A Britney Spears Comeback Tour wouldn’t quite be the same without a Rolling Stone cover—especially since the mag helped launch her underage sex-kitten image back in ’99 and then documented her Frapp-guzzling, pap-loving downfall just this past February.

Rolling Stone’s job now, along with everyone else in the Brit camp, is to reassure all of us that Old Britney is totally back and ready to rock this Circus! They accomplish this with a relatively tame, Parade-esque cover showing off Brit’s flat stomach and big blond mane. In fact, the only tangible evidence the article ever provides that Old Britney is back forreal is her blond hair.


The article itself echoes Brit's previous complaints that her life is like Groundhog Day. The interviewer sticks to preapproved questions as a Brit-guard hovers and the pop star hints at how bored she is...

"I feel like an old person now,” she mentions. “I go to bed at, like, 9:30 every night, and I don’t go out or anything, you know what I mean? I just feel like an old fart.”

When she does go out on something like a date—and she is dating, because her manager Larry Rudolph has decided a boyfriend is the next step in Brit’s recovery—she is accompanied by her own assistant and a colleague of Rudolph’s. Needless to say, things aren’t working out too well in that department.

But maybe that has something to do with a little bit of K-Fed hostility she's holding on to. Talking about her boys and the importance of being a mom, she says, “I didn’t think my husband was gonna leave me, otherwise, I’d be with my babies 24/7.” She also blames her ex for the bad language the boys seemed to have picked up recently. “It’s weird ‘cause they’re starting to learn words like ‘stupid,’ and Preston says the F-word now sometimes. He doesn’t get it from us. He must get it from his daddy.”


Her troubled time is not to be mentioned at all—Rudolph is the only one who vaguely acknowledges it, explaining, “It’s about the journey for Britney, and the journey has taken her to this place now, which is a much, much better place. I mean, she’s not there yet, but she’s in an infinitely better place...She's very happy now."

The thing is, Old Britney isn’t going to come back, no matter how blond her hair is or how many times Rudolph insists she's happy. Present Britney has been through too much to just go back to being Old Britney, and that’s cool. That’s just how people change and grow up and eventually become Future Britney. And that’s the Britney we’re most excited to see. The one who emerges from this highly protected and guarded bubble to find herself on her own terms. But now we're just getting all cheesy, so we'll direct you over to where Circus is streaming in its entirety a week before its release. It's a pretty good time.