Britney: 60 million in record sales can’t be wrong

Britney is a cultural barometer. That’s why her pregnancy is news in this celebrity-obsessed culture. I said it in my early post (see link below). I can’t say it better than the Washington Post did today:

It’s all about life passages, says Ken Baker, West Coast editor of US Weekly. In olden days, in the tabs (say, the 1990s), there was a bitter divorce here, a rehab bout there, but now a few rarefied celebs are recurring characters in the national pop novella. J. Lo & Marc. Demi & Ashton. Jessica & Nick. And, of course, the alpha and omega, Brad & Jen. (When the two split, Katie Couric paused to ask a troubled nation: If it could happen to them, are any of our marriages really safe?) “A lot of readers have grown up with this batch of celebrities, and they’re like their best girlfriends,” says Bonnie Fuller, editorial director of American Media, who oversees Star magazine. “We’ve never had such a fascination with celebrity, and all their life events become news.”
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Think of the slick glossy celebrity magazines and their tabloid kin, Baker says, as “a soap opera, a weekly soap opera, and each issue is another episode, and the characters have new challenges, a narrative and a story arc, and we follow each character through life.”

The celebrity press predicts, in the meantime, that likely scoops might include: The ultrasound! The raging hormones. The inevitable fight with Kevin (who consoles himself in, say, Vegas). The making up. Medical trials and tribulations of a myriad sort. The decoration of the nursery. The shopping. The exercise routines. How Bit Bit, Britney’s Chihuahua, is adjusting. Not to mention the stepkids. And, big time, Britney’s eating habits.

For, oh, the natal glow. And those telephoto shots of bloat and cellulite. “There will be a huge fascination with her shape and size,” predicts the Enquirer’s Field, as well as “enormous interest in her relationship with Kevin,” which the tabs and slicks have been calling a wee bit rocky from the start.