Britney Spears Weight

Britney Spears brings 'Femme Fatale' tour to Portland's Rose Garden

The knock on the American economy -- one of them, anyway -- is that we don't make anything. It's all shell games and marketing tricks. There's no tangible product, nothing to see from concept to completion. Of course, this assertion is wrong.

We make pop stars. Then we strip them down and try to figure out why we ever made that particular model to begin with -- only to reassemble and see if we can do it better the second time.

Take Britney Spears . Because she's bumping and grinding her "Femme Fatale" tour to the Rose Garden on Tuesday , and because she's presently the best example of pop star as carefully manufactured product. She's even been updated with a flashy late-model option: the comeback.

"Femme Fatale," released in March, is the album after the fall, and that fall mirrored our own. Turns out 2007 would have been a good time to be paying attention to toxic assets and mortgage-backed thingamajigs but did you hear Britney forgot to wear underwear again?

It was the easier of the two stories, the post-virginal pop princess in decline, and then in distress. She shaved her head. She got divorced. She went to rehab. She made atrocious parenting decisions. She went to rehab. She partied with Paris Hilton. She kept ... forgetting ... to ... wear ... underwear. And she was once a Mousketeer, they'd say with adequate amounts of shock and disgust.

There was, throughout 2007 , something for everyone to find morally reprehensible, and many a soapbox snapped under the weight of the piling on.

This continued until early 2008, when rock bottom arrived in the form of hospitalized lockdown and psychiatric evaluation.

A month later, the economy began its crumble and onward to recession and unemployment and misery. Not that the two things are related. At least not anymore than Spears' late-1990s rise to stardom with not-really-age-appropriate sex appeal and bubbly pop songs was related to the end of the Clinton era, known for its bubbly times and not-really-age-appropriate sex scandal.

At least not any more than Spears could be considered an early influence on the art form that led to Anthony Weiner no longer being a member of Congress.

We see our reflections in the popular culture and 2008 was a bad one for Spears. She broke down, she started to get back up. She released "Circus" in November of that year and it debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's album charts. The ensuing tour was a financial success.

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It digusts me that the media are talking about Britney Spears in this way. Focussing on her weight like that...

RT : Britney Spears has gained lots of weight. She looks terrible.

RT : Britney Spears has gained lots of weight. She looks terrible.

Guillermo Diaz has gained alot of weight (via that new Britney Spears video... unless that is his twin brother named Guillermo)

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