Why are people so fascinated with Britney Spears?

Never in the history of pop music has anyone achieved so much with so little talent as Britney Spears.

That's a big claim, isn't it? Five of her six studio albums have climbed to No. 1 (the other peaked at No. 2). Seven of her singles have landed in the Top 10. She's sold 32 million albums in the United States alone. Those are amazing accomplishments for someone who can't sing without the help of gadgetry. (I attended a rehearsal for the 2000 Grammys, and the show's audio engineer declared her live singing "unusable.")

She's not much of a songwriter, either. When she writes, it's always in collaboration with a team of professional tunesmiths. And she doesn't play an instrument — at least not onstage.

She can't act. Did you see "Crossroads"?

As a Mickey Mouse Club-trained dancer, she can execute the simple moves of a choreographer, but no one is going to mistake her for Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul or even one of the Pussycat Dolls.

So what's Britney Spears' biggest talent? Being a celebrity.

Her career — or more accurately, her 11 years in the spotlight — has been, as Rolling Stone put it last year, about "the crucible of fame: loving it, hating it and never being able to stop it from destroying you."

As with Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith, America fell for this bleached-blonde sweetheart from a small town who has tried to triumph over her white-trash background.

We loved that suggestive schoolgirl cooing "Hit me, baby, one more time," that come-hither vixen charming a snake with "I'm a Slave 4 U" and that midriff-bearing coquette on the cover of countless magazines.

But over the years, Spears' career has crashed more often than the stock market. Drugs, bad boyfriends, trailer-trash marriages on a McMansion budget, poor parenting skills, escapes from rehab, custody battles for her two sons, managers quitting, clashes with paparazzi.

In a 2008 cover story titled "Inside an American Tragedy," Rolling Stone said: "She is an in-bred swamp thing who chain smokes, doesn't do her nails, tells reporters to eat it, snort it, lick it and bleep it, and screams at people who want pictures for their little sisters."

All that bad baggage makes the fact that she lip-syncs for entire concerts seem as insignificant as a parking ticket for Bernie Madoff.