A sample:
Long before Britney Spears’ dazed performance on the MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas on Sunday, her comeback effort looked out of sync.
It started in May, when the erstwhile pop queen marked her tentative return to public performance after a long hiatus with a string of haphazard club gigs that lasted for as little as 15 minutes, during which she lip-synched old hits like “Baby One More Time.” But no one was prepared for Sunday night’s fiasco, in which a listless Spears teetered through her dance steps and mouthed only occasional words in a wan attempt to lip-synch her new single, “Gimme More.”
Endlessly mocked in the mainstream news media and the blogosphere, it has left her fans and her handlers bewildered. The show also left raw nerves: Spears’ label, Jive Records, sent a note to MTV chastising the network over the comments of the comedian Sarah Silverman, who took the stage immediately after Spears and referred to her children as “mistakes.”
With her first studio album in four years scheduled for release on Nov. 13, the music industry is debating whether Spears’ career can recover.
“Is she going to be the next Michael Jackson?” wondered Jay Marose, a former publicist for teen-pop acts like the Backstreet Boys who is a past acquaintance of Spears. “She’s been on her own for so long, calling the shots in this bubble.”
