I don’t remember much from my time in secondary school, but I do remember the exact moment I told someone that Britney Spears would soon be dead. It was 2008, shortly after Spears had been carried out of her home on a stretcher and taken to a psychiatric hospital, and the words tumbled out of my mouth so quickly that I remember being jolted by them. I think I believed it. Or maybe I just wanted to show off – not my absolutely non-existent precognitive powers but the fact that actually, fellow classmates, only I truly understood the gravity of what was happening. We’d all witnessed Spears transition from pop cultural zygote in a schoolgirl’s outfit to sexy MTV temptress to angry, fragile shambles beset by paparazzi flashbulbs and judgment. And now, I insisted, there was a single, dire outcome on the cards.
I thought about this ultimately incorrect claim while reading You Thought You Knew, the new tell-all by Spears’s ex-husband Kevin Federline, the father of her two children and America’s least favourite white boy in a durag circa 2005. After 200 pages of ruminations on his former marriage and his aborted rap career, Federline closes his book with a premonition of doom similar to that which I made as a teenager almost a decade ago. One just as empty and as unhelpful to Spears herself as mine had been. “It’s become impossible to pretend everything’s okay,” Federline writes. “From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we’re getting close to the 11th hour. Something bad is going to happen if things don’t change.”
