Waiting for Britney Spears
A True Story, Allegedly
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
AN LA TIMES BESTSELLER. Named a Most Anticipated Book by People, Vulture, A.V. Club and OurCulture. One of Glamour's Best Summer Beach Reads.
"Like a J.D. Salinger novel rolled in Hunter S. Thompson's hallucinogen dust." —Ann Powers, author of Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
"[Waiting for Britney Spears] transformed and transported me." ―Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year
A frenetic, gonzo account of Britney Spears’s historic rise and equally tragic fall told by an iconoclastic music journalist.
America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He'd instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”
Years later, after finally establishing himself as a celebrated journalist, Jeff Weiss presents Waiting for Britney Spears, a gonzo, nostalgic, and “allegedly true” recounting of his years as a tabloid spy in the lurid underbelly of Los Angeles. Weiss follows America’s sweetheart through Vegas superclubs and Malibu car chases, annulled marriages and soul-crushing legal battles, all the way to Britney’s infamous 2007 VMA performance. As Weiss lives through the chaos leading to Britney’s conservatorship, he observes, with peerless style, cringe-inducing fashion waves, destructive celebrity surveillance, and a country whose decline is embodied by the devastating downturn of its former golden child.
With the narrative flair that established him as a singular chronicler of modern pop culture, Weiss goes for broke in Waiting for Britney Spears, a descent into a neon hall of mirrors reflecting our obsession with fame, morality, and the mystery of what really happened to the last great pop star.
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Music journalist Weiss (Passion of the Weiss) takes an exhilarating trip through the ups and downs of Britney Spears's career in this no-holds-barred account. He traces his infatuation with the pop star from crashing the filming of her "Baby... One More Time" music video as a 16-year-old through to his coverage of Spears for the tabloid magazine Nova. Weiss reported on such highs as Spears's domination of the Teen Choice Awards in 2003, as well as lows like her disastrous performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, her flirtations with cocaine, her public battles for custody of her children, her father's attempts to send her to rehab, and the conservatorship she was placed under from 2008 to 2021. In colorful, entertaining detail, Weiss lucidly explains how the paparazzi capitalized on the chaos of Spears's life to give the public the chaos they demanded. For instance, he describes how photos of Spears's son buckled the wrong way in her car resulted in a global scandal and fueled doubts about her ability to mother her kids, and how paparazzi would sometimes bait her, leading to a supposed "psychotic break" in 2007 when she struck a photographer's car with an umbrella. As much a thrilling chronicle of Spears's life as it is a perceptive examination of celebrity culture, this captivates.
