50: Jeff Weiss is still waiting for Britney Spears

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.


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