My sister was 10 years old when Britney Spears’ debut single “...Baby One More Time” came out, therefore, I have a greater familiarity with Britney’s early work than I’d like to admit. I remember her lively and feminine pop music blasting in the bedroom next to mine, and she was always showing up on MTV in my living room. No matter how much I buried myself in my Game Boy Color, there was seemingly no escape from the sights and sounds of Britney Spears.

As I grew up, Britney never really went away. Britney Spears is one of those pop culture icons whose influence endures across decades in the vein of Madonna or Elvis Presley. Also, like Madonna and Elvis, the enduring public fascination with Britney Spears has less to do with the art she creates and more to do with the spectacle of her personal life, which has been well-documented since she was a teenager.

I’ve never intentionally followed celebrity gossip. I’m more of a Culture Wars reader than a People Magazine reader. However, there has always seemed to be some sort of public discussion around Britney Spears popping up every so often since the late 1990s. Did you hear Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake broke up? Did you hear Britney Spears got married and divorced in Vegas? She got married and divorced again! Did you see the pictures of Britney Spears with her shaved head? Have you seen the “Leave Britney alone” video? Her high-profile conservatorship and the “#FreeBritney” movement came and went. Perhaps with the exception of fortunate homeschooled kids who were protected from mainstream pop culture, most of my fellow Millennials remember these moments.

And now she has a book, reportedly ghostwritten by a gay journalist named Sam Lansky. It’s published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Jewish publisher Simon and Schuster, owned by Jewish investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Britney Spears says her music career is over, so making money off of her has shifted from the Jewish music industry to the Jewish publishing industry. At a rumored value of $15 million, “The Woman in Me”1 is one of the biggest celebrity book deals of all time.

This book is designed for people who rarely, if ever, put down TikTok long enough to read a book. The average chapter length is less than six pages. I’ve read Roald Dahl books to my kids with longer and more intellectually challenging chapters than the ones in this book that’s ostensibly written for Millennials over 30. At times, I felt as if I were reading a collection of long and well-edited social media posts rather than a memoir.

Before we dig into the content of the memoir, a prologue is in order to set the stage for the pop music scene that created fertile ground for Britney Spears’ success.

Backstreet Goys

While a young brunette Britney Spears was still going through what she calls “boot camp for show business” in the Mickey Mouse Club, a Jewish blimp salesman named Lou Pearlman was unwittingly laying the groundwork for her career. Lou Pearlman is only mentioned in passing in “The Woman in Me,” but the damage he did to American pop culture provides some important background to Britney Spears’ story. There likely would’ve been no Britney Spears if it weren’t for Lou Pearlman’s molding of pop music in the 1990s.

The 2019 documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story2 (which you can watch for free on YouTube), produced by NSYNC veteran Lance Bass, tells the dark and disturbing tale of Pearlman from the mouths of the first-hand victims of his schemes.

Lou Pearlman initially made his fortune in the aviation business, leasing planes and blimps. His company, Airship International, raised $3 million in an IPO before the company even owned any aircraft. He achieved this by taking phony photos using optical illusions of a model airplane taking off and landing on a runway to trick investors.

Pearlman was leasing luxury jets to rock stars when the proto-boy band New Kids on the Block popped up as a client. He noticed how rich and how young they were and decided he was in the wrong business. Pearlman collaborated with his Wall Street buddy Jerome Rosen to pump and dump the stock for his blimp company before getting into the music business through connections with his cousin Art Garfunkel and formed Trans Continental Records. That’s when the ’90s boy band scene was born.

Music journalist Dave Holmes articulately defines the boy band genre in the film.

A boy band is usually five, sometimes three, never four…usually no instruments, [they play] sort of club tracks that would’ve been huge in Europe a few years before. Some involved choreography. All five members have distinct personalities. They just had incredible charisma…and a 13-year-old girl will lose her mind.

The Backstreet Boys was the first experiment of Pearlman. After the band’s massive success, Pearlman created NYSNC as its rival band and profited off of the rivalry, selling millions of records in the process. He would even trash-talk one band while speaking to the other to stoke the rivalry and keep them from speaking to each other. Pearlman was the “sixth member” of both bands, which meant he was paid like a member of the band in addition to what he was paying himself as the band manager and owner of the record company.

Pearlman’s odd insistence on being the sixth band member made me think about the strange numerology in Kabbalah mysticism. I thought it was a long shot, but just for fun, I asked ChatGPT if the number six has any significance in Kabbalah. Here’s what it told me:

In Kabbalah, the number six is often associated with the concept of the “Sefirot,” which are ten attributes or emanations representing different aspects of divine energy. The Sefirot are typically arranged in a specific structure known as the Tree of Life. In this context, the number six is significant because it is associated with the sefirah called “Tiferet.”
Tiferet, often translated as “Beauty” or “Harmony,” is considered the central and balanced sefirah on the Tree of Life. It is situated on the central pillar, which represents balance, and it serves as a mediator between the sefirot above it (representing divine attributes) and the sefirot below it (representing more earthly manifestations).
Tiferet is often associated with virtues such as compassion, balance, and harmony. It represents the integration of opposites and the synthesis of conflicting forces. The number six, through its connection with Tiferet, symbolizes the harmonious blending of divine qualities and attributes within the Kabbalistic cosmology.

Am I an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist if I notice that the Jew Lou Pearlman was the sixth member of a band called “NSYNC” (pronounced “in-sync”), and the number six in Kabbalah signifies balance, harmony, and the integration of opposites? What about the fact that NSYNC stylized its name with a star in its logo at the suggestion of a Jewish magician named Uri Geller? I don’t know if Pearlman has ever publicly expressed any interest in Kabbalah, but I couldn’t help thinking that was odd.

Anyway, in the film, the now-grown boys in Pearlman’s boy bands revealed that while they were at the height of their fame and working seven days a week practicing, taking dance lessons, recording, performing, touring, and doing media appearances, they received a per-diem stipend of $35 per day. Per their contracts, they would live off of the per-diem, Lou Pearlman would pay for their day-to-day expenses like fancy hotels and restaurants, and the band members would receive a big check after three years of work. The boys, who largely came from low-income, fatherless homes, thought they had it made.

Lance Bass tells the tale of the check distribution after three years of NSYNC being one of the most popular music acts in the world. They sold 10 million records by this point. Bass’ mother’s conservative estimate for the long-awaited check was in the neighborhood of $200,000.

It came time for the long-awaited dinner, and each band member received a $10,000 check. That was their compensation for selling millions of albums, doing endorsement deals, and performing tours of sold-out stadiums. Lou Pearlman had been going deeply into debt with his own personal spending and the lavish accommodations for himself and his bands. When they stayed in luxurious hotels and ate fancy dinners “for free,” the boys were actually footing the bill. They would’ve been better off working a minimum-wage job for three years. The Backstreet Boys were ripped off in the same way as NYSNC.

This was a wake-up call for the band members. Even as young men, they knew something was wrong. Luckily, NSYNC member J.C. Chasez had a lawyer uncle who looked over their contracts and was horrified by how bad they were. The boys wanted out of their contracts, and they found a technicality they could use to get out of them. Backstreet Boys and NYSNC severed ties with Pearlman in different ways, but in the case of NSYNC, they went to court. It didn’t go well for Pearlman. The judge could clearly see that these boys had been ripped off by a con man, an obese, middle-aged Jew calling himself a member of two boy bands. The members of the Backstreet Boys and NYSNC were never fairly compensated, but they were able to get out of their contracts.

The lawsuits continued from almost every band represented by Pearlman, eventually driving him out of the entertainment business. He ran a Ponzi scheme called the Trans Continental Savings Program, got caught making fake financial statements from a fictional accounting firm, hid out in Israel for a while, and got arrested in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007. Pearlman died in a federal prison in 2016…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the April 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

Culture Wars: Volume 43 Issue 5

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Articles:

Culture of Death Watch

Not that Innocent: Who are the Real

Villains in the Life of Britney Spears? by Eric Brandt

Saul Alinsky’s Chicago by Jack Kopreus

Features

The Ethnic Cleansing of German Minorities after the War by Dr. E. Michael Jones

Reviews

Satanism as the Hidden Grammar of America by Sean Naughton

(Endnotes Available by Request)

1) Spears, Britney. The Woman in Me. New York, NY: Gallery Books, 2023. 
2) Bass, Lance. The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story. YouTube. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019. https://youtu.be/CcCRs0Ic3FI?si=reE1jLVBSzGa0CYK.