Citizen Jake

I finally got around to reading Rolling Stone’s big Britney Spears cover story and…wow. To her credit the author of the piece, Vanessa Grigoriadis didn’t pull her punches and the picture she paints is pretty depressing and revolting read to be quite honest. Here are two of clips that stood out to me:

If there is one thing that has become clear in the past year of Britney’s collapse — the most public downfall of any star in history — it’s that she doesn’t want anything to do with the person the world thought she was. She is not a good girl. She is not America’s sweetheart. She is an inbred swamp thing who chain-smokes, doesn’t do her nails, tells reporters to “eat it, snort it, lick it, fuck it” and screams at people who want pictures for their little sisters. She is not someone who can live by the most basic social rules — she is someone who, when she has had her one- and two-year-old sons taken completely out of her care, with zero visitation rights, appeared at Los Angeles’ Superior Court to convince the judge to give her kids back, but then decided not to go inside, and she’s someone who did this twice. She’s the perfect celebrity for America in decline: Like President Bush, she just doesn’t give a fuck, but at least we won’t have to clean up after her mess for the rest of our lives.

And

There is one group of people who love Britney unconditionally, and whose love she accepts: Every day in L.A., at least a hundred paparazzi, reporters and celebrity-magazine editors dash after her, this braless chick padding around town on hilariously mundane errands — the gas station, the pet store, Starbucks, Rite Aid. The multibillion-dollar new-media economy rests on her slumped shoulders, with paparazzi agencies estimating that she has comprised up to twenty percent of their coverage for the past year. It’s not only bottom feeders running after Britney — a recent memo leaked from the Associated Press, which plans to add twenty-two entertainment reporters to its staff, announces that everything that happens to Britney is news (they have already begun preparing her obit). The paparazzi feed the celebrity magazines, which feed the mainstream press, while sources sell their dirtiest material to British tabloids, and then it trickles back to America. “She is by far the top person I have written about on my Web site, ever,” says Perez Hilton. Harvey Levin, founder of TMZ: “We serialize Britney Spears. She’s our President Bush.”

Read it all if you dare.

Image via Gawker