I don’t know what the best part of Shania’s concert was for me—if it was the silk leopard print robe replica from the “That Don’t Impress Me Much” video, or that she brings not one but two live horses up on stage, one black one to represent her tough times (her husband, Mutt Lange, running off with her best friend, who was her assistant), one white one to represent her healing (Vegas, and the fact that she’s now married to that assistant’s ex-husband! Booyah!). In the bowels of the Colosseum, a woman named Glynda removes that silk robe and all of Shania’s other clothing each night, checking it for rips or stains before retiring it lovingly to the safety of a hanger. Perhaps this is a trade secret, but here’s something that Glynda told me that echoed panicky through my brain later that night: There is no alternative for that robe. It’s the only one.

Each residency is a reflection of the demographic the property is going for—the Mirage made a play for the affluent and not-quite-debaucherous late 30s/early 40s crowd with Boyz II Men, these boyz who are now patchily gray men, who remain pure in their desire to romance you, to make gauzy, romantic, sweet, consensual love to you, and quickly retreat when you give the nod, who wear sequined letter sweaters and overestimate the impact their music had on our sex lives (“I bet there are some Boyz II Men babies in here!”). The Venetian very much wants the Midwestern, soft-country audience of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Planet Hollywood, with its hot pink accents and movie-themed rooms, was built for the Britney fan.

It’s only late in the evenings that Vegas visibly becomes what the tourism board says it is: young and saturated with sex—and not the Boyz II Men-sanctioned lovemaking kind, either. Out on the Strip, aging women wear shirts that say “Girls! Girls! Girls!” A man working for a competing strip club has a shirt that says “Orgasim Clinic: Accepting New Patients.” (Sic on that tragic typo.) Single-named DJs pump their skinny arms as women in tight tube dresses and Lucite heels they bought online a year ago straddle mouth-breathing men on VIP couches like they just heard there was an asteroid headed toward earth or just took a handful of Ecstasy; platonic girlfriends decide to make out at no urging at all because we’re in Vegas bitchez! One does not have to go far to feel the erection of a stranger in the rear of one’s jeans. It is in these small, handsy hours of the night that Caesars’ hope for Britney was born.

Caesars owns several properties—the Paris, Bally’s, Harrah’s, the Flamingo, Caesars Palace, of course, and Planet Hollywood. Kurt Melien, the smiley, tan vice president and head of Caesars Entertainment, wanted a star to call his own, someone he didn’t have to share with AEG Live, someone bigger than Season 5 American Idol winner Taylor Hicks, who looks like he’s 50, seems like he’s 60, even if he’s actually not even 40. Taylor Hicks was selling out the 200-seat Napoleon room at the Paris to horny, bosomy middle-aged women and their gloomy, hopeless husbands. So, thought Melien, why not bring in someone young to drive youthful spending? Sure, he’d do a fast gut on the Axis theater. Anything for Britney!

Britney’s contract for this show, which pays a reported $15 million (about $300,000 per show), demands that she create a spectacle that’s bigger than anything she’d done before, so that people who had seen her live before would still be tempted to come. (Celine’s first residency featured 53 dancers and a bunch of clowns, impractical to take on the road, to say the least.) Fine by Britney. She told Baz Halpin, the show’s creative director, that she wanted elements: fire, water, snow. She wanted a jungle theme, which is something she always wants. Halpin loved the idea and gave her a tree to jump off of in the middle of the third act; it’s 56,000 pounds and 32 feet high and takes six people to move.

Halpin and Britney began working on the set list, and the subindustry that is hired when a show like this goes up—costumes, dancers, ticket sales kiosk-builders, etc.—got to work. The contract, like all residency contracts, insisted on the hits. Vegas shows are normally just 90 minutes, no intermissions, no matter who is playing. Halpin told me it’s because you have more creative control in Vegas, and that stars don’t like intermissions: “You prep and prep and you’re getting ready for the show and then you hit the stage and then it’s a roller coaster. It’s a blur. Then it’s over and so to get plucked out of that and then sit in your trailer for 15 minutes and then like have to build up that excitement again is incredibly frustrating for the star.”

That’s not the only reason, of course. You can’t tire an audience out. It used to be a Britney show was your whole night, a special event. Now, her show is very deliberately just one part of the night, and that renders her just another of the women you encounter in Vegas who ease your way to the baccarat tables and buffets: card dealer, table dancer, hostess, prostitute, waitress, bartender, Britney Spears. (The first thing you notice when you land in Vegas is all the breasts. Breasts are the shining, veiny centerpiece of the uniforms in Vegas; it’s a city built on the breasts and shoulders of women. The only thing women aren’t in this city are magicians, but they are the people being sawed and made to disappear nightly for the magician’s applause.)

Notably, AEG Live was one of the only entities in town that didn’t make a play for Britney. Though John Meglen—the president of AEG Live, the mastermind behind the Celine deal, and, as such, the father of the modern-day, post-Wayne Newton residency—said, “We were offered it a few times.” Meglen has a lot of gray hair and is built like a muscle car—dense and handsome. There is nobody who understands the inner workings of Vegas and its properties like he does.

“Even if you believe in Britney, that gives you 50 shows [per year], great, what are you going to put in there your other 200 nights a year?” Meglen told me, in his office in L.A. “If all they have in there is Britney Spears and she is sold out for 50 shows, they have failed. They need Britney Spears and the Spice Girls and Jennifer Lopez and Pink or whoever, okay?” That said, even if the theater is sold out and the seats filled, that doesn’t quite fulfill the residency’s mission, which is to say: Vegas may claim to want youth, but young people aren’t actually good for business.

“You have to ask, ‘Are those kids buying tickets yet?’” Meglen continued. “Because most of them still are seven in a carload driving out from Southern California, they all sleep in one room, they spend the day at the pool and at night they go to the clubs. They’re great at using the workout room, that comes with your ticket. They don’t get the body scrubs or the facial wraps, you know? They don’t gamble and they don’t eat at restaurants and right now, in my opinion, it’s fucking tanking the whole fucking city.”

Almost immediately following the announcement of Piece of Me, a memo on Caesars letterhead leaked, listing possible responses that Planet Hollywood staff should use when asked by the average ticket-buyer if Britney plans to sing live. (Sample: “Certainly she will be singing live!” “Yes, all vocals will be live!” “No lip syncing will happen at the show.”) The document was a fake, concocted by who knows, which is not to say she’s singing live, either.

Britney knows she’s no Celine in that department; she’s not even a Shania. A voice teacher I know said she uses “unnatural and precarious forceful closure of the pharynx with corresponding raised larynx and tongue root” to effect equal parts sexy baby voice and major vocal fry—it’s a way to compensate for what is not a naturally lovely voice. On her albums, her voice isn’t just auto-tuned, it’s layered. What we’re hearing is Britney on top of Britney on top of Britney, filling in the thinness with quantity.

I don’t begrudge her the backup track, though. Our expectations of a woman in her 30s who has built two people in her body might be a little bit of a reach. “To put on the show that she puts on, it’s virtually impossible to sing the entire time and do what she does,” Adam Leber told me. “She’s singing on every song, basically, when she has the ability to sing. There’s no way you can dance for 90 minutes straight and sing the entire time.”

Britney runs through it, again. (AP Photo/Caesars Entertainment, Denise Truscello)

Vicious assessments of the show’s likelihood for failure soon flooded the Internet. Fox News wondered if Britney could handle the pressure of the gig, quoting unnamed sources close to Britney who said, “There is little chance that she can actually do this. The stress of a daily public appearance and the physical nature of a show could overwhelm her for sure.” Fox also brought out a legal analyst, who said, “There is no doubt that Spears has mental health issues or the judge would be forced to lift the conservatorship,” which allowed her father and lawyer control over her money, a move initially necessitated by her breakdown. She was going to fuck this up too, just like the Queen of England had predicted. (The truth is probably closer to what sources close to Caesars, which means that they work at Caesars, tell me: that the company had insisted on the conservatorship just in case, and that it must remain throughout her contract.)

But if you weren’t watching in the years since the head-shaving, the car-beating, and the conservatorship—and tabloids didn’t really cover this in-between part, so your ignorance is understandable—Britney managed to have six top-10 Billboard hits and two successful world tours: 2009’s The Circus Starring Britney Spears grossed $131.8 million, making it the seventh highest grossing tour that year and the sixth highest ever by a female artist, and 2011’s Femme Fatale, which was the 11th highest grossing tour that year, with a take of about $70 million.

Britney and her team decided it was time for a new album, too, and the new album, Britney Jean, which she promised would be her most personal and intimate yet, would come out around the same time that Vegas came to fruition. One would feed the other. That doesn’t appear to have happened. 209,000 albums had been sold by early January. For context, Beyonce’s album, which dropped in the middle of the night on iTunes more than a week after Britney Jean, had sold 1,432,000 albums by the same time.

If you think instead of the residency as a two-year tour to promote the album, which is sort of what it is, the jury is still out on how well it did. This is the kind of efficiency born of a smart management team, sure, but also what Britney has become since we last really watched her: a single working mother, and all that entails—a balancer, a scheduler, a picker, and a chooser. Britney is the machine that supports both her immediate and extended family. And of course there’s the matter of keeping her sons’ father, the upwardly motile Kevin Federline, who receives a $25,000 monthly child support check from Britney. That money mostly helps support Kevin’s new startup, which is building an empire of tiny Federlines to rise up and one day demolish us all, Idiocracy-style. At this writing, Federline’s sixth child had just been born.

“There’s Britney Jean, the little girl from Louisiana,” said Fenton Bailey, who co-directed the documentary I Am Britney Jean and spent months with her. “There’s Britney Spears the pop star. And then there’s Britneyplex, which is the enormous machine built around Britney Spears. It’s not just one person. It becomes like an aircraft carrier, all people, personnel, interrelation business, and industries.”

If you imagine the Britneyplex as concentric circles, you’d find her and her parents and her sister and brother, but also her kids and Kevin and Kevin’s other kids, and then the managers and the agents and publicists. Further out on those circles are the dancers, many of whom have trained all their lives to be her dancers. (Unlike some other stars, she likes to share the stage with them, and isn’t threatened by their presence — something that occasionally works to her detriment with some of the critics, when they compare her with her much younger compatriots.) From there are the musicians and costume designers and the many, many people who work for the costume designers, stitching in silk and locking in corset boning. Additional circles house the people who make their livings, even if briefly, documenting Britney — like Bailey and a 26-year-old Vegas local named Jordan Miller, who has run the fansite BreatheHeavy (which receives more than 70,000 uniques per day) since he was 15 years old. And then there are the people who work the Britney Spears store that’s open after her show, all the way down to the carpenter who was now in charge of gutting the old Aladdin to make way for Britney, and even further to the twerking little person Britney lookalike who was doing impressions of her down the road at a dive bar for $300 a night. (It is not lost on me that I, too, have momentarily entered the Britplex while reporting and writing this story.)

“There is a myth out there that she is a robot or just a controlled person,” said Bailey. “I don’t think it’s true at all. I think she is the captain of her ship. It’s just that she’s not an alpha personality in the way that Madonna is an alpha personality. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, I think.”

Not everyone counted Britney out. There was, of course, her fan base: the Britney Army, a true organism filled with what appears to be people from their late teens to early 40s who can mark a special place in their lives with a Britney song or era—communicating primarily in capital letters and animated GIFs of past Britney sound bites, dance moves, looks, and gestures that highlight her overall fierceness. (The one thing they cannot abide is Beyoncé. A Twitter war can break out when a Britney fan simply states, apropos of nothing, “BEYONCÉ STOLE BRITNEY’S MOVES,” and it’s on, motherfucker. Fifty retweets, Beyoncé’s fans engaged in tepid quasi-comeback. This is probably the worst part of it all, the way the Beyoncé fans don’t even care about the baiting.)

They refer to her not as Brit-Brit, which is her family’s nickname for her, but as an assortment of words to describe her made into portmanteaux with her name: When she’s practicing for her show, they call her Rehearsalney. When she’s caught learning choreography or participating in a new sequence, she’s Dancney. When she goes to Target, which is constantly, she’s Errandney. And when she inspires them or pulls something amazing off, which is practically always, if you ask them, she is Godney.

Andrea is not the real first name of a New York-based dominatrix who is a Britney obsessive. She is very skinny, with long hair, a pointy nose, smiley eyes, and perpetual excitement. We met on BreatheHeavy and I’d asked if we could meet the day of the show. She had texted me to look for her — “I’m in a cowgirl look” — and she was, boots and hat included.

She’s been a Stan (an obsessive fan, a term plucked from Eminem liturgy) since 2003; that was when Britney, to Andrea, became Authenticney, less Bubblegumney and dropping that bullshit wide-eyed Virginey act. It was Meltdowney circa 2008 that sealed the deal for her, though. “Oh, I loved it,” Andrea said. “She was just saying fuck you to the world over and over. This was who I knew she was. In the early 2000s, she was a phony. This was really her.” The Britney Army believes in her in a way that is touching. They watched Britney do the ugly work we are all charged with: leaving our innocence behind and figuring out a way to be real people without being living reactions to what we once were or were perceived to be.

This was Andrea’s first Britney show—there was literally no way she could be disappointed, she told me. It’s worth stopping to consider why Andrea was here in Vegas, or why anyone was. Increasingly, we are all experiencing one another only from our desks and our phones and our Twitter feeds. This Britney concert is real. Maybe the singing isn’t, sure. But this, a weekend in Vegas, is real. It is a concentrated vacation experience in which the only expectation is that you act like the type of person you usually are not. You might not even enjoy it—for truly, over my month there, I saw much drunkenness, much screaming, much innuendo, much grinding, but I don’t believe I saw much enjoyment. Time in Vegas will, however, give you something to go back to your computer about. The longer we spend at our computers, the more we need those that times to post about.

When opening night came around, among the tearful fans in line, replicas of the red vinyl catsuit that she wore in the “Oops! … I Did It Again” video could be seen in great abundance; Andrea wore one, too. I ended up sitting near a group of trans women who each, individually, acted as though they were alone with Britney, singing to her like I would never have the guts to do with anyone in public, or maybe even alone. These people just wanted to be in the same room with Britney, and with people who also wanted to be in the same room as Britney. These people didn’t care that Britney was a pawn for foot traffic to the casino. Fuck foot traffic to the casino.

O n the surface, “Work Bitch” is a bizarre dance song with depressing lyrics. It is the first song she sings in Piece of Me:

You want a hot body? You want a Bugatti? You want a Maserati? You better work bitch

Without getting into the politics of a woman calling herself or another woman a bitch, consider what Britney is trying to tell us. She’d promised that this album would be her most personal album yet, and what do we get? “Work bitch”? Is she the bitch? Are we calling her a bitch? Is she instructing another bitch as to the secret of her success? How is this personal?

Vulture published a disgusted review, calling her not just the most boring singer on the planet but “the most boring person,” and “anti-matter in a belly shirt.” Flavorwire kindly rushed to Britney’s aid, asking why we talk about Britney as if she’s not a prisoner. (A reference, again, to her conservatorship.)

I’d like to submit a different theory: What if this is a personal song? The song’s sentiments are certainly the only ones in current pop that I can relate to. Its message is that nothing comes easily, that you can’t keep your kids in private school and your community gated and your ex-husband in his nation-building ambitions without work. Britney isn’t the fuck-up we decided she was during a relatively short but well-publicized period of her life. She drops off her kids and picks them up from school just about every day. She shows up on time, hits every mark, is polite and soft-spoken. She rehearses five or six hours every day, saying, “Let’s run through it one more time.” Britney works.

So, are we prepared to dismiss our preconceived notions of her as some sad gum-chewing has-been to make room for another interpretation? What if Britney has somehow become a feminist role model for single working mothers here and everywhere?