Britney Spears and how the media lost its mind

Join us in Philly on Tuesday, 29 for a special book talk with this week’s guest, Jeff Weiss, co-presented by CUJO and Lot 49 Books. The event kicks off at 7 pm, at Fishtown’s Neon Clown Dream Lounge — and will feature Jeff in conversation with Emilie, Drew Millard, and Sadie Dupuis, followed by a book signing, a Britney-themed DJ set by Domino Dancing, and, rumor has it, Britney-themed drinks. Admission is free, but you can pre-order Jeff’s book here to support him and one of the city’s best independent bookstores.

As a younger generation obsesses over Canon PowerShots, low-rise jeans, flip phones, Von Dutch, and other relics of the Y2K era, it’s easy to forget that the 00s were actually a pretty terrible era for pop culture. And while some of that has to do with aesthetics (looking at you, Boho Amnesia Belt), it was especially true when it comes to media. Think: award-winning news anchors contemplating pop stars’ virginities and making them cry on primetime TV; reality shows about celebrities in rehab funded by commercials for dubious diet pills; supermarket check-out aisles lined with magazines asking whether your favorite actor was “hot” or “not.”

Few people got to know that world quite like music writer, friend-of-the-pod, and Passion of the Weiss founder Jeff Weiss, and he just published a book about it. It’s called Waiting For Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly, and it’s a semi-fictional account of Jeff’s years working as a young tabloid reporter in the early 2000s, roving the streets of LA with a paparazzi buddy in pursuit of the rich and famous — and the concurrent arc that saw Britney Spears go from America’s Sweetheart to Vegas party girl to conservatee.

You could call it a work of fiction, written as a memoir; a work of non-fiction in the spirit of Joseph Mitchell and the Beat poets; or, as Jeff has described it, “a one-person referendum on the impossibility of knowing the exact truth about anything — especially anything refracted and distorted through the lens of electronic media.” Either way, it’s as much about Britney as it is about the glossy, Ed Hardy-adorned last days of pre-internet media and pop culture at the turn of the millennium — and how that time set the stage for the ruthless, gossip-obsessed cultural climate of the present.

Jeff joins us to talk about his days as a gossip reporter, and why he chose this experimental format rather than a straightforward biography. We also get into how these experiences informed his understanding of the morality (and amorality) of journalism, how the tabloid era paved the way for our current moment in political media, and why a new generation of young people seems so nostalgic for the fashion and music of the early 2000s.

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Buy Waiting for Britney Spears, and follow the book’s Instagram account. There’s also an official playlist.

Follow Jeff on X and check out his new podcast, The Truth Hurts.

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