Miss American Dream

How Britney Spears went to Vegas and became a feminist role model. No, really.
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Illustrations by Geoff J. Kim
At the top of the steps of Planet Hollywood, on the Las Vegas Strip, an elderly
woman dressed in a black wig and a tiara and a fur coat over an evening gown lod
ged a formal complaint with a woman holding a clipboard.
She s fucking up my day, said the woman loudly. This is where I work. This was her tur
f, it seemed, a place where she allowed tourists to take pictures of her or with
her in exchange for a dollar or two. This is a common occupation up and down th
e Strip, but most practitioners are dressed as familiar characters like Darth Va
der or the Minions from Despicable Me. It was harder to discern who this lady wa
s supposed to be. The Queen of England, maybe?
Either way, there would be no pictures today. About an hour before dawn on a win
dy morning last December, several tired-looking men had rolled out heavy metal e
quipment and slowly assembled the various components into what seemed to be a st
age: high-intensity lights, a long red carpet, an industrial-looking 360-degree
rotating platform. Security guards had taken their seats at strategic corners, s
ettling in for what they knew was going to be a long day with a chaotic ending.
You better believe she s going to fuck this up, like she fucks up everything, the Qu
een said. How am I going to get paid? Who will pay me? The woman with the clipboar
d listened to her sympathetically and then pretended to be called away.
Britney Spears s Las Vegas
Welcome. (Denise Truscello/ WireImage via Getty Images)
A surprisingly forceful wind began to blow, and more and more people emerged fro
m the 150,000 hotel rooms along Las Vegas Boulevard and began to gather around t
he barriers. They shared no clear demographic, unless being people who chew gum
loudly is a demographic, which maybe it is: families with small children; drag p
erformers off their nightly shifts; women who were anywhere between their late 2
0s and early 40s and who had the aggressively stripey blonde highlights and seve
re, long-in-front, shorter-in-back haircut of so many female visitors to the Str
ip; those women s despondent male companions; women still drunk from the night bef
ore who kept hoisting up their wilting strapless dresses and who carried yard-hi
gh cups in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, now equal parts frozen drink remnants
and backwash. Whenever anyone sidled up to the guards and asked what was going o
n, the answer was always just Britney.
Nobody had to ask which Britney. From the time you deplaned into McCarran airpor
t, you were full-court pummeled with giant billboards of Britney Spears in a red
, sequined leotard, an actual scarlet V on her chest, hands on hips, head bent d
isconcertingly downward as she stares, either seductively or drunkenly it could be
either, and determining it depends largely on your worldview, but more on that
later into the camera. The mini TVs in the cabs played Britney music as mini show
hosts talked about Britney. Inside Planet Hollywood, life-size Britneys covered
the elevators, so that when the doors opened she was cut directly down the middl
e, which is exactly the subtle sort of metaphor that Vegas is known for.
All this was to advertise Piece of Me, her new two-year Las Vegas residency. Veg
as doesn t make as much as it used to on casinos you don t have to travel to gamble an
ymore, not since the advent of online gambling and the Indian casino; plus the c
rash in 2008 left Vegas s tourist-dependent economy in tatters. The thing that pul
led it around was a phenomenon known as the trip-driver, a star so big that people
would come to Vegas to see her, as opposed to a star who people would see if th
ey just happened to be visiting Vegas. Celine. Elton. Shania. Britney.
This event was Britney s Las Vegas Welcome, which is a sort of official greeting c
eremony, usually a few weeks before a residency begins, when, ostensibly, the st
ar settles into her newly adopted city, and is received by the hotel brass and o
ther Vegas dignitaries, like DJs and the people who impersonate her at late-nigh
t variety shows. To Welcome Shania Twain for her residency, Still the One, in 20
11, the Strip was closed off and 40 actual live horses were set loose to thunder
from one end to the other. Rod Stewart s residency was Welcomed in 2011 with a bu
nch of synchronized swimmers in the pool at Caesars because why shouldn t he be. F
or Britney s Welcome, Caesars had decided on a retrospective of her career, includ
ing a medley of her most popular songs and outfits. Though she s only 32, she s had
a long enough career that this seemed to make sense.
The sun rose and descended over the Strip, quickly, like it does in a reality sh
ow, on sped-up film. Some dancers who were also gymnasts and contortionists rehe
arsed over and over for hours on the revolving platform, doing everything from a
sexy schoolgirl-uniformed Baby One More Time to a fire-breathing Circus. The wind bl
ew even harder, and some in the audience paused their gum chewing to express to
the security guards that perhaps it was dangerous for these dancers, and of cour
se, Britney, to perform on top of the structure. Everyone seemed quite worried,
but also there was nothing else to talk about. A young woman who had slowly gott
en drunker and drunker over the past hour thanks to a double Eiffel Tower of fro
zen drink said, Where the hell is that bitch?
Fifty stories above all this, Britney Spears was working. She didn t know about th
e wind or the dancers or the fire-breather or about the old lady whose day she h
ad fucked up immeasurably, the one who might be the Queen of England. She was si
tting in a room in the semi-dark, slightly hunched over, a little bored, at the
tail end of a daylong junket in which TV journalists asked her questions like Wha
t do people not know about you? ( Really that I m pretty boring. ) and What was the craz
iest rumor you ever heard about yourself? ( That I died. ) and who her secret famous
crush is, a question that she s been asked for years and years and that she s been g
iving the same answer to for years and years ( Brad Pitt ).
Suddenly, one of the lights went out and the interview stopped as assistants scu
rried, trying to fix it. They were running a very tight clock. Britney needed to
be downstairs at 4:30 for her Welcome.
Britney sat there with a polite, blank expression. This is the job, right? She k
nows there s a lot she has to do so that she can continue to do the thing that she
loves. You can t just sing and dance anymore. You have to prepare to sing and dan
ce, which is getting harder as you get older. You have to talk about preparing t
o sing and dance to reporters, and then talk about what you plan to sing and dan
ce. Some interviewer had given Skittles to her as a gift during the junket, and
now an assistant handed them to her when the lights went out. That s what the inte
rviewers do. They come and they give her food. Yesterday had been her 32nd birth
day. Mario Lopez had brought cupcakes. (The month before, a foreign journalist h
ad asked her what her birthday plans were. Probably working, she d said. His respons
e: You re so American. )
The residency had been Britney s idea in the first place, one she d been kicking aro
und for years, this notion of setting up shop somewhere, making life a little bi
t more predictable and normal for her kids. But how can a pop star do that? For
a while, she tried TV, and Fox paid her a reported $15 million for a judging gig
on The X Factor. But she was terrible at the banter and bitchy sound bites that
are so much the matter of those talent shows. Britney came up in a time of CDs,
one of her managers, Adam Leber, reminded me, before interaction with fans was
so unpredictable and needy and could come at you through your phone.
But it wasn t just that, really. She told her publicist, Jeff Raymond, that watchi
ng other people perform made her wistful. She wasn t ready to hang it up in her ea
rly 30s and assume the bizarre position of grande dame judge, trotted out for he
r wisdom rather than her talent, like Liza Minnelli or an errant Pussycat Doll.
Britney quit before Simon Cowell could fire her so she could quit before he coul
d fire her.
So what do you do next? You could set up shop in London or China and do a regula
r show. Or Broadway. But the other cities felt too remote and Broadway seemed to
o old. Vegas seemed old, too, with its so-called heritage acts that coalesce so
well with what the city loves about itself: its ability to create a museum in ti
me that tourists can visit, where you can tell them the story of what it was lik
e for you, and how you d like them to think of you. Elton John remembers when rock
and he were young. Over at the Flamingo, Donny & Marie are still testing the bo
undaries of acceptable sibling love like it s 1974.
Still, it s hard to compete with Vegas, which brings in 300,000 new people every s
ingle weekend. That, and the 45-minute private jet ride back to Britney s home in
Westlake, California, made it seem doable. Plus, there had been a few younger re
sidencies recently that had done well: Mtley Cre and Guns N Roses had done mostly s
old-out runs at The Joint, the clubby concert venue over at the Hard Rock Caf. (O
kay, so not younger. Hipper? Hipper.)
It was actually electronic dance music that inspired her to think she might fit
in there, with Deadmau5 and Tisto and Avicii ruling nightclubs that were able to
charge $500 for a VIP couch and a bottle of champagne. And EDM was proving good
for Vegas. In 2011, the Electric Daisy Carnival yielded an economic impact of $1
36 million. (To put that into perspective, look at some of the city s top-earning
events that year: The NASCAR Sprint Cup race contributed $177 million and the Co
nsumer Electronics Show, $202 million.) And Britney would be a trip-driver for s
ure, even after what people thought might be her peak. She is still more famous
to more people than, say, Carrot Top, and he s filling seats at the Luxor several
nights a week.
Britney had once been a get the subject of much-previewed, much-advertised prime-t
ime interviews with the morning TV hosts who are our unelected arbiters of all t
hat is wholesome and morally upright. Diane Sawyer demanded an explanation of ex
actly where her hymen went and when and what the girls who look up to her were s
upposed to make of all of this. Britney reacted the way we all did when we were
confronted about our virginity as teenagers: She answered the questions, either
truthfully or not, never summoning the disgust that was her due for having peopl
e ask the question in the first place. In 2006, Matt Lauer interviewed a pregnan
t, gum-chewing version of Britney on the cusp of a breakdown, a perceptible Matt
Lauer sneer on his face, wanting to know if she truly understood what her behav
ior was doing to her children. She cried and begged for privacy. You have to real
ize that we re people, she pleaded.
Now she just does a quick televised announcement of the residency with
sunny-tanned weatherman Sam Champion, followed months later by these junket inte
rviews, so that she can fulfill her obligation to get out as much of the informa
tion to as many of the people as she can. Britney handed over the bag of Skittle
s, unfinished, to an assistant and answered another riveting question, which had
already been asked of her multiple times that day and whose answer was availabl
e to anyone with YouTube access or a memory: What s something that people don t know
about Britney? ( Really that I m kind of boring. )
The security and management and publicity teams assembled in the hallway, and Br
itney shivered a little big crowds make her nervous. Not because of safety or anyt
hing. No, she has tried to explain this in interviews: Something that isn t her ta
kes over when she s on stage. When she s not, she s, well,
really kind of boring and regular and doesn t love being the center of attention,
or in a large group. Britney was ushered toward the elevators, through the casin
o, and outside to a 58 Impala, chosen from the classic car collection at the Quad
(another Caesars property) that was waiting to drive her around the block so th
at she could get out and deliver what everyone had been waiting for all day.
So, just after 4:30 on that Tuesday, as the Las Vegas police were becoming irate
in their insistence that the crowd not spill onto the street and someone behind
me nervously mentioned the Walmart worker who had been trampled the week before
at a doorbuster, Britney stepped out of the Impala. She walked past the crowd,
up the stairs. She was blonde and shiny, and for a minute it was as if everyone
in attendance faded to a muted dark and she was the only thing on the entire Str
ip that glowed. Her performance was not a singing performance, or even a vamping
one. She received a bouquet of roses and thanked Planet Hollywood and the city
of Las Vegas for Welcoming her so warmly, took a few pictures, and she was gone.
The Welcome, you see, is as false a construct as the word residency. Most reside
nts save Celine Dion actually reside outside of Vegas, and the minute she was ab
le to, Britney hightailed it back to her private plane and went back home to put
her two kids to bed and then went to bed herself, because there were more rehea
rsals in Manhattan Beach tomorrow.
In the elevator, on the way back to our rooms in Planet Hollywood, inside those
doors that had opened Britney up and closed us up inside her, a young lady told
her friend that that was some fucked up way to spend the last four hours.
I met Courtney Fitzgerald, a public relations manager from the tourism bureau, f
or lunch at Burgr, one of several Gordon Ramsay-
operated restaurants on the Caesars properties. The waiter had a one-sided discu
ssion about the menu for maybe five whole minutes, using not one but two iPads t
o make his case. During his filibuster, he used the buzzwords of Las Vegas, tempt
ed and sinful and
indulge, winking and smiling his sparkleteeth at me like it wasn t a hamburger he wa
s talking about; like it was an underage virgin or my best friend s husband. I lik
e to think Vegas would have reminded me of Britney Spears even if I hadn t been at
work on a story about her in the first place.
Las Vegas is getting younger, Fitzgerald told me when the waiter finally beat it.
Between 1998 and 2013, the percentage of people under 40 visiting
Vegas went from 29 percent to 42 percent. The amount of people 65 and older drop
ped from 20 percent to 15. Just about every person I met in Vegas excitedly shar
ed this statistic with me, as if eliminating age in favor of youth didn t sound cr
eepy and dystopic. But looking around the city, all I can say is: you could have
fooled me.
You could have fooled Cher, too. Cher had a residency at the Colosseum at Caesar
s Palace from 2008 to 2011. She didn t like it the official story is Vegas throat, whi
ch is the impact of consistent exposure to dry air on the vocal chords. That was
just the cover, though. The theater she was performing in had been built for Ce
line with a microclimate system moist air jetting up from vents in the stage into
her face. Her dressing room had roughly the same humidity levels as a rainforest
. But, really, Cher couldn t stand the old people. Playing a concert and seeing th
e walkers up and down the aisles and the blue hairs and the wrinkles filled her
with an existential dread that sent her running back to Malibu.
But the old people who came to see her old people in wheelchairs, on
motorized scooters, hooked up to oxygen tanks and smoking they have money, and the
y spend it, pounding away at slot machines with no other aspirations for the day
except maybe to hear some music at the end of it, so long as they don t have to l
eave the building.
The tourism sweet spot, of course, is the middle-aged double-income couple, whic
h is why AEG Live, the concert promotion company, bet the Celine Dion residency
would be a goldmine back in 2002 when the Colosseum was first built as her perso
nal theater. People who want to see Celine can pay for a steak afterward, and ma
ybe a few rounds of blackjack, too. Or they can just buy more Celine tickets! Th
e Colosseum has hit a total of $1 billion through its various residencies (Celin
e, Rod, Shania, Elton John) since 2003.
Celine, which is the second iteration of her residency, was described to me as a
celebration of Celine, and Celine sure is great at celebrating Celine: She sing
s Where Does My Heart Beat Now with a bunch of LCD monitors that are playing recor
dings of her singing that song at various other times in her career, which is re
miniscent of the scene in Being John Malkovich where they go into his ego and it s
all Malkoviches. This should but doesn t prepare you for later, when she does a d
uet with I shit you not a hologram of herself, and at times it is difficult to deter
mine which of the Celines is the hologram. Later she does a duet with a hologram
of a piano-playing Stevie Wonder, but by then, sure, why not.
Shania Twain s Still the One residency fills the 4,000-seat Colosseum when Celine
isn t performing. She s Canadian, too, and she s country, so that leaves only about 12
Vegas tourists who don t want to see her. (A note here on Canadians: They are not
only the largest international group visiting, with all major airlines deliveri
ng planeloads of Canadians directly every few hours, but they re also running the
place. There s Celine and her husbandager Ren Anglil and Celine s protg, the vocal impre
ssionist Vronic DiCaire, and her husbandager, Ray, but also Cirque du Soleil is e
ntirely Canadian, making Vegas very much the American land of Canadian opportuni
ty.)
I don t know what the best part of Shania s concert was for me if it was the silk leop
ard print robe replica from the That Don t Impress Me Much video, or that she brings
not one but two live horses up on stage, one black one to represent her tough t
imes (her husband, Mutt Lange, running off with her best friend, who was her ass
istant), one white one to represent her healing (Vegas, and the fact that she s no
w married to that assistant s ex-husband! Booyah!). In the bowels of the Colosseum
, a woman named Glynda removes that silk robe and all of Shania s other clothing e
ach night, checking it for rips or stains before retiring it lovingly to the saf
ety of a hanger. Perhaps this is a trade secret, but here s something that Glynda
told me that echoed panicky through my brain later that night: There is no alter
native for that robe. It s the only one.
Each residency is a reflection of the demographic the property is going for the Mi
rage made a play for the affluent and not-quite-debaucherous late 30s/early 40s
crowd with Boyz II Men, these boyz who are now patchily gray men, who remain pur
e in their desire to romance you, to make gauzy, romantic, sweet, consensual lov
e to you, and quickly retreat when you give the nod, who wear sequined letter sw
eaters and overestimate the impact their music had on our sex lives ( I bet there
are some Boyz II Men babies in here! ). The Venetian very much wants the Midwester
n, soft-country audience of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Planet Hollywood, with it
s hot pink accents and movie-themed rooms, was built for the Britney fan.
It s only late in the evenings that Vegas visibly becomes what the tourism board s
ays it is: young and saturated with sex and not the Boyz II Men-sanctioned lovemak
ing kind, either. Out on the Strip, aging women wear shirts that say Girls! Girls
! Girls! A man working for a competing strip club has a shirt that says Orgasim Cl
inic: Accepting New Patients. (Sic on that tragic typo.) Single-named DJs pump th
eir skinny arms as women in tight tube dresses and Lucite heels they bought onli
ne a year ago straddle mouth-breathing men on VIP couches like they just heard t
here was an asteroid headed toward earth or just took a handful of Ecstasy; plat
onic girlfriends decide to make out at no urging at all because we re in Vegas bit
chez! One does not have to go far to feel the erection of a stranger in the rear
 of one s jeans. It is in these small, handsy hours of the night that Caesars hope
for Britney was born.
Caesars owns several properties the Paris, Bally s, Harrah s, the Flamingo, Caesars Pa
lace, of course, and Planet Hollywood. Kurt Melien, the smiley, tan vice preside
nt and head of Caesars Entertainment, wanted a star to call his own, someone he
didn t have to share with AEG Live, someone bigger than Season 5 American Idol win
ner Taylor Hicks, who looks like he s 50, seems like he s 60, even if he s actually no
t even 40. Taylor Hicks was selling out the 200-seat Napoleon room at the Paris
to horny, bosomy middle-aged women and their gloomy, hopeless husbands. So, thou
ght Melien, why not bring in someone young to drive youthful spending? Sure, he d
do a fast gut on the Axis theater. Anything for Britney!
Britney s contract for this show, which pays a reported $15 million (about $300,00
0 per show), demands that she create a spectacle that s bigger than anything she d d
one before, so that people who had seen her live before would still be tempted t
o come. (Celine s first residency featured 53 dancers and a bunch of clowns, impra
ctical to take on the road, to say the least.) Fine by Britney. She told Baz Hal
pin, the show s creative director, that she wanted elements: fire, water, snow. Sh
e wanted a jungle theme, which is something she always wants. Halpin loved the i
dea and gave her a tree to jump off of in the middle of the third act; it s 56,000
pounds and 32 feet high and takes six people to move.
Halpin and Britney began working on the set list, and the subindustry that is hi
red when a show like this goes up costumes, dancers, ticket sales kiosk-builders,
etc. got to work. The contract, like all residency contracts, insisted on the hits
. Vegas shows are normally just 90 minutes, no intermissions, no matter who is p
laying. Halpin told me it s because you have more creative control in Vegas, and t
hat stars don t like intermissions: You prep and prep and you re getting ready for th
e show and then you hit the stage and then it s a roller coaster. It s a blur. Then
it s over and so to get plucked out of that and then sit in your trailer for 15 mi
nutes and then like have to build up that excitement again is incredibly frustra
ting for the star.
That s not the only reason, of course. You can t tire an audience out. It used to be
a Britney show was your whole night, a special event. Now, her show is very del
iberately just one part of the night, and that renders her just another of the w
omen you encounter in Vegas who ease your way to the baccarat tables and buffets
: card dealer, table dancer, hostess, prostitute, waitress, bartender, Britney S
pears. (The first thing you notice when you land in Vegas is all the breasts. Br
easts are the shining, veiny centerpiece of the uniforms in Vegas; it s a city bui
lt on the breasts and shoulders of women. The only thing women aren t in this city
are magicians, but they are the people being sawed and made to disappear nightl
y for the magician s applause.)
Notably, AEG Live was one of the only entities in town that didn t make a play for
Britney. Though John Meglen the president of AEG Live, the mastermind behind the
Celine deal, and, as such, the father of the modern-day, post-Wayne Newton resid
ency said, We were offered it a few times. Meglen has a lot of gray hair and is buil
t like a muscle car dense and handsome. There is nobody who understands the inner
workings of Vegas and its properties like he does.
Even if you believe in Britney, that gives you 50 shows [per year], great, what a
re you going to put in there your other 200 nights a year? Meglen told me, in his
office in L.A. If all they have in there is Britney Spears and she is sold out f
or 50 shows, they have failed. They need Britney Spears and the Spice Girls and
Jennifer Lopez and Pink or whoever, okay? That said, even if the theater is sold
out and the seats filled, that doesn t quite fulfill the residency s mission, which
is to say: Vegas may claim to want youth, but young people aren t actually good fo
r business.
 You have to ask, Are those kids buying tickets yet? Meglen continued. Because most of
them still are seven in a carload driving out from Southern California, they al
l sleep in one room, they spend the day at the pool and at night they go to the
clubs. They re great at using the workout room, that comes with your ticket. They
don t get the body scrubs or the facial wraps, you know? They don t gamble and they
don t eat at restaurants and right now, in my opinion, it s fucking tanking the whol
e fucking city.
Almost immediately following the announcement of Piece of Me, a memo on Caesars
letterhead leaked, listing possible responses that Planet Hollywood staff should
use when asked by the average ticket-buyer if Britney plans to sing live. (Samp
le: Certainly she will be singing live! Yes, all vocals will be live! No lip syncing
will happen at the show. ) The document was a fake, concocted by who knows, which
is not to say she s singing live, either.
Britney knows she s no Celine in that department; she s not even a Shania. A voice t
eacher I know said she uses unnatural and precarious forceful closure of the phar
ynx with corresponding raised larynx and tongue root to effect equal parts sexy b
aby voice and major vocal fry it s a way to compensate for what is not a naturally l
ovely voice. On her albums, her voice isn t just auto-tuned, it s layered. What we re
hearing is Britney on top of Britney on top of Britney, filling in the thinness
with quantity.
I don t begrudge her the backup track, though. Our expectations of a woman in her
30s who has built two people in her body might be a little bit of a reach. To put
on the show that she puts on, it s virtually impossible to sing the entire time a
nd do what she does, Adam Leber told me. She s singing on every song, basically, whe
n she has the ability to sing. There s no way you can dance for 90 minutes straigh
t and sing the entire time.
Britney runs through it, again. (AP Photo/Caesars Entertainment, Denise Truscell
o)
Vicious assessments of the show s likelihood for failure soon flooded the Internet
. Fox News wondered if Britney could handle the pressure of the gig, quoting unn
amed sources close to Britney who said, There is little chance that she can actua
lly do this. The stress of a daily public appearance and the physical nature of
a show could overwhelm her for sure. Fox also brought out a legal analyst, who sa
id, There is no doubt that Spears has mental health issues or the judge would be
forced to lift the conservatorship, which allowed her father and lawyer control o
ver her money, a move initially necessitated by her breakdown. She was going to
fuck this up too, just like the Queen of England had predicted. (The truth is pr
obably closer to what sources close to Caesars, which means that they work at Ca
esars, tell me: that the company had insisted on the conservatorship just in cas
e, and that it must remain throughout her contract.)
But if you weren t watching in the years since the head-shaving, the car-beating,
and the conservatorship and tabloids didn t really cover this in-between part, so yo
ur ignorance is understandable Britney managed to have six top-10 Billboard hits a
nd two successful world tours: 2009 s The Circus Starring Britney Spears grossed $
131.8 million, making it the seventh highest grossing tour that year and the six
th highest ever by a female artist, and 2011 s Femme Fatale, which was the 11th hi
ghest grossing tour that year, with a take of about $70 million.
Britney and her team decided it was time for a new album, too, and the new album
, Britney Jean, which she promised would be her most personal and intimate yet,
would come out around the same time that Vegas came to fruition. One would feed
the other. That doesn t appear to have happened. 209,000 albums had been sold by e
arly January. For context, Beyonce s album, which dropped in the middle of the nig
ht on iTunes more than a week after Britney Jean, had sold 1,432,000 albums by t
he same time.
If you think instead of the residency as a two-year tour to promote the album, w
hich is sort of what it is, the jury is still out on how well it did. This is th
e kind of efficiency born of a smart management team, sure, but also what Britne
y has become since we last really watched her: a single working mother, and all
that entails a balancer, a scheduler, a picker, and a chooser. Britney is the mach
ine that supports both her immediate and extended family. And of course there s th
e matter of keeping her sons father, the upwardly motile Kevin Federline, who rec
eives a $25,000 monthly child support check from Britney. That money mostly help
s support Kevin s new startup, which is building an empire of tiny Federlines to r
ise up and one day demolish us all, Idiocracy-style. At this writing, Federline s
sixth child had just been born.
There s Britney Jean, the little girl from Louisiana, said Fenton Bailey, who co-dir
ected the documentary I Am Britney Jean and spent months with her. There s Britney
Spears the pop star. And then there s Britneyplex, which is the enormous machine b
uilt around Britney Spears. It s not just one person. It becomes like an aircraft
carrier, all people, personnel, interrelation business, and industries.
If you imagine the Britneyplex as concentric circles, you d find her and her paren
ts and her sister and brother, but also her kids and Kevin and Kevin s other kids,
and then the managers and the agents and publicists. Further out on those circl
es are the dancers, many of whom have trained all their lives to be her dancers.
(Unlike some other stars, she likes to share the stage with them, and isn t threa
tened by their presence? ?something that occasionally works to her detriment with
some of the critics, when they compare her with her much younger compatriots.) F
rom there are the musicians and costume designers and the many, many people who
work for the costume designers, stitching in silk and locking in corset boning.
Additional circles house the people who make their livings, even if briefly, doc
umenting Britney? ?like Bailey and a 26-year-old Vegas local named Jordan Miller,
who has run the fansite BreatheHeavy (which receives more than 70,000 uniques pe
r day) since he was 15 years old. And then there are the people who work the Bri
tney Spears store that s open after her show, all the way down to the carpenter wh
o was now in charge of gutting the old Aladdin to make way for Britney, and even
further to the twerking little person Britney lookalike who was doing impressio
ns of her down the road at a dive bar for $300 a night. (It is not lost on me th
at I, too, have momentarily entered the Britplex while reporting and writing thi
s story.)
There is a myth out there that she is a robot or just a controlled person, said Ba
iley. I don t think it s true at all. I think she is the captain of her ship. It s just
that she s not an alpha personality in the way that Madonna is an alpha personali
ty. There s more than one way to skin a cat, I think.
Not everyone counted Britney out. There was, of course, her fan base: the Britne
y Army, a true organism filled with what appears to be people from their late te
ens to early 40s who can mark a special place in their lives with a Britney song
or era communicating primarily in capital letters and animated GIFs of past Britn
ey sound bites, dance moves, looks, and gestures that highlight her overall fier
ceness. (The one thing they cannot abide is Beyonc. A Twitter war can break out w
hen a Britney fan simply states, apropos of nothing, BEYONC STOLE BRITNEY S MOVES, an
d it s on, motherfucker. Fifty retweets, Beyonc s fans engaged in tepid quasi-comebac
k. This is probably the worst part of it all, the way the Beyonc fans don t even ca
re about the baiting.)
They refer to her not as Brit-Brit, which is her family s nickname for her, but as
an assortment of words to describe her made into portmanteaux with her name: Wh
en she s practicing for her show, they call her Rehearsalney. When she s caught lear
ning choreography or participating in a new sequence, she s Dancney. When she goes
 to Target, which is constantly, she s Errandney. And when she inspires them or pu
lls something amazing off, which is practically always, if you ask them, she is
Godney.
Andrea is not the real first name of a New York-based dominatrix who is a Britne
y obsessive. She is very skinny, with long hair, a pointy nose, smiley eyes, and
perpetual excitement. We met on BreatheHeavy and I d asked if we could meet the d
ay of the show. She had texted me to look for her? ? I m in a cowgirl look ? ?and she was,
boots and hat included.
She s been a Stan (an obsessive fan, a term plucked from Eminem liturgy) since 200
3; that was when Britney, to Andrea, became Authenticney, less Bubblegumney and
dropping that bullshit wide-eyed Virginey act. It was Meltdowney circa 2008 that
sealed the deal for her, though. Oh, I loved it, Andrea said. She was just saying
fuck you to the world over and over. This was who I knew she was. In the early 2
000s, she was a phony. This was really her. The Britney Army believes in her in a
way that is touching. They watched Britney do the ugly work we are all charged
with: leaving our innocence behind and figuring out a way to be real people with
out being living reactions to what we once were or were perceived to be.
This was Andrea s first Britney show there was literally no way she could be disappo
inted, she told me. It s worth stopping to consider why Andrea was here in Vegas,
or why anyone was. Increasingly, we are all experiencing one another only from o
ur desks and our phones and our Twitter feeds. This Britney concert is real. May
be the singing isn t, sure. But this, a weekend in Vegas, is real. It is a concent
rated vacation experience in which the only expectation is that you act like the
type of person you usually are not. You might not even enjoy it for truly, over m
y month there, I saw much drunkenness, much screaming, much innuendo, much grind
ing, but I don t believe I saw much enjoyment. Time in Vegas will, however, give y
ou something to go back to your computer about. The longer we spend at our compu
ters, the more we need those that times to post about.
When opening night came around, among the tearful fans in line, replicas of the
red vinyl catsuit that she wore in the Oops! I Did It Again video could be seen in
great abundance; Andrea wore one, too. I ended up sitting near a group of trans
women who each, individually, acted as though they were alone with Britney, sin
ging to her like I would never have the guts to do with anyone in public, or may
be even alone. These people just wanted to be in the same room with Britney, and
with people who also wanted to be in the same room as Britney. These people did
n t care that Britney was a pawn for foot traffic to the casino. Fuck foot traffic
to the casino.
On the surface, Work Bitch is a bizarre dance song with depressing lyrics. It is t
he first song she sings in Piece of Me:
You want a hot body? You want a Bugatti? You want a Maserati? You better work bi
tch
Without getting into the politics of a woman calling herself or another woman a
bitch, consider what Britney is trying to tell us. She d promised that this album
would be her most personal album yet, and what do we get? Work bitch ? Is she the b
itch? Are we calling her a bitch? Is she instructing another bitch as to the sec
ret of her success? How is this personal?
Vulture published a disgusted review, calling her not just the most boring singe
r on the planet but the most boring person, and anti-matter in a belly shirt. Flavor
wire kindly rushed to Britney s aid, asking why we talk about Britney as if she s no
t a prisoner. (A reference, again, to her conservatorship.)
I d like to submit a different theory: What if this is a personal song? The song s s
entiments are certainly the only ones in current pop that I can relate to. Its m
essage is that nothing comes easily, that you can t keep your kids in private scho
ol and your community gated and your ex-husband in his nation-building ambitions
without work. Britney isn t the fuck-up we decided she was during a relatively sh
ort but well-publicized period of her life. She drops off her kids and picks the
m up from school just about every day. She shows up on time, hits every mark, is
polite and soft-spoken. She rehearses five or six hours every day, saying, Let s r
un through it one more time. Britney works.
So, are we prepared to dismiss our preconceived notions of her as some sad gum-c
hewing has-been to make room for another interpretation? What if Britney has som
ehow become a feminist role model for single working mothers here and everywhere
?
Collage image credits, from top: 1. Denise Truscello for Caesar s Entertainment (B
ritney), Chris Gilmore, University of the Fraser Valley, Shawn Perez, Love_Haigh
t (Fans); 2. Marco Pakoningrat (Britney), Mainstream Media Distribution (makeup
artist), Sister72 (TV anchor); 3. Picturesbyann; 4. From left: LunchboxLP (Boyz
II Men), David Carroll (Cher), Zoltan Szabo (Shania Twain); 5. From top: Mark Sc
ott, Jimi Chang, Patrick Barry / via Flickr
Maybe that s what I was seeing. For her entire career, Britney has been a living,
breathing Rorschach test not just to me but to anyone who regards her. She prese
nts us with action and art, all for interpretation, maybe even fucking with us a
little while she does it. And whatever we see in it, that tells us a lot about
who we are, not who she is.
Example: She recorded a song for the 2013 Smurfs sequel called Ooh La La. Here are
the lyrics:
Take my hand, we can go all night And spin me round just the way I like It feels
so good, I don t wanna stop So baby come with me and be my ooh la la
If you find that song sweet, you are one kind of person; if you find it to be a
song about anal that somehow made it into a children s movie, you are quite anothe
r.
Meanwhile, here is the bridge for Work Bitch :
Hold your head high Fingers to the sky They re gonna try to try you But they can t d
eny you
Mine is just as valid as any of the hundreds of theories that others have propos
ed over the years. Alas, Britney ll never confirm or deny it. I never did get to i
nterview her as I said, she refuses most in-depth interviews. In December, she tol
d InStyle that she s gotten lip injections, and so the coverline reveals this is He
r most candid interview yet! Everyone wants her most personal album and her most
personal interview ever we are a nation riveted by Britney s personhood and no matter
how many times she answers our questions, still she is a whore and a liar and an
idiot and a fraud.
Instead she answers the same questions she s always answered: The crazy rumor, the
favorite city to visit, the secret crush (that she died, for Christ s sake; Londo
n, but she s not sure why; Brad Pitt! Brad Pitt! For the love of god, it s always Br
ad Pitt!). They re gonna try to try you but they can t deny you.
So now we get nothing, either because she s wary of us or because she knows that i
f you re reading this, your decision has already been made. Now she s a mystery wrap
ped in a riddle bound together by a hair extension. Now, the weatherman gets to
interview her.
And then, on opening night, Britney descended into the crowd inside a basket-wea
ve metal orb, sparkly in silver and flesh, alighted from the thing, doing her fa
mous strut up and down, draaaag step, draaaag step. It had been a hellish few we
eks for those involved in the show. One of the dancers had been injured, and the
whole thing was running over, so they had to cut a number. A publicist for the
show told me, I flew home for like a day. But then even, I did not answer a singl
e e-mail on Christmas Day. I m like, This is for Jesus. Like, he doesn t care about
Britney. I mean, he does. But not like about this job.
Britney did some major dancing, dipping low and jumping high and leaping faithfu
lly into other dancers arms. She did a lot of those robot-who-mated-with-Janet-Ja
ckson fast movements we ve always known her for. She swung from a tree. She dresse
d like an angel. In all her public life and in Piece of Me, she treats her abdom
inals like they are an organ connected to her lungs: They cannot be covered up,
lest the entire organism shut down. She famously used to do 1,000 crunches a day
, but these days she bakes cookies with her kids and sometimes finishes off the
batter. Still, these abs are formidable and deserve the stage time they get. (Pe
rsonally, I think not enough attention is paid to her knees, which take the most
brutal beating in the show, with quick squats and slides across the floor.)