Can Britney Make A Comeback?

The latest headache for Britney Spears is a video of her a few years ago belching, eating chicken wings and complaining that she'd missed out on life by being a pop star.

The video is being circulated virally via the popular Web site YouTube, and is getting a plethora of hits.

The pop diva, or should we say, former pop diva, is said to be working on a new album, but the question surrounding her is simple: Can she make a comeback from this video and numerous other public embarrassments? Among them: the widely seen photos of her driving with her baby in her lap, potentially putting the child in harm's way.

On The Early Show Monday, Bradley Jacobs, senior editor of Us Weekly magazine, predicted Spears will be able to resurrect her career.

"She lost control of her image a long time ago," Jacobs told co-anchor Tracy Smith. "When she first (rose to stardom), in the late '90s, early 2000s, she put out four albums in five years. In the media's presence, she was always very controlled and very protected.

"But she stopped working a couple of years ago, in the summer of 2004. Then the attention went to her personal life. And since then, it's just been one bad publicity moment after another. Her career has become really unhinged. The YouTube video is just the latest example of that."

In the video, Spears is heard saying, "I feel like I've been missing out on life … like things, and things going on. Like, I feel like I'm behind or something. I know that sounds so weird, but I do."

"There are a lot of embarrassing moments in this YouTube segment," Jacobs observes, "but also some moments that pull at your heartstrings, (such as) when she says she's missing out.

"This was filmed in the spring of 2004, right before she pulled out of her tour due to an injury, and stopped working. She stopped going to the studio and focused instead on her relationship with Kevin Federline, also known as 'K-Fed.' She married him, had a baby. Now, she's pregnant with her second baby."But along the way, she kind of lost some of her core audience, sort of turned them off with her antics, and activities with him and, of course, the examples with her baby."

How much do people blame Federline for the drag in Spears' career?

"Her core audience of fans," Jacobs responded, "young women, the readers of 'Us Weekly,' feel that, they look at the trajectory of Britney's career and they see that the turning point really happened around the time that she met him, in the spring of 2004, when things went downhill for her.

"But they are still pulling for her. A lot of women can relate to someone who makes bad decisions in her personal life. Remember, Britney Spears is only 24, so she's still a young woman, and her fans would love to see her come back; they'd love to see her get control, and get back to doing 1,000 sit-ups a day."

So, can Spears come back?

"She definitely can," Jacobs replied, "and in her recent interview with Harper's Bazaar, where she posed pregnant on the cover, she talked about how she's been playing the piano again, she's been doing a lot of writing again. And that's the sort of Britney who is on her way to getting back into the studio.

"She said, once she has her second baby, she's getting back to the gym, back into the studio. I think a year from now, you could see a refurbished Brittney, at 25-years-old, ready to take the pop landscape by storm again."

And if she makes it back, can she stay there?

"Pop culture being what it is," Jacobs chuckled, "she's going to have to stay on top. The world works in a way, you know, they're up, they're down. Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera, they all go up and down."

And what's to become of Federline's career?

"It will be interesting to see," Jacobs remarked. "He has ambitions of his own. He's been in the studio. He has an album he's going to publish on his own label, and he's going to be performing for the first time live in the next couple of weeks. We will see. The jury is still out on whether he can turn some of his rebel attitude into a career."