Herb Sundays 154: Jeff Weiss

The acclaimed writer in '00s mode: "a start-to-finish Sunday during those depressive years. The groggy late morning wake ups where I'd sip coffee, spin record sand study the Los Angeles Times"

Herb Sundays 154: Jeff Weiss

Playlist: Apple Music, Spotify.

Art by Michael Cina

“In the mid-'00s, I lived at least three lives. The first was as a staff reporter at a small regional business journal, where I wore a suit and tie and frequently screamed about the cruelties of fate during hour-long daily commutes. During breaks, I furtively typed mean-spirited screeds at a blogspot provisionally called "Passion of the Weiss." Quite often, I wrote about the previous night's indie rock or rap show at Spaceland and The Echo for a semi-satirical column called "Beards, Blazers and Glasses." I was barely old enough to shave, had perfectly fine eyesight, and wouldn't be caught dead in a blazer, but Silver Lake wasn't yet a punchline and these were the halcyon days when having a quasi-notable blog was enough to score free drinks. And even if I couldn't, everything was still cheap.

My third existence remained a state secret (at least until "the arrest"). In an attempt to pursue a legitimate writing career, I stumbled into a gig freelancing for the tabloids, which helped offset the $28,000 a year salary at my day job. The story of that era is chronicled in "Waiting For Britney Spears" which comes out on June 10th on MCD/FSG. For my Herb Sunday, I wanted to capture a start-to-finish Sunday during those depressive years. The groggy late morning wake ups where I'd sip coffee, spin records, and study the Los Angeles Times, dreaming of being given the opportunity to write for them. The disorienting bong rips in the afternoon and the slow transformation into evening, where I'd be often sent out to some lavish, celebrity-clotted party or club or red carpet premiere. And then the existential drive home where I contemplated this purgatory, a time when I was waiting for Britney Spears and for the rest of my life to begin, whichever arrived first.” - Jeff Weiss for Herb Sundays

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Adapted from the Bio: Jeff Weiss is a Los Angeles-based cultural critic, music journalist, and editor. He is the editor-in-chief and founder of POW MAG, an independent culture website dedicated to in-depth music coverage. Weiss’ writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Wax Poetics, and The Washington Post. Over the years, he has profiled a wide range of cultural figures, from Kendrick Lamar and André 3000 to the Beat Generation poets and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Weiss also hosts The Truth Hurts podcast (“the antithesis to hip-hop podcasts dedicated to shameless clout-chasing and nihilistic exploitation”), co-organized the rap club night Don’t Come to LA, runs the POW Recordings label, and runs a radio show on Dublab. He is the author of the new book, Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly, which comes out on June 10th on MCD/FSG, a deep dive into the pop star’s rise and fall.

Lamping outside of a Hollywood Hills party? Canyon hiker casualty? Wizard offering knowledge on your sacred path? Weiss has done them all.

I checked old messages and found my initial interactions with Jeff dating back to 2010, around my first stint in Los Angeles settled at Pico and Fairfax. As I finish my second LA era (2024-2025), I am honored to host Jeff’s Herb Sundays 154 playlist, a hallowed gift from a very special Angeleno.

Looking back at our dialogues, usually me pitching him on Ghostly stuff, trying to hang out, or even asking for this playlist, I’m shocked with his consistent kindness. He’s the rare blend of enthusiast that doesn’t brush you off at the party and is still deeply connected to a sense of morality snd quality that resonates through his work. In LA parlance, as a character type, he’s that hardheaded journalist of upstart attorney always haunting the hallways outside court rooms or crashing hangs in the Hills, raking up some shit.

As such, he is also a guy you don’t want on your bad side. His takedowns are the stuff of legend. In 2018, Weiss led a boycott against LA Weekly after its change in ownership, which included a long running feud that scared away advertisers and writers, and even the founding of a new publication. I half expected him to show up with a Chinatown (1974) styled bandage on his nose and a black eye for his good deeds.

By the same token, he is a guy that you truly want to believe in you. He’s a chief herbalist with a wild combination of self-awareness, regional pride and swagger, plus a king of obits (I tried to keep pace on Twitter but he is too nice with the pen), and has kept the torch lit for the slain rapper Drakeo the Ruler. He’s a an absolute motherfucker for what he believes in. They don’t make many like this these days.

passionweiss

A post shared by @passionweiss

So imagine my surprise when I heard he was working on a book in 2023 and I inquired about the subject of said tome on SMS. I figured it would be some smoky West Coast music biography, like The Doors or Sublime (his episodes of

Yasi Salek

’s (Herb 16) Bandsplain are insane). Nope. “Britney Spears” Whoa. I was a bit worried to be honest, Weiss is sort of one of the the last honest gunslingers in the game I’ve always felt, someone riding for the underdog, which of course is/was Spears in many ways, but was he losing the plot? The initial Spears moment hit when i was in college, I’d already packed up my identity, but Weiss got socked right in the nose in high school and his early journalistic days were naturally seeped in the plateau of the Chateaux/Fred Segal/Viper Room axis of power that would radicalize his mind, inevitably, the world was fixated on his backyard.

I had nothing to worry about of course, the book is a fabulous meditation on the last wild IRL pop cultural era, the confluence of unfettered celeb interest before publicists and managers closed ranks completely around their subjects. Yes, other former teen stars are still flaming out in public, and false info runs down feeds smoothly like occasional rainwater on Mulholland, but the world that Jeff’s book is set in had no Instagram, so in many ways, its the monoculture’s last stand.

To be fair I’ve only started reading the book, so I can’t give a full review cause I’m not some big dumb liar substacker or podcaster you adore who would normally fib about having finished it. I'll read it on my own time. Thanks so much.

Weiss’s book begins outside a Venice high school gym, our narrator, presumably, Weiss (or definitely Weiss, but multiversed) has been displaced from his basketball court by a music video shoot for “…Baby One More Time” which is of course is Teen Pop and TRL’s gym-themed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” moment, or the nuclear event that changed everything. Weiss as an innocent is thrown fifty yards by the blast of Jive Records’ greatest and most dangerous weapon, Spears, both as a personal crush, a career starter in the tabloids (see Nightcrawler (2014), but more importantly as a lodestar of what’s to come.

As he told Rolling Stone: "Everyone always wants to know what really happened. How much of this is true?" he says. "I think we're in a world right now where it's very post-truth, post-reality. And I think this tabloid sensibility was kind of a canary in a coal mine, a harbinger of where the world was going."

What makes the book great (so far) is that is is pure Herb-fare: The artifice, the inquiry into the past, the moralism, and the nagging flypaper of Truth sticking to the heel of our (gum)shoe. Weiss apparently pored over old tabloids, some of which he supposedly wrote, wrestling with what he helped create. It also deals in the self, but not the boring "know thyself" thing, but how far all of us could go with some bad influence and some heat.

Elisabeth Garber-Paul contines, for Rolling Stone:

To write the book, Weiss revisited journals he kept at the time, as well as copies of the stories he'd published. (In the book, he writes for Nova; it doesn't take much sleuthing to discover that it's a pseudonym for Star.) Another part of Weiss's research process entailed ordering old tabloid magazines on eBay, spending what he estimates to be thousands of dollars for the blind items that never made it onto the internet, or had long since disappeared from it. "I am the greatest eBay collector now of tabloids from '03 to '07," Weiss says. "And yeah, they were excruciatingly evil. Just deplorable. A complete absence of any kind of decency, anything remotely resembling humanity."

A good writer can make you interested in just about anything, so here I am in Spearsworld. I was already marinated in Weisspeak, the pan was pre-seasoned, the guy can rip prose that shouldn’t work but it does, making Nas into Dylan and Rakim into Woody Guthrie in an Illmatic Sunday review for Pitchfork, or saying Teddy Riley’s drums “attacked with Scud-era force.” He gets away with murder, its amazing.

It’s only because he’s honest, that it all connects. All the Black Cats and M-80's in his ‘00s Jansport rip because he wants to make you better. A caption in the book says it all, so we’ll give him the final word:

Late at night, I write about the Vegas trips and Santa Barbara shakedowns, the panopticon monitoring and ethical codes desecrated in pursuit of the Big Story. The cynical mainstream press laundering news through the tabloids, exploiting our appetite for gossip while hiding behind a silhouette of respectability. I was old enough to know the truism that every writer is always selling someone out, but at least the celebrity magazines didn’t pretend otherwise. They gave people the carnage they demanded, and when that failed they just created it.

I understood Britney as the heliocentric focus. She had been ever since the golden rays zapped me almost a decade earlier on that summer afternoon in Venice. And as you’re probably wondering, I realized that I was exploiting her too. I regretted it and still do. But this was the system we were born into, and at some point, my own story became intertwined with hers, and theirs. Telling the whole truth was impossible, but there was the possibility of being sincere.

Spears 12”s from my archive, original pressings from my house party DJ era.

Bonus Beats:

• Perpetual Dawn, a 2025 listening sketchbook is updated on Apple and Spotify

  

• If angular electronics (or um, IDM) is what you seek, you could do worse than

  RamonPang
  ’s new playlist

• Shigeto (Herb 131) just finished another Movement fest in Detroit (footage to follow I hope), and his new album just got a video for the closing song featuing KESSWA, all pure Michigan modernism: “director Romeo Okwara assembled a stellar team of filmmakers to bring the 35mm vision to life at Smith House, a Frank Lloyd Wright gem stewarded by the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.”

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en plein sight by RPB