of the night Tom and Chal went their separate ways and forgot all about their podcast for four weeks!!! No but really, we didn’t mean to be away for this long – consider it our summer recess. In the episode’s introduction we catch up with our recent cultural activities – a cursory Glasto mention, a 12-hour rave-as-performance art marathon, the perils of high summer in Hackney Wick – before making a snap decision on our four favourite pop albums of all time. Tell us yours in the comments, and look out for our petition to have Mutya Buena’s face carved into Cheddar Gorge.
If you like what we’re doing on No Tags, please forward this email to someone else who’d like it, subscribe on your podcast app of choice – or better yet, leave us a nice review. And if you’re really into what we’re doing, please consider subscribing to our paid tier for £5 per month.
CR: In the book, your character – a version of you – had been to college, and maybe expected bigger things for life than happened immediately afterwards.
Jeff Weiss: That’s true, yeah. Very delusional. So much has changed.
CR: You go and get this job at a gossip magazine by just blagging it. You lie about your backstory, you just tell them what they need to hear. Assuming that elements of this are based on truth, I'm interested in how you exactly got to this position as a celebrity reporter, and the need to be bullshitting all the time as part of the job. Did you know that you had that in you?
JW: Growing up in LA, it's like a cauldron in a lot of ways. I don't want to confirm the LA cliché but obviously there is this artifice all around you. You find that a normal thing. I have a lot of friends that would come visit me in LA and they're like, ‘Is this normal for you?’ And it's like, ‘Well, yeah.’
TL: What sort of thing are we talking about?
JW: Just that Hollywood world. And look, I despise that Hollywood world. I still despise that Hollywood world. That's sort of what the tension in the book is, because my character is thrust into it. But that world is meant for you to lie. It's the ultimate ‘fake it till you make it’, right? The notion of authenticity is whatever you want to create. If you say it's authentic, then it is authentic. Look at somebody like Paris. Is Paris Hilton the Paris Hilton we know on The Simple Life? No, that was clearly a shtick that she was creating based off Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield and all these things.
So my character, when he gets his job at – well, it’s called Nova in the book, but [in real life] it was Star Magazine. He makes up this crazy email [about all the LA clubs he frequents]. I had a friend who went to all the clubs, so I was like, ‘What are the cool clubs?’ And then I basically wrote Jermaine Dupri's ‘Welcome to Atlanta’ but of all the nightclubs in LA at the time [Dupri’s verse in ‘Welcome to Atlanta’ is a run-down of the city’s go-to nightlife hotspots]. And from there I was off to the races.
CR: Did the idea of writing a book come to you at that time?
JW: Oh, I took comprehensive notes. I knew it was always going to be a book.
CR: You were like, ‘This is good stuff.’
JW: I hated my life. Every time I would do it, I would call my mom and be like, ‘How are you allowing this to happen to your only son?’ And she's like, ‘Shut up. Do you think you're a mass murderer?’ And I'm like, ‘Kind of!’ But I knew it was almost like an intellectual tax write-off, where you're like, ‘OK, I need the money but also I will write this down one day and that will hopefully mitigate my shame a little bit.’
TL: Were you journaling this at the time?
JW: Oh yeah, it’s comprehensive. I have not only the things I would file to the magazines but I kept receipts, I had letters that I'd send to people, I had journals. I [originally] tried to write a version of this book in like 2005. I mean, it was awful but, you know, I definitely tried. It was really, really rough but the idea was there, just how to execute it was not.
TL: I don't want to go too far into the ‘what's real, what's fake’ aspect of the book because it feels besides the point to analyse that too much. But I do want to have a moment for the character Oliver.
JW: Oh, Oliver is very real.
TL: From what I can gather he’s someone we can talk publicly about. He’s based on Mel Bouzad, a real life photographer who at one point in his mid-20s was the biggest paparazzo in America, to quote you. So how accurate is your depiction of him in the book? He’s kind of this sidekick character who takes you on wild adventures which often turn into car chases and get pretty rogue.
CR: He’s your Dr. Gonzo!
JW: Oliver was very real and was very rogue and very brilliant. Even with the book, he was like, ‘Why is my real name not in the book?’ I feel like Oliver is more real than my character in a lot of ways. The book of Oliver would be a great sequel. Oliver is the star of the book as far as I'm concerned.
TL: Are Olivers commonplace in that world?
JW: No, he was one of a kind. He was like a superstar. He was the youngest paparazzo in London at 17 or 18 years old. He was at university and he started somehow meeting photographers and they're like, ‘You can make a lot of money if you just start shooting photos’. He’s this broke college kid and he starts making – this is the late ‘90s – he’s making three or four hundred pounds a photo, and then all of a sudden it goes up. But he was infamous, because he was in it to win it, so he would stalk… I can't remember, it’s in the book, but it was Liam or Noel Gallagher.
TL: It’s Liam Gallagher, I found the article. Liam smashed his camera.
JW: Yeah, that’s totally real. Mel’s actually done [Oliver’s parts in] the audiobook. He was sort of the only person that looked out for me in that world. He was an honest man living outside the law.
CR: What does he do now?
JW: He does social media marketing and he lives up in Oregon, and he's married and he's a dog dad. He has an 18-year-old son. We had a really nice time hanging out when he came to LA to read the audiobook. It’s funny, he’s obviously mellowed out a lot in the 20-something years since, but when he was reading the audiobook his wife was like, ‘No, he’s doing it how he is now – just be you in 2010!’
TL: We did notice that in the one picture of him we could find online, he's wearing a [legendary jungle record label] Moving Shadow jacket.
JW: Yeah, he was a head, he was a serious music head.
CR: Even though I read a lot of those trash magazines and felt like I was loosely following what was going on with Britney at the time, I was shocked by the level of drug-taking in the book. I don't know if it's because I just wasn't paying attention at the time or felt somehow innocent to that, but it's almost strange that, despite the massive intrusion into her life, some of those facts were glossed over.
JW: I think that's what's so interesting, right? Because so much of this has been either memory-holed or it's just sunk into the dark abyss of the internet. It no longer exists. So much of this stuff never even made it to the internet in the first place. And look, the purpose of the book was not to expose Britney's drug use or whatever, but this is public record stuff, these are people that are either testifying in court or they're testifying in the magazines.
Everyone thinks all the tabloids are fake, right? And I noticed very quickly the first time I worked for these tabloids, I went to a pitch meeting, I had like five ideas but I had no idea how to report them, I had no idea if they were true. And they're like, ‘So who are your sources and how are you planning on reporting that story?’ I'm like, ‘I don't know’. Then I didn't get hired full-time.
I don't know how it is now, but at the time they had really good fact-checking. Three of the smartest people I've ever met were Us Weekly fact-checkers. You couldn't slip in complete bullshit. Now whether it was true or not is a different story, but there was always some kind of source in there corroborating what they reported.
TL: The first time we had you on the podcast, you said: ‘My working theory is that the three most American Americans of the last 23 years are Britney Spears, Kanye West, and Donald Trump. Certain people that for whatever reason are tapped into the zeitgeist. And as the world continues to crumble, you can see them go off the rails in various ways.’ Fast forward a year and a half. Trump has stood for re-election and won. Kanye's dabbling — maybe more than dabbling — with Nazism. Arguably Trump is as well! But what is it about Britney specifically that tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2000s?
JW: I think if you're an American now, when you wake up in the morning the most logical thing to do is wave knives in front of your face [as Britney did on Instagram last year] and do your best not to have them slash off your nose. So I think she's still tapped into it. She's addicted to posting. She's a divorced mom. She's writing things that are of dubious coherence. That's quintessentially American. But I don't know why those people get chosen. There's a line in the book where it's like, ‘Luck plus looks plus talent plus timing.’ So much of it is timing, but also people have been asking me, ‘Could Britney Spears exist today?’ And I'm like, ‘Well, no, because there's no monoculture.’ You know what I mean? You're not going to be on the cover of every magazine, and even if you are, no one reads those magazines.
TL: And a music video will never make that impact again.
JW: No. It can't. Maybe the last one was ‘Gangnam Style’.
CR: In the book, your first encounter with Britney Spears is while you’re a student at the high school where she films the ‘…Baby One More Time’ video. There's this idea from the beginning that there is something special about her, and even as she goes off the rails, she still has this ability to lock in and create an amazing record, and sometimes create an amazing performance. But what is it that she is doing? What is she controlling, even?
JW: I don't know. It's the It Girl quality. It's the essence. It's the thing that the A&R in the book says, ‘It's the thing that everyone's always looking for.’ What makes somebody have it? I think that's an eternal question. Of course it’s charisma and it's a light in your eyes and it's the way she looked at the camera. And it's the way that she understood how to move the needle and, like, instinct. I feel like the older we get, the more you're like, ‘Oh, it's just instincts, right? People are just animals being guided by their instincts. Paris Hilton called her ‘the animal’. She said, ‘Britney doesn’t think. She just moves off instinct.’
TL: One of the things that threw me in the book was Donald Trump blogging about Britney in 2006, which is an insane sentence to just say out loud like that.
JW: So funny.
TL: But researching for the book, you said you spent thousands of dollars buying old tabloid magazines on eBay. Something you said shocked you was realising just how visible a tabloid personality Trump was even 25 years ago. It occurred to me that, on the one hand we have Britney, who was ultimately driven crazy by her celebrity. And on the other we have Trump, who's used his celebrity to become the most powerful man in America. It would be interesting to hear you speak about just how greased the wheels were for Trump, even then.
JW: Totally. I think it’s worth noting all three – Kanye, Britney and Trump – all blogged. Britney had a blog. Actually, Britney’s most revealing confessionals are on her website. I think they're all lost to history, but you might be able to Wayback Machine it. Kanye was blogging about furniture and being like, ‘Ooh, Mondrian!’
TL: It’s funny to think how commonplace it was at the time. Mariah Carey had a blog and I think that was how she announced to the world she'd had her breakdown. It was very commonplace.
JW: Totally. It was before social media. But in terms of the Trump thing, there’s a man named David Pecker, who was the CEO of American Media. He owned Star Magazine and a bunch of bodybuilding magazines, Muscle & Fitness, Men’s Fitness or whatever. And he was really close friends with Trump. [In 2018, Pecker was involved in a catch-and-kill operation under which his company would buy exclusive rights to stories that might embarrass Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 election.]
So there are these laudatory three-page spreads about Trump and his new model wife, Melania. ‘Look at his kids. Aren't they perfect Aryan lunatics?’ And they're everywhere. We forget this is the height of The Apprentice, too. So he's the daffy reality star who's just sort of a joke. But so much of it is psychological implanting. It's just subliminal advertising, right? And so I think in America, when you have [Apprentice producer] Mark Burnett creating this fantasy of you as this great business person, and then the magazines are like, ‘Look at this loving family and his FHM wife.’ As you said, the wheels have been greased. It was not that much of a stretch for him to become a political candidate.
CR: The book charts that first big chapter of Britney's career, from ‘…Baby One More Time’ to being put into the conservatorship, in which her dad had complete control over her life for 13 years. Was there a point in this story where you felt like some kind of boundary had been crossed, or that something had been spiritually exceeded or broken?
JW: Like I said, I came up with the title Waiting for Britney Spears before what's called her breakdown, and certainly well before the conservatorship. But for me, when she shaved her head, that was this Rubicon moment of American life. Because she is the quintessential American. I’ve been to her hometown, and the house where she grew up now has two Trump flags above it. It is a desiccated town, completely post-industrial. It used to be the dairy farm capital of the South [and was] destroyed by Walmart. Very segregated. She went to the all-white school, 30 miles outside of the town over the state border in Mississippi. They have a Britney Spears museum there now – a woman named Faye who’s like 85 years old works there. Half the museum is a Kentwood, Louisiana history museum, and half of it is a Britney museum, which is trapped in 2001.
But you go there and you see these black-and-white photos of the dairy festival, which was the only thing [in the town]. Then you get to around 1994 and they're like ‘no more’, because there were no dairy farms left. And the town was already like rotting into the earth. [Britney is] this creation of the major label machine, but the reason why it struck such a chord, I think, is because she did reflect something within the zeitgeist and the psyche of America that it believes about itself.
And here she is shaving her head and getting captured by these monstrous tabloid ghouls, who are so excited because they know this is going to pay so much money. Then the next week she beats a paparazzo with an umbrella and smashes her car. And you're like, ‘Oh, it's a psychic break.’ It's a deep rupture within our psyche. I think people are symbols and vessels for energy, not to get too California woo-woo, but she clearly struck a chord, like a deeper thing with people. And I think that was the moment where we crossed that point of no return.
CR: It instinctively feels to me that that story, and that arc, for a pop star, particularly a young woman in the public eye, couldn't really happen now, or at least not in the same way. What do you think about the idea that this is almost the first and last time that this series of events could happen?
JW: I mean, maybe to a young female pop star. But I could see it happening. It happened to Amanda Bynes. It’s happening to Kanye still. And then it of course raises questions where if Kanye was a 25-year-old woman, would he have been placed in a conservatorship? Possibly. Does Kanye need a conservatorship? Probably. More than Britney probably did.
It's a really interesting question. I think stan culture is one of the most insidious developments in modern life, but [it] maybe offers them a cocoon.
TL: Yeah, that was a note we had on it actually, that if it happened to a pop star of that size now, there would be an entire online army that would mobilise in minutes. Whereas all Britney seemed to have back then was the ‘Leave Britney Alone’ fan, who just became a meme.
CR: We had a few other ideas. We were talking about stan culture and this idea that there’s a protective ring around these artists, even if sometimes it can turn in on itself. I also remember in that period, when I was an older teenager and in my early 20s, there was a real cultural amnesia about feminism. It just went away for a while. You didn't get someone like Beyoncé saying ‘FEMINIST’ in huge letters [in her stage visuals]. I think my particular micro-generation really went along with FHM High Street Honeys and what the boys wanted. There was this idea that labelling behaviour as misogynistic would have been femi-nazi killjoy craziness. So I do wonder if [what happened to Britney] happened in this sinkhole for feminism, historically.
JW: I think that's definitely right. That was one of the other things writing this book – you’re like [porn franchise] Girls Gone Wild, huh? That was a thing. You know what I mean? I had gone to the Playboy Mansion [as a young journalist] and I remember being like, ‘God, this is fucking depressing.’ But again, it was considered normal. The lad magazines obviously were a factor. They were all from the UK, which is interesting to me as it’s coming across the Atlantic that way. So it's maybe not all America's fault. What was it, Page Two?
TL: Page Three.
CR: But also the sort of kiddy ones, Zoo and Nuts.
TL: I was explaining Zoo and Nuts to a friend of mine who's Italian recently. She googled it and the first issue that came up had the headline, ‘When Boobs Escape!’ She was like, ‘Sorry, British kids just used to read this on the bus!?’ And it was the same thing [in the USA], Girls Gone Wild was advertised on mainstream television.
JW: Oh, yeah. It was on cable TV all the time.
CR: Could you briefly explain what the ‘Bimbo Summit’ was?
JW: I'm glad the word 'bimbo' has been reclaimed because that was a good word. Bimbo Summit was a great phrase. Basically, there was a night in 2006 where Britney was… she hadn't really crashed out yet, but she was definitely wearing less and going out more. There was a nightclub called Hide. If you guys don't know what Hide is, great. I would say you don't need to know. But if you do need to know, it was like the nightclub to end all nightclubs in LA. It was really difficult to get in, super exclusive. The worst people in the world went there. You'd go in, and it'd be like Leonardo DiCaprio and there’d be models being like ‘Am I too old for him?’ And you'd be like, ‘You're 24. So you have one year left.’
It was just a bizarre place. And then one night, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan all got together for a very iconic photo, which they called the Bimbo Summit. Paris Hilton preferred the Holy Trinity, also a great name for it. No one ever really understood why or how it happened. But actually, in the book, it's explained. And who knows? That's the thing, who knows? Nobody knows anything about this stuff. The reality might as well be fiction, and the fiction might as well be reality.
People are like, ‘Are you nostalgic for this era?’ I'm like, ‘Certainly not.’ And yet it was a little bit better, you know?
TL: We had mystique. Mystique is gone.
JW: Yeah, definitely. There was a little mystique then.
CR: We also had Mis-Teeq! The other development that means that this series of events can't quite happen again is poptimism. There was a shift in how people talked about pop music, around 2008. Previously the attitude was that pop music is basically manufactured, empty and stupid, and it doesn't really matter and it's not important. Britney doesn't write her own songs, so you don't need to take anything about her seriously. I think that did contribute to this idea of like, this is fair game. These people are just idiots. Whereas now, even people who don't write their own songs, that's fine. Pop music is more respected now.
JW: We're also post-reality, so you're like, ‘What is the point of real? What is real?’ And that's what the book was trying to riff on. This is when the post-reality age starts, even though it doesn't really become an effect until probably the last three or four years. Post-Covid, I feel like everyone's just in their own wormhole. But in terms of the criticism, it's interesting, right? A lot of people didn't know that [Christian Karlsson of] Miike Snow produced ‘Toxic’. Britney was also working with James Murphy and the DFA guys and a lot of cool, great producers, obviously Pharrell.
It’s almost like we're at the other end now where pop music is valorised as the be-all-and-end-all. Music's in a strange place. I also think hip-hop is part and parcel with the poptimism trend, and hip-hop was always regarded as stupid and silly at this time too. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, 50 Cent is this empty, steroidal pop talent.’ And now we look back on that era and we're just like, ‘yeah, it's great’. Everything gets worse, is the moral of the story.
TL: I just want to say that in a career rich with high-calibre takedowns, it's really fun to have Justin Timberlake constantly in your crosshairs throughout the book.
JW: History absolved me there. I always hated Justin Timberlake. Always.
TL: When and where did you start this hate affair with JT?
JW: He's just so loathsome. He was so smarmy. And I just always felt like he was the ultimate beneficiary of whiteness, right? Like, is Omarion more talented than Justin Timberlake? Probably. Is Lloyd? You know what I mean? The irony is that he was the guy that got put into the pop machine. Justin Timberlake could not make anything outside of that. He got really lucky and got the best beats ever made. What frustrated me was in that era when everyone was like, ‘Actually, Justin Timberlake is a genius auteur,’ and ‘Britney Spears, she's kind of just this figure of pop ephemera.’ Like, ’SexyBack’? That was the guy that was bringing sexy back? Come on.
CR: I found that very believable at the time.
JW: Also the worst dresser, like just wearing vests and fedoras.
CR: Everyone had a fedora, it wasn’t just him!
JW: I think the fedora is important, because we need to remember about whatever’s cool now, people once thought the fedora was cool.
CR: Yeah, that’s been erased from the current Y2K/indie sleaze reboot – where are the white fedoras, guys?
JW: People ask me what my proudest achievement in life is. It's probably never wearing a fedora.
TL: I have this vivid memory of watching the Britney Spears Hulu documentary about her conservatorship. In it, they interview a paparazzi photographer and he goes to great lengths to paint this picture of Britney's relationship with the paparazzi as mutually beneficial, as if they were work colleagues or friends. I remember instinctively at the time being like, ‘You're a ghoul, this is bullshit,’ but it's something that crops up twice in the book, first with Oliver and then with Adnan Ghalib, who later was in a relationship with Britney. How prevalent was that line of thinking in that industry, and is there any truth in it at all?
JW: I mean, it was definitely 100% the way that the paparazzi thought about her. People lie themselves to sleep at night. That was very prevalent at that moment. But also, if you talk to Mel [Bouzad] today, I'm sure he would tell you that. Did she like Mel? What does that even mean? I don't know. They did have a good relationship, but there was a thing when the paparazzi shifted, right? It went from this roguish outlaw type that kind of understood boundaries – and at first, when Mel came to LA, there weren't that many paparazzi. It wasn't this locust cloud trailing her. So she could actually be like, ‘Hey, did you get your shots for the day?’ He’d be like, ‘OK, I got my shots for the day, I'm going to go home.’ There was sort of a code.
Once it shifts into digital where you no longer need to know how to take a photo – you don't need a light, you don't need a composition – then it changes, where basically any idiot can get in. One of the things I tried to express in the book was this theme of the corporations eventually taking over. TMZ comes in, [and] there was a company also called X17, they would hire former gang members, the pizza guy, the valet. These people didn’t learn how to become photographers. And there is a certain buy-in there I think.
The original photographers were all British Fleet Street guys, and that meant something too because they actually came from a semi-legitimate press. There was obviously a lot of craziness involved in that world, but it was not just these roving gangs of paparazzi. But by the end she did have a kind of symbiotic relationship with them because she'd been abandoned by her family – or she had abandoned her family. It's very unclear. She no longer had management. I don’t think she really had an agent. The label was talking to her sporadically. She had broken up with Kevin Federline. She was desperate for her kids. She was surrounded by these predatory managers. And then she starts dating a paparazzo because that was who she was dealing with. She'd go to the CVS or the drugstore or whatever to buy lipstick in the middle of the night, and that would be her companion. So they did kind of consider themselves friends, even though in the back of their mind they must have known they were exploiting her.
CR: So in the book, Britney is with you all the time but she's also very distant. She cuts an incredibly lonely figure. But I did think that, in many ways, young Jeff cuts quite a solitary figure as well. Does that ring true? What was this period actually like for you?
JW: I wanted [the book’s protagonist] to be nameless because I didn't want it to be one of those meta things where you're like, ‘Oh it's Jeff Weiss playing Jeff Weiss.’ But at that time of my life it was horrible because there's nothing worse than being like a 23-year-old guy. Nobody wants you there. You're just like detritus. All the girls like older guys that have money and are better dressed and probably smarter and more sophisticated than you, and here I am being very emo and frequently writing poems and a journal. Pity anyone that met me at that time.
But I don't know, I always had this dream of being a writer, like a real writer. People always ask, what is a millennial? It's somebody that was raised with dreams and a reality. They were teased by the media images of what was going to be their future. And then as soon as they were old enough to grab whatever the proverbial brass ring was, it was snatched away from them. And I think that's the defining instance of millennial culture. I have a friend who would always be like, ‘You know you’re a millennial – or at least an older millennial – when you go to school for journalism and they teach you about print journalism. And as soon as you graduate, it’s like, ‘Haha, no magazines anymore.’ And I feel like we've all experienced that. It's a real bait and switch.
I was very depressed at that time, and part and parcel [of that] was the fact that I was doing this [job]. Not to spoil the book, but I got hired at People magazine, and I thought that was definitely my route out of this horrible world. Then due to various fiascos I did not end up working for People magazine for very long. If you read the book you'll see.
CR: At the end of the book Britney is being placed under this conservatorship. It's going to take away her freedom for more than a decade. She is doing increasingly deranged things. She's desperate to get her kids back, but isn't able to go through the hoops that would actually allow that to happen. K-Fed is hell – he’s an evil person, I think?
JW: No, I think K-Fed is misunderstood. I don’t know if he needs a full-scale image rehabilitation, exactly.
CR: Wow. OK. He comes across quite badly.
JW: Again, guilty of wearing way too many fedoras. He’s not a hero but he turned out to be a good father by all accounts, which I think he deserves credit for. Was he after the money? I think eventually, of course. But my point of it all is, you're a 27-year-old guy. Granted he was technically married at the time and did leave his pregnant wife to be with Britney Spears, which is pretty unconscionable. We cannot defend that. But I’m of the belief that a lot of people are hypocritical, and if they had the opportunity to date Britney Spears in 2004 they probably would have cut off an arm.
And then he is just thrust into instant fame and notoriety and is just as much the target of tabloid hatred as her, if not more. Everyone blames K-Fed for Britney’s slide. You have Rosie O'Donnell cheering when they get divorced. I can't even imagine how that must have felt at 27 years old, to be like, ‘The entire world hates me. I am like a joke.’ I think it's important to look at everyone as a human. One of the points about this book is I feel like people looked at Britney as though she wasn't a human being, she was just this object of pop stardom. And we still do that to celebrities – they’re making so much money, we do whatever we want with them. But K-Fed wasn't even making any money. He's just like this broke backup dancer.
CR: So in the midst of all of this, and as the book reaches its climax in the courts, Britney records Blackout. Now it's really easy to look back and say, ‘Well, that's a classic pop album.’ But it had a mixed reception at the time. I’d like to know, what is the takeaway here? How is it possible that she went to the studio and was apparently very dedicated to turning up, making this record good, and putting out probably the best, most cohesive album of her career while everything around her was melting down? How can such a person be?
JW: Well, I think it’s worth noting, her life was Blackout, right? That usually makes the best art, I think, when you can channel that headspace, whether accidentally or intentionally. And whether it was accidental or intentional, that was her – she was living this chaotic life. And she was really gifted. People forget that. She was not just in the Disney machine, but she was going up to New York and taking schooling and was a very naturally gifted singer. She was a little girl that was seven years old singing at a church and they’re like, ‘Your girl's gonna be famous.’ And going on Star Search and having to deal with Ed McMahon being a lecherous weirdo. And so I think that training mixed with this inherent gift that she had allowed her to do it.
Also, you have to give credit to Jive. Obviously we go the opposite way, we're like, ‘Well, actually, Britney had 100% agency,’ and she did have 100% agency – but so much of the record industry is based on these contributions from the producers and the label president and the A&Rs. It is a team effort. And if you look at Jive Records, barring the Justin Timberlake moments it is one of the great labels in history.
TL: To conclude, the book charts this shift away from weekly glossies towards a 24-hour online gossip cycle – so TMZ, Perez Hilton, etc – and the slow death of magazine journalism, which as you’ve said, also happened in music. I guess you've witnessed quite a few media collapses in your career. With all of this stuff we’ve endured over the last 25 years, why write a book? What is the impulse that still drives you to invest your time and money into something like this book?
JW: It's certainly not a financial decision. I don't know. Books have always been the most important things in my life. And I feel like if you really want to make any kind of artistic statement as a writer… I always felt very stultified by writing for magazines because it’d be like, ‘you can't do this,’ or ‘this has to be like that,’ so you felt like you were part of a product. Not to say that a book isn't part of a product, because there’s the whole selling soap promotional element of it, but it felt way closer to purity.
I think there's also this human impulse to tell your story. Obviously this isn't literally exactly my story. People always ask [how much of the book is true], and I don’t know what percentage is true, really. But it’s very spiritually honest. I tried to capture a moment in time. And I think books are really beautiful things. I’m terrified by the AI world that we’re in, and that people don’t read books the same way. The cliché now is that books teach you to have empathy. I would hope that this book has a lot of empathy for the people involved, as much as it’s making fun of them and myself at the same time.
We live in this world where to get people to read your book, your best bet is getting it adapted. And you have to have all kinds of crazy promotional gambits to get people to even notice the book in the first place. But I think my dream is that at the end of the day you're always trying to be part of this grander transmission or tradition. At least I am. I've been very lucky in the course of my journalism career to meet people that were heroes of mine, whether it was the Beat poets or the writer John Rechy. I’ve got to interview him a couple of times. He blurbed the book, which is amazing. I got an email from him last week, he’s been following all my press and congratulating me. And you’re like, that’s it. That’s the whole point of it. You do the thing not for any kind of material gain, but because there's some impulse driving it. You know, like Drakeo [the Ruler] always said, ‘Keep the truth alive.’ So at the end of the day, you're just trying to keep the truth alive. Allegedly. The truth can be interpreted any way you want.
