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One night in the fall of 2004, I got into a fight with my boyfriend, comforted myself with a tab of acid and wandered off into the woods where I spent a confused and confusing night trying to find the meaning of life. But what I found was Britney Spears, or a hallucination that looked very much like her, and we sat down right there on the grass and talked about her future. It seemed to make perfect sense at the time, but when I got home and told my boyfriend all about it he looked kinda shocked. It may have been because I was wild-eyed, naked, grass-stained and babbling incoherently but I like to reassure myself that it was because of the message from Britney. I didn’t bother to do a Wordsworth and recollect it in tranquility. I just went straight to the WoB Forums, wrote it off the top of my head and posted it in all its surreal drama. And this is what I said:
BRITNEY SPEARS HAS LEFT THE ROOM - a fan thinks she has left without saying goodbye
An eerie atmosphere has descended upon the career of Mrs Britney Federline. There's a strange sense that it's balancing on a knife edge right now.
Over the last few months, Britney the woman has been slowly but steadily detaching and distancing herself from Britney Spears, the crazy, outrageous, much-maligned, over-protected pop princess. She has grown tired of being controlled by an army of money-grubbing managers and of being carried along on an overwhelming but remorseless and suffocating tide of success.
In 2003 she decided to take a break from the business, saying she was sick of herself. But she soon recovered, and within days was in the studio making her fourth album. Now, as the end of 2004 approaches, the sickness has become terminal.
The signs have been there for a while now, but we didn't want to read them. When she briefed David LaChappelle about what she wanted for the "Everytime" video, there was one thing she made totally clear to him - she wanted to die in the video. And in the treatment which finally met with her approval, she was reborn, but her life-force was channelled into a new-born baby.
The reason she was not present at the 2004 Teen Choice Awards, or the VMAs, or the WMAs, and why she will not be present at any other awards shows or indeed any other media showcase events for the foreseeable future is that she is determined to escape from the past.
The public may buy My Prerogative and her Greatest Hits album, or they may not. She doesn't care. She has no intention of promoting them in any way. "Britney Spears", pop and celeb phenomenon, is dying and she has placed a "Do Not Resuscitate" notice on her bed.
She spent most of 2003 trashing her image as a squeaky clean, morally upright, loveable innocent . By the time the Onyx Hotel tour was cancelled following her serious knee injury in June 2004, it was as if she felt she hadn't gone far enough. Now her beauty, glamour and showbiz gloss had to be trashed as well.
And so she has rarely taken much trouble to evade the increasingly savage attentions of the piranha-shoal of paparazzi who swarm constantly around her, nor has she in any way attempted to counter the constant stream of lies and inventions peddled by the tabloid press. As their bloodlust has reached a frenzy, fuelled by a growing sense that at last, after nearly 6 years of improbable survival, she has been fatally wounded, Britney Spears has simply looked them in the eye and put on another message T-shirt.
And so we come to the recent events in her life. The paparazzi pics of the last few weeks have shown us, not the grumpy, depressed-looking Britney of June and July, but a girl who is rarely seen without a smile on her face. Her interview with Cojo, her first live appearance on TV for a very long time and probably her last, was almost euphoric.
But for her fans, what she said - and what she didn't say - was deeply disturbing. She "had been doing way too much" before. What she valued in Kevin Federline, as much as his love, was the stability and calm he had brought to her life. She said not a word about anything she planned to do in relation to her career - because she has no plans.
"Being a young mom", she said, was her dream. And this is the dream which has now replaced the dream of stardom for this highly motivated, powerfully focussed and deeply determined young lady. Kevin Federline never had a chance. Britney wants a child, and she is going to have one. Her pregnancy will be announced within the next few weeks.
For her wedding, her hairstyle was simple, brunette and very un-showbiz. In an act of pure symbolism, she had stripped away the last vestiges of the glamour and unreality of the blonde bombshell Britney Spears and was ready to start again on a new life. "It feels like a beginning", she said later. "Britney Federline - I like that."
She didn't want her wedding to be a showbiz event. She didn't want it to be glamorous. Indeed, by the time of the after-wedding shindig, she had even removed her make-up. For the paparazzi she knew would be waiting, she wanted to look ordinary.
Since then, she has said that she's becoming a woman and things need to be different. That means more attention to her life, and less to her career. She plans to be a mother in 2005, when she's 23. Everything about her is inward-looking now. It's all about what feels right, and real, and honest for her. The impulsive decision to bring her wedding date forward was just something she wanted to do.
She isn't deliberately or wantonly neglecting her fans. She has simply cleansed herself of all that it means to be a pop star. She isn't intending to make a new CD, or tour, or do any one-off concerts or TV spots. She has fulfilled her contractual obligations to Jive and to Elizabeth Arden. The horizon looks clear. Soon, she believes, the media will lose interest in her, and she can proceed to be a young mom without a care in the world.
Her dreams now are of tucking her baby in at night, of singing sweet lullabies, of pushing her buggy down the main street, of talking to other young moms at the nursery school gates... Britney does not see herself as a typical showbiz mom, hardly ever there. She will work as hard at being a mom as she did at being a star.
Will she ever come back? That's what's on the knife-edge. She was meant to be starting a new movie soon, but, unless contracts have been signed already, that will be put on hold. She will now go straight into her new life as a housewife and expectant mother.
But, somewhere in her mind, she will definitely be planning to come back sometime. When she does, she will do her utmost to make it the most astonishing comeback the world of showbiz has ever seen. She will be unrecognisably different. When she comes back she will be Britney Federline.
Some people sneer at internet articles written by fans, but I reckon they’re validated by the number of people who read them. And this one got a really wide circulation. It rumbled around the internet for weeks and eventually came full-circle when somebody e-mailed it to ME, in total horror, saying “Read THIS - Britney’s gone and isn’t coming back!”
Can I stand over what I wrote NOW? Did I get any of this right? Did the hallucinatory Britney who talked to me that night in the woods reveal her truth to me? I still think she did. I know I’m only one official announcement away from making a fool of myself. Various producers who have been working with Britney have reported favorable progress on her new album and everyone seems to be assuming it’s on its way, but I’m not so sure.
I believe she’s come out of rehab a changed woman, but maybe not in a good way from a career point of view. Just like when she met Kevin Federline, then later when she married him, she looks happy, contented and revitalised. I don’t think Britney is a woman who is familiar with steady states, she waxes and wanes like the tide and she’s either ecstatic or self-destructive.
At present she’s in an ecstatic phase, but she doesn’t equate happiness with working. Unlike some stars, that celebrity persona is not who she is - she enjoys the simple pleasures of life and right now she’s seeing them with new eyes. Post-rehab is not a time for making important and binding decisions. It’s a time when a lot of your independence of thought and willpower has been stripped away or suppressed. It’s a time when you lean on those closest to you. It’s a time when your pain has been buried and you don’t want to rediscover it. You’re scared to go back or to open any old doors. And Larry Rudolph is like a ghost from her past.
When I originally posted the article at PopDirt, a lot of people asked what I was smokin’ when I wrote the final paragraph, but I think it’s vitally important to our understanding of what’s been in her mind for her career since 2004. I believed then, and continue to believe, that she has always harbored ideas of making a triumphant return. But I don’t think these ideas have ever gone beyond the realms of her imagination.
Yes, it’s true that she’s been in recording studios a lot over the last year or so, but she’s missed sessions too and there’s been no talk of her having recorded anything for quite a few months. Some of the producers, like JR Rotem and Sean Garrett, have been talking up the good news, but Britney herself hasn’t made any recent statements about having work plans, where most artists in her position would have been bubbling with enthusiasm and excitement.
I remember an interview Britney gave back in 2003, before ITZ came out. The interviewer remarked that she appeared to be quite devoid of passion about her music. And it occurred to me at the time that her music had never been especially confessional or personal, and, although the trouble she took with her recorded vocals was always obvious, the product as a whole was probably not a labor of love.
It’s my belief that for a while, back in 2004, she really did set her heart on becoming Britney Federline - new name, new artist, new music. Then she would have been free of all the ties that had bound her in the past. The image, the performance, the reputation - all gone. She could have come back - not as a PR creation, not as a girl so hyper-perfect and untouchable that people used to think she was an alien - but as a folksy, friendly, down-home Southern girl playing country music or rock. If she could have done that, she would no longer have been troubled by the conflict between what she saw as real life - her personal, home life - and her life as a performer. But then, maybe that wouldn’t have produced the fairytale, all-conquering comeback? There were the seeds of yet another conflict.
I do find it odd that, in the course of a 3-year break, Britney has never even once performed in public. She doesn’t do award shows or media celebrations. And I really do think she has little interest in performing as “Britney Spears”. However, I’m not going to annoy site-meister Jason by claiming that she’s never coming back. There are huge and unusual obstacles to Britney turning up in a small venue with her trusty piano and doing a Jerry Lee Lewis-style rock ‘n’ roll gig. The tradition for Britney Spears shows is that they’re huge, mega-stadium, all-singing, all-dancing, all-choreographed, heavily produced multi-media events. Anything less than that would attract a load of questioning comment to the effect that “this was what she had come to” and things weren’t what they used to be.
So, while she may want to come back as Britney Spears’ country cousin, the reality is that she has to steel herself for a massive comeback operation. And along with her celebrity status, the legend of her prowess as an artist has also grown while she’s been away (with comments to the effect that the likes of Jessica Simpson and Hilary Duff are unfit to tie Britney’s bootlaces) so expectations will be extremely high and a mediocre r&b Ciara-lite rebirth will not satisfy them. I can see why both stage-fright and extreme nervousness might be developing inside Britney’s already-overloaded head. If her comeback is delayed, delayed and delayed again I will not be in the least surprised.
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